InsurTech Startup Plum Raises ₹ 7 Crores in Seed Funding

Plum, a Bengaluru based group health insurance startup, providing modern health benefits to corporates, has raised INR 7 Crores in seed funding. The round was led by Incubate Fund with participation from Gemba Capital and Tracxn Labs along with angel investors including Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam of Praxify Health, Sudheendra Chilappagari of Belong.co, Nitin Jayakrishnan of Pando and Alvin Tse of Xiaomi.

Plum is on a mission to enable employee health insurance for over 1.1 million companies in India by reinventing how health insurance works. The company plans to use the funding to scale business & engineering teams so as to solve some of the hardest engineering challenges in Insurtech and build innovative distribution channels. Within just 4 months of launch, Plum has managed to get over 100 companies as customers.

Plum, through its online platform, www.plumhq.com, provides employers & employees with customizable plans, transparent pricing, and high-quality healthcare experience. The platform understands the needs of a corporate and guides them on setting up their group health insurance in less than 60 mins. Plum combines modern technologies with robust processes to deliver unprecedented simplicity & efficiency.

Plum additionally helps employees with improved health benefits including doctor consultations, health check-ups, fitness & yoga, mental wellness, nutrition and dental care. The platform enables ease of experience for employees with guided claims support. Plum has an insurance intermediary license from IRDA. Taking the current situation into account, Plum also offers COVID-19 cover as an offering to its customers, however big or small they are.  Plum’s clients include Twilio, Instawork, Posist, RevvSales, The Label Life, Growfit, StayAbode, Fampay, myHQ, and Jiny. 

Plum was founded in late 2019 by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora who comes with rich experience in financial technologies and insurance distribution. Abhishek, a Stanford University alumnus has worked with Google and McKinsey and built technology companies. Saurabh led product & engineering teams at Freshworks (he had previously built Airwoot, an AI-based CRM company which got acquired by Freshworks). Abhishek and Saurabh were joined by Debankur Biswas, an FMS alumnus with 17 years of experience in building insurance distribution and has led operations for Insurtech player BIMA in Srilanka & Bangladesh.

L-R Saurabh Arora CTO & Abhishek Poddar CEO

Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder & CEO, Plum said, “When we look at other countries like the US, we see that a high percentage of the population is covered under employer-provided health insurance. We believe that India too will move in that direction, where a significant portion of India's population will rely on employer-sponsored health insurance. With Plum, we want to enable every last company in India to provide a high-quality health cover to their employees, no matter how small or big they are. We want to be the de-facto platform for employee health insurance, initially in India, and later in other developing markets like SE Asia and Latam.”

Saurabh Arora, Co-founder and CTO of Plum, added,  “At Plum, we are imagining group health insurance products from ground-up. We have built underwriting and fraud detection rails with insurance companies that never ever existed. This has enabled us to offer pricing that may be up to 80% cheaper than existing market pricing, to companies as small as 7 employees. At Plum, we are building a truly online insurance platform that covers frontend (distribution) and backend (pricing, carrier and compliances).”

Nao Murakami, Founder and General Partner at Incubate Fund India said, 

“Health insurance is now becoming a “must-have” product in India, especially in the post-COVID world. It is an essential component for companies to attract talent. However, group health insurance is a very complicated product in nature and the entire customer process from buying to claiming is still very manual in India. So, there is a huge gap between insurance companies, employers, and employees. Plum is filling this gap by bringing transparency and efficiency through beautiful technology and product. Abhishek and Saurabh have a very clear vision which aligns with what we see as a future of health insurance in India”. 

The group health insurance market in India, which is almost 50% of the total health insurance market, is expected to grow to INR 100,000 crores by 2025. It has seen an annual growth of about 25% in the last few years and is doubling every three years.

InsurTech Startup Riskcovry Raises Funding from Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund and co-led by Varanium Capital, Better Capital

Mumbai based InsurTech Platform startup, Riskcovry, confirmed today that they have closed their Pre-Series-A round led by Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, which also saw participation from Varanium Capital and Better Capital.

Riskcovry considers itself as a neo-insurer providing "insurance-in-a-box" solution, which allows any business with a large captive user base to enable distribution of insurance to their users in an end-to-end fashion. The company has taken the payment gateway (PG) approach of enabling insurance as a financial services layer to any business.  Just like a PG cuts across multiple payment instruments (cards, UPI, wallet etc.) and issuers, Riskcovry enables the distribution of multiple insurance products across insurers (Health, General and Life) with plug-and-play infra to support any distribution use-case, for existing or new customers, completely digitally as a “one-stop-shop".

