Lemonade Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
July 29, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Growth and profitability continued to improve: In-force premium rose 32.5% year over year to $1.43 billion, revenue increased 79% to $294 million, and adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed 54% to $19 million. Management reiterated its expectation for positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2026 and for the full year 2027.
  • Positive Sentiment: Lemonade reported record claims-handling efficiency, with its loss-adjustment-expense ratio falling to 5% versus an estimated industry average of about 9%. Management said continued AI automation should support profitability, pricing flexibility, and operating leverage.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company expanded its footprint with 14 new state-product combinations in the past 100 days, including renters expansion and autonomous-car launches in Colorado and Indiana. Management expects car insurance to reach a majority of U.S. drivers by the end of 2027.
  • Positive Sentiment: Reinsurance and growth financing improved: the renewed reinsurance program modestly increases retained premiums while adding stronger catastrophe and named-storm protection, and the synthetic-agents extension provides $250 million of 2027–2028 growth financing at roughly a 9.8% cost.
  • Negative Sentiment: Pet insurance loss ratios rose modestly because of industry-wide veterinary-cost inflation, although Lemonade is taking rate increases to offset the pressure. Annual dollar retention remained at 85%, still affected by prior homeowners “clean the book” actions.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Lemonade Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Lemonade second quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to the Lemonade team. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good morning, and welcome to Lemonade's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining us on our call today, we have Daniel Schreiber, CEO and Co-founder, Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, Tim Bixby, Chief Financial Officer, and Nick Stead, SVP Finance. A letter to shareholders covering the company's second quarter 2026 financial results is available on our investor relations website at lemonade.com/investor. I would like to remind you that management's remarks made on this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC, and our more recent filings with the SEC.

Speaker 1

Any forward-looking statements made on this call represent our views only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. We will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures on today's call, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted free cash flow, and adjusted gross profit, which we believe may be important to investors to assess our operating performance. Reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our letter to shareholders. Our letter to shareholders also includes information about our key performance indicators, including number of customers, in-force premium per customer, annual dollar retention, gross earned premium, gross loss ratio, gross loss ratio ex-CAT, trailing 12-month loss ratio, and net loss ratio, and a definition of each metric, why each is useful to investors, and how we use each to monitor and manage our business.

Speaker 1

With that, I'll turn the call over to Daniel for some opening remarks.

Speaker 2

Good morning. I'm happy to report on another excellent quarter, marked by accelerating growth, strong underwriting performance, and continued progress towards profitability. In-force premium reached $1.43 billion, growing about 32.5% year-over-year and extending our streak of accelerating growth to 11 consecutive quarters. Revenue grew even faster, increasing 79% to $294 million, and gross profit increased 76% year-over-year to a record $113 million. As a result, adjusted EBITDA loss improved 54% to $19 million, and we remain on track to deliver our first positive adjusted EBITDA quarter in Q4 of this year, followed by a positive adjusted EBITDA full year 2027. Against that backdrop, we remain confident in our outlook and are reiterating our guidance across IFP and EBITDA while raising our guidance for both gross earned premium and revenue.

Speaker 2

During the quarter, we also completed our annual reinsurance renewal as well as the extension of our synthetic agents program, with important upgrades to each. As it relates to reinsurance, the renewed program modestly increases the share of premiums that we retain while meaningfully strengthening catastrophe protection, including named storm coverage that was largely absent under the expiring structure. The agreement related to our synthetic agents extension provides a quarter of a billion dollars in growth financing at roughly 9.8% cost and applies to growth spend in 2027 and 2028. This amounts to more than six percentage points improvement in our cost of capital, materially lowering expected interest expense on a go-forward basis. With the financing of our growth investment improving, let me turn to that spend and its efficiency.

