For many renters, insurance is not something they think much about. It often comes up at the last minute, sometimes only because a landlord requires it before handing over the keys. When Chris Lotz founded Goodcover, he saw an opportunity to make that experience far simpler.
The San Francisco–based company was built around a straightforward idea: renters insurance should be easy to understand, quick to buy, and designed for the way people actually live today.
Today, Goodcover is helping expand access to renters insurance across the United States while working with Accelerant to support the next phase of its growth.
From Boats to Startups
Chris Lotz did not originally plan to build a technology-driven insurance company. His career began at AIG, working in yacht insurance, a role that suited someone who had grown up sailing.
What started as a niche job soon became an international experience. Chris Lotz helped launch yacht and watercraft insurance operations across Asia, spending time in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sydney before eventually returning to San Francisco.
The experience gave him a strong understanding of how insurance businesses are built and scaled. It also helped him notice something that seemed surprisingly overlooked.
“There was a huge generation of young people who were renting and simply not buying insurance,” Chris Lotz says.
At the time, fewer than 20 percent of renters carried renters’ insurance. Even those who wanted coverage often faced a clunky process that involved calling brokers, filling out forms, or bundling policies with other insurance products.
For people used to doing everything online, the experience felt outdated.
In 2017, Chris Lotz decided to try something different. He left AIG and founded Goodcover. Soon after, the company joined Y Combinator with a clear goal: make renters’ insurance fast, simple, and fully digital.
Reaching a New Generation of Renters
From the beginning, Goodcover focused on a group that traditional insurance models had largely overlooked: renters who had never purchased coverage before.
“Almost everyone buying Goodcover renters insurance is buying insurance for the first time,” Chris Lotz explains.
Instead of competing for the same customers as established insurers, the company is helping grow the overall market. Over the past decade, renters insurance adoption has increased significantly, with roughly half of renters in the United States now carrying coverage.
Convenience plays a big role in that shift. Goodcover allows renters to purchase policies online in just a few minutes, often while they are finalizing a lease or preparing to move.
“In many cases, renters insurance is the last thing standing between someone and getting their keys,” Chris Lotz says.
Building the Next Stage with Accelerant
As Goodcover matured, the team began looking for ways to capture more value from the underwriting performance they had built and reinvest it into expanding the business.
That search led them to Accelerant.
Through Accelerant’s Risk Exchange and captive capabilities, Goodcover can now participate more directly in the risk generated by its own book of business. The structure allows the company to reinsure part of its program and reinvest the results back into growth.
“We wanted a way to take the success of the book we’ve built and put it back into growing the market,” Chris Lotz says.
For Accelerant, the partnership felt like a natural fit. Goodcover combines an entrepreneurial mindset with a disciplined, data-driven approach.
“They’re a team that believes in what they’re building and is willing to bet on themselves,” says Josh Kalmikoff from Accelerant.
Raising the Bar for the Customer Experience
The partnership also opens the door to improving one of the most important parts of the insurance journey: claims.
While Goodcover has built strong technology across underwriting and customer service, claims processes were historically tied to the systems of the underlying carrier.
Working with Accelerant gives the company the flexibility to rethink that experience and better integrate its technology.
“We’ve built great technology across the rest of the platform,” Chris Lotz says. “Now we have the opportunity to bring the claims experience up to the same standard.”\
What Comes Next
The U.S. rental housing market continues to grow, creating strong momentum for renters’ insurance providers.
Goodcover plans to build on that momentum by expanding into new distribution channels and partnerships that make coverage easier for renters and property owners alike.
With Accelerant supporting the program’s infrastructure and risk participation, the company sees significant room for growth.
“In five years,” Chris Lotz says, “we expect to be Accelerant’s largest personal lines book.”
If that vision becomes reality, it will mean more renters gaining access to a simple but important form of financial protection that many households historically went without.