The startup was incorporated in 2018 by the founders, Suvendu Prusty, Sorabh Bhandari and Chiranth Patil. Suvendu and Sorabh are ex-insurance industry execs who built the distribution books of two insurers, whereas Chiranth is a two-time founder who comes from a fintech & strategy background.  Vidya Sridharan is also a co-founder and CTO, and brings in deep technology experience.

The founders issued a joint statement, "As a startup, we get a chance to dream big and back it up with our execution chops.  We dream of a time when insurance is truly democratized for all Indians.  We figured that an inclusive model that connects various players in the insurance industry is win-win and scalable.  For this, we needed to organise the insurance value chain by way of technology, which makes it easy for various types of products to be distributed.  

We serve our distribution partner community by essentially being that unified solution for them to do anything insurance.  This means not just enabling for ‘purchase’, but also two other touchpoints their end-users typically have with providers as part of insurance life-cycle i.e., ‘manage’ and ‘claims’, all digital, and on-demand.

We are super excited to be partnering with the Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, Varanium Capital and Better Capital for our Pre-Series-A round.  We embrace mutual thesis around intersecting inclusive insurance ecosystems with new-age technology tools and look forward to working with them closely as we accelerate into the next stage of our company’s evolution.  This round will help us scale on our product-market fit, and serve more enterprise customers across segments that enable both mainstream and alternative insurance distribution.  We look forward to building out our technology, product, data sciences, sales and growth teams.”  

Saras Agarwal, Principal at Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund added, “Riskcovry brings a fresh approach to digital distribution for the insurance market.  Their API-first approach helps enterprise customers get access to highly relevant insurance products, through a completely digital process of underwriting, policy issuance, claim settlement and compliance. This extends the reach for insurance companies and provides downside protection to many end-users of enterprise customers at a very reasonable price point.  We are very excited to support the team on this journey!"

Riskcovry falls into the “financial infrastructure” bucket, essentially, a startup space that enables the ‘rails’ or ‘pipes’ that connect various payers within the industry’s value chain via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in order to seamlessly interact with each other. 

Of late, this space has seen conviction from many financial and strategic corporate investors.  Some noteworthy deals in India include Payments & Cards Infra Provider M2P’s recent Series-A of $4.5M led by BeeNext and FinTech Infra company Setu’s Series-A of $15M led by LightSpeed with co-investment from Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund among others.  Globally speaking, US headquartered payment network VISA acquired Plaid for $5.3B, a Silicon Valley based FinTech company that enables applications to connect to users’ bank accounts via APIs. 

Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund is an early-stage venture capital fund, that supports ventures leveraging technology to build inclusive solutions for India’s next half billion. The fund invests at the idea, seed or pre-series-A stage in high impact sectors such as finance, health, education and livelihood.

The fund is built on a decade-long start-up engagement experience and deep-rooted network of IIM-Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO, which has been running leading accelerator programs and seed-funds in India since 2008.

Riskcovry InsurTech Platform is an omni-channel insurance distribution technology company.  It bridges the gap between demand-side distribution and supply-side manufacturing sides of the insurance value chain, by providing product innovation & commercialization, omni-channel distribution technology & data analytics.  Current customers include Banks, FinTechs, eCommerce, Digital, NBFCs, Brokers, BCs, HRTech, HealthTech and Supply-Chain companies.  

InsureTech Startup Turtlemint Raises $25 Mn from Sequoia India

Mumbai-headquartered online insurance distribution platform Turtlemint has closed a $25 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital India along with contribution from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.

This startup will use the latest funds to further scale up their digital network across India.

So far, Turtlemint has raised a total of $31 million in funding over three rounds, according to the data by Crunchbase.

Founded in 2015, by Kunal Shah, Anand Prabhudesai and Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, Turtlemint provides recommendations to customers based on proprietary algorithms and data analytics. It caters to about 25,000 licensed insurance experts (PoSP’s), across 700 cities, to help customers select and complete their insurance purchase using their proprietary MintPro app.

“A lot of customers, while depending on online research to learn more about the available policies, ultimately prefer to buy their insurance from an intermediary they can personally interact with. We developed MintPro to bridge this online-offline gap," said Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, one of the Co-founders of Turtlemint.