Speaker 2

Over the past several years, we've substantially increased our growth investments while holding the LTV to CAC ratio stable at roughly 3x. No mean feat. Some of you have noted that this growth spend outpaced the corresponding growth in in-force premium. The concern, as I understand it, is that this gap signals declining efficiency, that each incremental growth dollar is buying less premium than once it did. It doesn't, and I'd like to walk you through why. With our direct-to-consumer distribution and predictive LTV models allocating that spend, we ratchet spending up and down and shift it from one product or geography to another in real time in pursuit of those sterling 3x returns. In 2023, as inflationary pressures shrank the opportunities for profitable spend, those controls naturally reduced our growth investments to about $55 million.

Speaker 2

We implemented rate changes to counter inflation, and as those came online, we added about $15 million of incremental growth spend each year. Now, a similar dollar addition to a growing base produces a lower growth rate, so spend growth decelerates by construction. On the premium side, the dynamic pushes the other way. Growth spend is a flow. It's expensed and reset each year. The premium it buys is a stock. Cohorts stay on the books, layered on top of every cohort before them. While spend growth decelerates, the premiums those dollars created keeps compounding, boosted further by our accelerating cross-sell. The bottom line is this: the observation is accurate, but it doesn't point to any underlying degradation in our efficiency. It's a mathematical artifact of our spending slowdown in response to inflation and our subsequent catch-up spending.

Speaker 2

Beginning in 2027 and beyond, we expect IFP growth to outpace spend growth, a key driver of operating leverage and profitability. Before I hand over, a word on this morning's other announcement. At year-end, after more than nine years as our CFO, Tim Bixby will pass that baton on to Nick Stead, our Senior Vice President Finance, and Tim will step up to Lemonade's Board of Directors. This transition was years in the making, instigated and paced by Tim himself, and today almost all of our financial functions already report to Nick. Expect this handover to look like everything else Tim has engineered here. The capital raises, the IPO, six years of beat and raise, which is to say planned, disciplined and seamless. Congratulations to both Nick and Tim. With that, I'll hand over to Shai, who will cover a couple of key insights across the business.

Speaker 2

Over to you, Shai.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Daniel. First, I wanted to update on our LAE ratio, that is the cost of handling claims. This is a key metric when looking at insurance carrier efficiency, with an industry average of around 9%. In the second quarter, we delivered our best ever LAE ratio result of 5%. This improvement is a continuation of a multi-year trend made by the growing use of our Lemonade OS technology, which drives AI across the claims operation. It is notable that the gains have been broad based, with record low LAE ratios in the quarter across each of our product lines. Beyond boosting our profitability and pricing power, the LAE ratio is a way to compare our efficiency versus other insurers. What these numbers show today is that our competitors spend almost twice as much as we do on handling claims, and we're not done here by any means.

Speaker 3

Next, I wanted to touch on our expansion efforts. In the past 100 days, we launched 14 additional state product combinations, which included both a meaningful push towards nationwide availability for our renters product, as well as the launch of our autonomous car product in Colorado and Indiana. That's made possible by continued investment in our proprietary technology platform, which reduces the effort required to launch new products and enter new markets. We believe that nationwide availability in renters will unlock a much broader partnership opportunity with potential partners for whom that is a key requirement. On the roadmap, we expect to see more geographical expansion, most notably with regards to our car product. We have several state launches expected in the near term, and before the end of 2027, I believe our car product will be available to the majority of drivers in the United States.

Speaker 3

With that, I'll hand it off to Tim, who will cover our financial performance in a bit more detail. Tim?

Speaker 4

Thanks, Shai. Let's start with Q2 results, which were excellent. In-force premium grew more than 32% year-on-year to $1.43 billion, driven by customer growth of 23% and premium per customer growth of 8%. We added about 166,000 new customers in Q2, more than 12% greater than the roughly 148,000 in the prior year quarter. Within our reported gross loss ratio of 60%, our favorable prior period development of 7% was driven primarily by our homeowners multi-peril and car products. Total catastrophe impact in the quarter was 3%, excluding catastrophe prior period development. On a net basis, we saw five points of favorable prior period development, of which two points were related to catastrophe. Prior year development, which we report on a net basis, was $12 million favorable in Q2 and $16 million favorable year to date.

