The Progressive Corporation
Founders
Joseph Lewis, Jack Green · Founded 1937 · HQ today: Mayfield Village, Ohio, United States
Progressive was founded by Joseph Lewis, Jack Green in 1937. It is now led by Tricia Griffith.
Lawyers Joseph Lewis and Jack Green founded Progressive Mutual Insurance Company in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937. The young company competed on service ideas such as drive-in claims offices and installment payments, and in the 1950s it moved into insuring higher-risk drivers that many insurers declined. Pricing that non-standard market profitably required careful risk segmentation, a discipline that became central to the company. Joseph's son Peter B. Lewis ran Progressive from 1965 to 2000 and turned it into a national, data-driven auto insurer.
Ohio lawyer.
Joseph Lewis co-founded Progressive Mutual Insurance Company in Cleveland in 1937 with fellow lawyer Jack Green. The early company differentiated itself with service ideas such as drive-in claims and installment premium payments. His son, Peter B. Lewis, later led Progressive from 1965 to 2000. Joseph Lewis was born in 1890.
American lawyer and insurance pioneer.
Jack Green co-founded Progressive Insurance in 1937 alongside Joseph Lewis. Recognizing a massive, highly lucrative gap in the traditional insurance market, the two lawyers intentionally targeted 'non-standard' drivers (people with terrible driving records who other companies refused to insure). By properly pricing the massive risk, they created the foundation for one of America's largest insurers. Jack Green was born in 1910.
Andrew Quigg
Chief Financial Officer
As Chief Strategy Officer, he manages the massive data science initiatives that keep Progressive's predictive pricing models significantly ahead of legacy competitors.
Lori Niederst
Chief Personal Lines Officer
Moved from CRM President into the newly created Chief Personal Lines Officer role in 2026, overseeing Personal Lines and CRM ahead of Pat Callahan's planned January 2027 retirement as Personal Lines President.
Tricia Griffith
President and CEO
Griffith joined Progressive in 1988 as a claims representative and became CEO in July 2016. During her tenure revenue has grown from $23.4 billion in 2016 to $87.7 billion in 2025, and net income reached a record $11.3 billion in 2025. She steered the company through the 2022 claims-inflation squeeze with rapid rate increases, then reopened growth spending in 2024 and 2025. Progressive also completed the ASI and Protective Insurance deals and expanded bundled home-and-auto offerings under her leadership.
Peter B. Lewis
CEO
Peter B. Lewis, son of co-founder Joseph Lewis, built Progressive into a national auto insurer focused on underwriting profit, data-driven pricing and service innovations such as Immediate Response claims and comparison rate quotes. He died in 2013.
The Progressive Corporation was founded on March 10, 1937, in Cleveland, Ohio, by young attorneys Joseph Lewis and Jack Green as the Progressive Mutual Insurance Company.
Joseph Lewis and Jack Green founded Progressive to provide affordable, secure auto insurance protection to vehicle owners. Recognizing that standard insurers rejected drivers who didn't fit narrow profiles, they pioneered underwriting for non-standard drivers whom others refused to cover.
In 1956, under the Lewis family's leadership, Progressive founded Progressive Casualty Insurance Company specifically to write policies for non-standard, higher-risk drivers. By pricing risk accurately through data rather than rejecting drivers, Progressive created a highly lucrative niche.
Peter B. Lewis was the son of co-founder Joseph Lewis. After his father passed away in 1955, Peter joined the company, orchestrated a leveraged buyout of Jack Green and other partners in 1965 with backing from a local bank, and became CEO to transform Progressive into a national leader.
Progressive completed its initial public offering (IPO) in 1971, listing shares publicly to fund national expansion and investing heavily in computerized actuarial modeling and claims technology.
Progressive introduced numerous industry firsts: drive-in claims locations (1950s), the first insurer with a toll-free 24/7 claims hotline (1990), immediate response claims vehicles (1993), comparative rating online (1996), and buying insurance over the Internet (1997).
Progressive remained deeply rooted in Northeast Ohio, building its sprawling corporate campus in Mayfield Village, Ohio, complete with an extensive world-renowned contemporary art collection curated by Peter B. Lewis to foster creative problem-solving among employees.
The founding ethos of innovating where others see obstacles, pricing risk accurately through empirical data, and delivering fast, empathetic service to policyholders remains the cornerstone of Progressive's corporate identity.
The Progressive Corporation was founded on March 10, 1937, by two young Cleveland attorneys and business partners, Joseph Lewis and Jack Green.
As practicing attorneys during the Great Depression, Lewis and Green observed that automobile ownership was surging while car insurance was either unaffordable or unavailable to ordinary working-class families, creating an untapped market opportunity.
The company was incorporated as Progressive Mutual Insurance Company, operating as a policyholder-owned mutual insurance company before later establishing a stock insurance company structure for expanded national growth.
The company started in a modest rented office in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, before expanding across suburban Cuyahoga County and ultimately establishing its modern corporate headquarters in Mayfield Village, Ohio.
Lewis and Green pioneered customer-centric conveniences like drive-in claims locations, installment payment plans for premiums, and rapid on-scene claims investigations that separated them from traditional, slow-moving insurance carriers.
Following Joseph Lewis’s death in 1955, Jack Green assumed executive leadership, while Joseph’s son Peter B. Lewis joined the company full-time, eventually borrowing funds to buy out partners and assume leadership in 1965.
The founders’ core philosophy—approaching insurance with fresh legal perspective, questioning conventional underwriting assumptions, and serving customer segments that others overlooked—remains the bedrock of Progressive’s innovative culture.
Progressive preserves its founding heritage through archival exhibits at its Mayfield Village campus, celebrating Lewis and Green’s entrepreneurial audacity during the depths of the 1930s economic depression.
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