South Miami-based Lula plans to triple its team by the end of the year after closing an $18 million Series A financing round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firms Founders Fund and Kholsa Ventures.
The car insurance startup, which calls itself the "Stripe for insurance," will use the funding to increase hiring and bring its service to the nearly 2,000 companies on its waiting list. Several notable investors – including SoftBank, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and previous investors Nextview Ventures and Florida Funders – contributed to the financing round.
Just as fintech platform Stripe provides businesses with the infrastructure they need to process online payments, Lula provides the software that car rental and car-sharing companies need to process and manage insurance claims.
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Lula, launched by twin brothers Michael and Matthew Vega-Sanz, began as a car sharing app for college students. The pair launched the concept at Babson College in 2016 and eventually the service – which connected college students with other students who wanted to rent out their vehicles – expanded to more than 500 college campuses nationwide.
The Miami natives dropped out of college and moved back to South Florida before the Covid-19 pandemic. But once the pandemic hit, college campuses shuttered. That's when they decided to repurpose the software that powered the app to create Lula 2.0.
“We realized companies wanted to vet their customers, insure their vehicles on a per-use basis and manage claims, but didn’t have the resources to do so,” co-founder and President Michael Vega-Sanz said.
The revamped Lula launched in August. The startup reports it had its first profitable month in November and began offering its technology to the trucking industry in April.
Lula has 15 employees based at its headquarters. The company is currently hiring for engineering and operational roles.
In a statement, CEO Matthew Vega-Sanz reflected on the brothers' journey to becoming startup founders. It's something he said he couldn't have imagined growing up as the son of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants on a farm in South Miami, or while selling shoes at Nordstrom in between classes at Miami Dade College, where both brothers studied before transferring to Babson College.
“Our hope is people hear our story and realize how attainable this all is, regardless of your background," he said. "It’s surreal to raise a round of this size, and to be building something that will revolutionize what is arguably the most important industry in our economy. But even more surreal is the thought that our story may inspire others in the Hispanic community to explore opportunities in tech."
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