Speaker 4

Gross profit increased 76% to $113 million, while adjusted gross profit increased 74% to $114 million, for a gross margin and an adjusted gross margin of 38% and 39%, respectively. These metrics use revenue as their denominator. Our adjusted gross profit as compared to gross earned premium was 34% in Q2, up eight points from 26% in the prior year. Revenue grew 79% to $294 million, while our adjusted EBITDA loss improved to a loss of just $19 million. Notably, revenue grew nearly 50 percentage points faster than IFP due to dynamics related to our sustained trend of increased premium retention at reinsurance renewals in recent years. Importantly, adjusted free cash flow was positive for the fifth consecutive quarter at $19 million and has been positive eight of the last nine quarters, while operating cash flow was negative $3 million, following a common seasonal pattern.

Speaker 4

We ended the quarter with roughly $1.2 billion in cash and investments, of which about $330 million is required to be held as regulatory surplus. Annual dollar retention, or ADR, remained stable sequentially at 85%, continuing to reflect the impact of our prior clean the book actions within our homeowners product line. As a reminder, ADR is measured relative to the prior year's IFP, so while those portfolio actions are now largely behind us, they will continue to impact the reported ADR metric for the next couple of quarters before rolling out of the comparison period. Operating expenses, excluding loss and loss adjustment expense, increased by $53 million, or 41%, to $182 million in Q2 as compared to the prior year. Now I'll hand it off to Nick, who will walk us down the P&L and break down those expense lines a bit. Nick?

Speaker 5

Thanks, Tim. Let's do that. Other insurance expense increased year-over-year by $5 million, or 25%, in Q2 as compared to a 32% growth rate of gross earned premium.

Speaker 5

This includes certain expenses that are variable in nature and typically grows at rates not materially different to that of the top line. Total sales and marketing expense increased by $18 million, or 30%, primarily due to increased growth spend as compared to the prior year. In Q2, growth spend was $64 million, up 30% or $15 million as compared to the prior year. Importantly, as we continued to ramp growth spend, marketing efficiency levels remained stable and strong in the second quarter, with an LTV to CAC ratio above three times, in line with prior year. Technology development expense was up by $8 million or 34% year-on-year to $30 million.

Speaker 5

The growth was driven in roughly equal parts by the SBC impact of recent equity awards to our executives, which were not reflected in the prior year quarter, growth in personnel-related expense, and higher software costs supporting our expanding AI capabilities. G&A expense increased 85% as compared to the prior year to $48 million. The year-on-year increase in G&A was driven primarily by a one-time tax refund benefit in the prior year period, the SBC impact of recent multi-year executive equity awards in the current period, and growth in interest expense. Excluding those items, the year-over-year growth rate of G&A expense was 2%. Headcount increased slightly by 65 or about 5% year-over-year to 1,339 in Q2. The increase is attributable to net hiring in our product and engineering teams, and we expect that most of the year's net hiring activity is behind us.

Speaker 5

Net loss was $43 million in Q2 or $0.56 per share, as compared to a net loss of $44 million or $0.60 per share in the prior year. Excluding the one-time benefit related to the tax refund I had mentioned from the prior year, the current period net loss result represents a 22% year-over-year improvement. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $19 million in Q2, dramatically improved as compared to a $41 million result in the prior year. Our detailed guidance for Q3 and the updated full year of 2026 is included in our shareholder letter and represents 33% Q3 and full year IFP growth, roughly 69% Q3 revenue growth and 65% full year revenue growth, and unchanged a positive full quarter of adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter. Based on our third quarter and full year guidance, implied fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA is approximately $8 million.

