US insurer Lemonade takes wefox to court for IP infringement
Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade
New York-based insurance platform Lemonade has filed a lawsuit against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company wefox, and founder Julian Teicke.
The complaint was filed in the US District Court Southern District of NY, and it claims that ONE was the product of reverse-engineering by wefox.
Lemonade claims wefox is “infringing Lemonade’s intellectual property, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and breaching its contractual obligations to Lemonade not to ‘copy content… to provide any service that is competitive… or to… create derivative works.’”
According to Lemonade, Teicke registered for insurance on Lemonade under various names and for various addresses, some of which do not exist, in order to gather information on the company’s arrangement of flows.
“[The lawsuit] catalogues how wefox’s founders used aliases and bogus addresses to create phony Lemonade policies and initiate fictitious claims,” writes Lemonade’s CEO Daniel Schreiber.
Allegedly, Teicke filed seven claims in 20 days, which prompted Lemonade to cancel his insurance. A number of other executives at wefox seem to have also filed claims at Lemonade.
Lemonade says it got in touch with wefox last August and requested it stopped.
Lemonade offers a digitised signup process. The firm says it redesigned its business model by taking profit out of each payment, and sending money to a charity if there isn’t any claim filed by the customer.
Any proceeds generated from this lawsuit will go directly to Code.org, a non-profit organisation that aims to expand access in computer science in schools and “increasing participation by women and underrepresented minorities”.
The sued company denies any culpability in the matter.