Speaker 5

With that, I would like to pass it over to Shai to answer some questions from our retail investors.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Nick. We now turn to our shareholders' questions. We received a question about our IFP growth rate acceleration streak, when it might end, and what factors could extend it. 11 consecutive quarters of IFP growth rate acceleration is a remarkable run by any measure. Especially for us, as it's roughly a quarter of our life as a company. What is most notable about that streak, though, is that it has never been at the expense of profitability. LTV to CAC ratios remain healthy and strong at roughly 3x, and adjusted EBITDA breakeven is precisely on track as compared to prior expectations. Our third quarter and full year guide contemplates the next point of IFP growth up to 33%, but we haven't given precise expectations for 2027 just yet. We have many growth drivers, but perhaps it's helpful to think through the lens of LTV to CAC.

Speaker 3

When unit economics improve, we're able to invest more aggressively in growth. We see opportunities on both sides of the equation. We seek to increase LTV through sustained momentum in cross-sells, which can drive gains in retention, and we seek to improve CAC efficiency through more granular AI-driven pricing, which can provide a tailwind to conversion rates. We continue to focus on these key drivers that we believe can drive sustainable, profitable growth. We received a question around our new car insurance business, specifically the share of customers acquired via marketing versus cross-selling. We continue to deliver excellent growth in our car business, 60% year-over-year in the second quarter. We are seeing strength across both of these channels. In the quarter, we saw both the highest ever period of new business to car and the highest ever period of car sales to existing Lemonade customers.

Speaker 3

In recent periods, cross-sales typically represent between 40%-50% of new to Lemonade car sales. We also received an interesting question around our adapting to new AI models as they come out. One of our core advantages is that we're model agnostic. We're not tied to any one frontier model provider. We continuously benchmark the latest models against one another to identify the best combination of capability and cost for each specific use case. When a new model is released, our teams typically begin evaluating it immediately. Where we see performance advantage, moving from evaluation to implementation can happen in a matter of hours. The benefit isn't usually one dramatic step change. It's the cumulative effect of incremental improvements. To name a few, those improvements increase automation rates, they reduce human intervention, improve customer experience, and lower cost to serve.

Speaker 3

I believe our system's ability to run multiple models at the same time while constantly evaluating them in real life is an advantage that helps drive the improvements in efficiency and operating leverage you've seen over the past several years. With that, I'll pass it over to the moderator, We will take some questions from the street.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question, and if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hey, thanks everyone. I'll ask two separate questions. First is, what's the team most excited about right now? Obviously, a number of things going on, product, geo, et cetera. What are you most excited about? Just second, as we're all trying to think about how the model spools forward and thinking about potential operating leverage in 2027, 2028, without giving specific guidance, I guess, do we think that gross margins and contribution margins can kind of continue to maintain the current path as you expand product and geo coverage? Just any kind of way, obviously, as we're all trying to think about what that bogey is for 2028 to support valuation. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Jason, hi. Good to hear from you. These are exciting times. There's a lot to be excited about. If I had to pick one, I think I would say car, where we're just seeing all the pistons going, all the quips around car kind of right themselves. We really are seeing a lot of acceleration, a lot of improvement. There are a lot of changes and implementations and launches being planned and worked on, and we'll elaborate on those during our Investor Day. There's a lot of reason for ongoing optimism in the sense that in this huge market where we are really just absolutely tiny and have so much headroom, we have advantages that we can sustain and can compound.

Speaker 2

Vaguely related to that, I'd add a second one, which is a little bit more vague, but there is a strong sense in the team, and I think it's reflected in our results quarter after quarter now, which is that the wind's at our back. The machine is doing what it's meant to be doing. These 10 years of hard work at building the technology that we've built is throwing off results, throwing off growth, throwing off gross profit, compounding on a regular basis all the data infrastructures, the AI infrastructures, some of which Shai mentioned a couple of minutes ago. The brand work that we've built, the team that we've built, that this machine is really functioning very well and it's just a pleasure from my vantage point to sit back to some extent and watch it compound and keep doing what it's doing.

Speaker 2

11 quarters in a row of acceleration. We think there's a lot more where that came from going forward. I'll touch on the gross margin question briefly and then see if Tim or Nick want to add more. My comment is less by way of a direct answer and more by way of challenging the premise or kind of a little nit, which is to say we are not, I am not, we are not focused on gross margin per se. The metric that we focus on, and we do encourage our investors to focus on as well, is gross profit. There will be times when we can increase our profitability through shrinking gross margins and times when we cannot.

Speaker 2

We were just talking about car, and I've spoken about this repeatedly on prior calls, which is that you see some incredible elasticity of demand in core products like car and our ability to actually shrink gross margins over time. That is to say, to price more aggressively than our competitors because we have a structural advantage that manifests in an entirely different cost structure. Open parentheses, have a look at what we just announced in terms of LAE spending something in the ballpark of half as much of our customers' premiums in order to give a better experience in claims, close parentheses. That kind of structural advantage allows us to produce a pricing advantage that will allow us to continue to grow and take market share.

Speaker 2

It will not manifest necessarily as an advantage play in gross margin, but it will manifest in growing gross profit, which is the more important of the two metrics if you follow my line of thinking. With that, let me just see if Tim or Nick want to come in as well.

Speaker 4

Yeah. Daniel has it exactly right. I think if you kind of translate that to a modeling perspective, the growth drivers for gross profit are clearly the top-line growth, the gross loss ratio, and that is really advantaged by the loss adjustment expense improvement that you've seen. We had a nice deep dive in the materials today, and we've updated you from time to time on that, and that's something we expect to continue.

Speaker 5

In addition to that, the top-line growth accelerating also puts upward pressure on that gross profit. While we would not expect to see such dramatic loss ratio impact as we've seen historically, we've seen something like 30 points of gross loss ratio improvement over time, as expected and as planned, but result of lots of hard work over time. You'll now see the gross loss ratio move around as much more of an output than an input. The gross profit, I would expect to grow materially in line with the top-line growth. Even mix shift doesn't hurt us. Mix shift tends to help us. Again, with the loss ratio or the loss adjustment expense looking nice, not only in aggregate but also if you isolate by product, we see that same dynamic. Even as mix shifts, we'll still see that nice benefit.

Speaker 4

I think we've given you enough breadcrumbs today, and we'll continue to do so to kind of model out that gross profit. We'll certainly update in the next quarter and at Investor Day, give a little more detail, but all the trends are quite good there.

Speaker 2

Sorry, I'm told that I misspoke, Jason. I hope I was understood nonetheless, but just talking about our LAE, we are at 5%, the industry is at around nine, and I was saying that they spend about twice as much of their customers' premiums than we do of our customers' premiums on the bureaucracy of handling claims, and that we tend to believe is probably indicative of a broader trend beyond claims as well. If I misspoke, I hope I've clarified that.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tommy McJoynt from KBW. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Hey, thanks for taking my questions. Do you envision the inputs of getting to 30%+ in-force premium growth shifting a bit, where customer count growth decelerates from the low 20s and premium per customer growth accelerates from the current mid to high single digits? Are those inputs likely to change?

Speaker 4

Thanks, Tommy. I would expect no material change in the near term as to those relative growth rates. I think customer growth will continue to be the primary driver of IFP growth. I also would expect the year-over-year growth rates of premium per customer to gradually and modestly increase, as has been the recent trend.

Speaker 7

Okay. Got it. There's been sort of a hot topic in the industry, has been around the future of distribution, especially with some of the AI technology in force today. Over time, and what you guys are currently working on, has your approach to complementing your core direct consumer form of marketing with using human independent agents changed at all over time? Has AI either changed your strategy around that? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Hi, Tommy. No, not materially. It's much the same. Our focus is on direct to consumer. We do have an agents program as well, but that is relatively niche, and the overwhelming majority of our sales are direct to consumer. We're fine with people using their agents to do their shopping on their behalf. We're actually overly weighted by agentic processes. Basically, the way the training data that Claude or Gemini or OpenAI's chatbots contain, or the materials that they're trained on, are materials that we're very proud of. It's the customer feedback. It's the pricing that we have. It's the response times that we offer our customers. If you do what we have done multiple times, which is see how often those agentic bots or processes will recommend Lemonade or will end up choosing Lemonade, you'll see that we're comfortably over-weighted.

Speaker 2

From that point of view, we feel quite comfortable with the emerging technologies and see no need to adjust our strategy.

Speaker 4

There's an interesting analog maybe worth mentioning when you think about our direct consumer efforts and where that is at times different. In Europe, for example, a pretty significant amount of business goes or originates through price comparison websites. One of the key learnings in our early time as we built and grew that business was figuring that out. How do we bring our direct consumer advantages to a process where there's a third party in the mix, even if just peripherally or just at the start? This is not entirely new to us. Obviously, AI and agentic is a different realm, but it's something with which we have some real experience. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get that consumer into a Lemonade feeling and experience as quickly as possible.

Speaker 4

Whether that's through a price comparison website to a small agent testing area where we have some work happening through AI agentic, those are all things with which we have some real experience.

Speaker 7

Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Tunis from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hey, thanks. Good morning. First of all, congrats to both Tim and Dan. First question, I guess, is just taking a step back. This seems like a really good quarter in terms of thinking about from a bottom-line perspective, right? There's new metric in terms of the convergence of the IFP growth and the customer acquisition spend. There's more good commentary on the loss adjustment ratio. You're retaining more of your gross premium. That should add operating leverage as well. All that's good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like to me that's coming at the expense of how you guys have been talking about growth. I guess that's the first part. Second part is just the operating expense piece in terms of the relative growth there and how that could contribute to operating leverage in 2027 would be helpful as well.

Speaker 8

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Ryan, thanks. I'll just comment on the first part and then hand over to Nick for the second part of your question. Yes, all of that, you highlighted a few things that we're proud of and that are, I think, quite an outlier in terms of the industry. Getting to an LAE of 5% across our book, 7% in our car business. Our car business is just a couple of hundred million dollars in size. The industry is several hundred billion dollars in size. We're talking about something that is a promill of the industry, and yet we are lapping the industry at large in terms of the efficiency metrics. That's something that I think is indicative of a structural difference that we've been talking about for a while, and that now is manifest in the P&L really almost on every line.

Speaker 2

Definitely those kinds of metrics, and I'm glad, Ryan, that you're highlighting them. Those kind of metrics are exactly the things that drive our growth. We speak about, on multiple occasions, how we have a bunch of machine learning algorithms, ostensibly AI, some 50 of them, that work in concert in order to allocate our spend. Really what they're doing is taking all of that information and figuring out what does it cost to serve, what kind of customers are we acquiring, how long will they stay for, what claims behaviors will they have. You throw all of that into the mix, and out comes a lifetime value of the customer.

Speaker 2

The way we hunt for those threefold ratios of LTV to CAC is by scouring and competing campaigns, products, geographies against each other in almost an algo-trading kind of structure in order to keep finding that growth. You'll see in the comments in our letter and in our earlier comments that when inflation shrank that pool, our growth shrank down, and now that we're in a much better place, that is an enabler of growth. The premise of your question is absolutely right. The better we get at each of those metrics, that automation, that precision, at new productology, new territories, obviously, the more growth you can expect to see.

Speaker 5

Ryan, maybe I can jump in on the second piece of this question around forward expectations for expense growth. I might take that by line item. I'll start with other insurance expense. That's the line item where we typically see less benefit from leverage. Those are certain line items that are somewhat more variable and so increase more or less in line with premium. Sales and marketing expense typically grows in line with the pace of growth spend. You're right to mention that insight in the letter where we outlined that in 2027, we expect the growth rate of growth spend to continue to decline below the growth rate of IFP for the year and beyond. That's an increasing driver of leverage. For both G&A and tech development expense, we see more significant benefit from leverage.

Speaker 5

I would expect the sequential growth rates for those line items to be quite low. I'd perhaps note the year-over-year growth rates of the upcoming couple of quarters may be somewhat noisy due to the impact of that recent multi-year equity award to our executives that we have mentioned. Perhaps it's helpful to model those growth rates sequentially from the Q2 baseline. Notwithstanding many of those drivers, I've just mentioned that these are more or less in line with the way we have been thinking about expenses. The way you can see that is in the reiteration of our adjusted EBITDA guide for the year and a positive fourth quarter.

Speaker 8

Very helpful. Thanks. Just a follow-up, definitely a lot more small ball, but a follow-up is just the pet insurance gross loss ratio looked like it ticked up a little bit this quarter. Just curious if there's any notable color around that. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 5

Yeah, happy to take that one. We are impacted by an industry-wide vet cost inflationary trend. From our view, that is the primary driver of the modest increase in our pet loss ratio, both sequentially and year-over-year. We are actively taking rates through the system to offset that impact. I'd say notwithstanding the significant rate that is being taken by both us and our competitors, the growth rate of the broader pet insurance market continues to outpace those of the other lines of business where we operate.

Speaker 8

No doubt. Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Andersen from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Hey, good morning, and again, congratulations to you both. On the quarter, Tim, I think I heard you say car produced some favorable development. I don't think that's too different from what some of the larger peers are seeing. Can you maybe just talk about what you're seeing in reserves to release some this quarter, even with the book still scaling rapidly here?

Speaker 4

Yeah, that's exactly right. We've seen a trend in the quarter that was not too dissimilar from a few prior quarters, which is both the home business and the car business primarily had some favorable development. Somewhat different causes. Car growing significantly and a significantly improved loss ratio over time. It's not uncommon to be somewhat more conservative in reserving as your business changes rapidly, and our business in car has certainly changed, absolutely for the better, but also in terms of its growth rate, in terms of its diversity across states, and a lot of that has come together to enable us to reanalyze those prior reserves and continue to release. Home's a little different. Home, it's not so much the growth rate. We've actually just kind of edged past our clean the book efforts in home, and so we've done a couple things there.

Speaker 4

One is to really look at, from a macro perspective, business that today we wouldn't write, and that's really been a year and a half or so in the making and really past that point. That said, the remaining business was still somewhat conservatively reserved in light of new data and our current understanding of the book, and that enabled us to release those reserves. By definition, our forward expectation is today's reserves are exactly right. We'll kind of see how the subsequent quarters play out. Those were consistent trends.

Speaker 9

Okay. Recognizing it's early, you had mentioned at the top of the call just the autonomous product, car products are live in a couple states. What have you learned maybe about the frequency or severity of this product relative to the traditional auto book?

Speaker 4

Awfully early, that's not something we've put any real data out on, we'll kind of have to stick with what we've disclosed so far. The good news there is that the trends are positive. We've seen a nice reception from those customers who qualify for that product. The N is quite small, but the trends are quite positive. I think if you look out across the market, as we do, and see the data that's released, not from Lemonade, but across the market, the frequency numbers, without question, are significantly, or not significantly, are notably lower. 50% number that we've quoted is really our number, data-driven through the data that we've analyzed as we put that product together. The public numbers we're seeing are that amount of savings or greater. We're quite optimistic about where that product will head.

Speaker 4

It's a multi-year adoption rate, and we'll see how that plays out. That's probably as much as we can say at this point.

Speaker 9

Thank you.

Operator

At this time, there are no further questions. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.

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