"This model has helped Turtlemint to provide insurance for customers and has widened career opportunities for insurance agents across Tier II cities in India," he said.

Anand Prabhudesai, Co-founder, Turtlemint, said that the app helps PoSP’s sell multiple insurance policies from different companies to their clients — ranging from life to health to motor insurance — through a simple online process that requires no paperwork. “It’s all done on their smartphones,” he said.

Commenting on the funding, Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said: “Turtlemint has pioneered a new model that is not only bringing new agents into the insurance domain but is also helping them become more productive and effective with their customers by making them digitally savvy. Sequoia India is excited to partner with them from the early stages — the company is growing at a very fast clip and is well on its way to transforming insurance distribution in the country.”

Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, said that the digitization of the insurance value-chain is a huge opportunity and benefits all the participants — customers by providing access to the right products, agents through significant business growth and productivity and insurers through improved transparency. “We have been impressed by Dhirendra’s and Anand’s vision and execution of transforming the insurance ecosystem by working in close collaboration with agents and insurers; and are privileged to have partnered with them from the concept stage,” he said.

Turtlemint competes with MintWise, Coverfox Insurance, and BankBazaar.com. However, other players such as PayTM amd flipkart are also entering online insurance market.

Paytm, which began operations in 2010 as a digital wallet service, has now diversified into financial services, and is looking strongly to cash in on insurance premiums. In February 2017, Paytm registered two insurance entities, Paytm Life Insurance Ltd and Paytm General Insurance Ltd with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

In May last year, Acko Technologies, an Insur-tech startup based out of Mumbai, had raised $12 million in a funding round led by Amazon Inc.

In the same month, Gurgaon-based digital-only insurance platform Toffee Insurance had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Kalaari Capital, Omidyar Network and Accion Venture Lab.

Source - Business Line

Amazon Leads $12 Mn Funding of Mumbai's Insure-Tech Startup Acko

US based e-commerce giant Amazon has led a $12 million ( ~ ₹81.27 crore) funding round in Acko Technologies, which is a digital-only insurance startup headquartered in Mumbai, reported ET Tech. The financing round also saw the participation of Ashish Dhawan, the founder of PE firm ChrysCapital, and existing backer Catamaran Ventures.

IndianWeb2.com first reported that Amazon is close to invest in Acko, in January this year.

With this, Acko becomes Amazon's first investment in India’s insurance services sector. Prior to this, Amazon had invested $22 million in Capital Float, a Bengaluru headquartered digital lending startup, last month. In 2015, Amazon also picked up a minority stake in financial services marketplace BankBazaar.

Founded in 2017 by Varun Dua, who is also founder & CEO of Coverfox.com, Acko Technologies is a parent company of Acko General Insurance.

In May 2017, Acko had received $30 million (about ₹200 crore) even before its launch and it was also touted to be one of the largest seed rounds for the Indian startup ecosystem.

Last month, Acko launched in-trip insurance program for riders of cab hailing firm Ola across more than 110 cities in India. Through this, Acko covers riders for obvious items like minor accidents, and eventualities like missing a flight due to traffic delays. The insurance claim system is built into the Ola app to simplify the process for users.

“We will be beefing up the technology. It’s heavily intensive, both, operationally and technology-wise to set up claims across the country…The other thing will be to scale up our marketing efforts and the business overall,” Varun Dua, chief executive of Acko, told a business daily.

Speaking about this investment, Amit Agarwal, senior vice president and country manager at Amazon India, said in a statement: “Acko is a young and nimble startup bringing technology and data-led innovation to the insurance sector to deliver a better insurance experience for customers."

"We are excited to back companies that are focused on using technology for enhanced customer experience and are led by missionary founders and management teams," he added.

[Top Image - Varun Dua | Image Source - BWDisrupt.businessworld.in]

Amazon Leads $12 Mn Funding of Mumbai's Insure-Tech Startup Acko

US based e-commerce giant Amazon has led a $12 million ( ~ ₹81.27 crore) funding round in Acko Technologies, which is a digital-only insurance startup headquartered in Mumbai, reported ET Tech. The financing round also saw the participation of Ashish Dhawan, the founder of PE firm ChrysCapital, and existing backer Catamaran Ventures.

www.indianweb2.com first reported that Amazon is close to invest in Acko, in January this year.

With this, Acko becomes Amazon's first investment in India’s insurance services sector. Prior to this, Amazon had invested $22 million in Capital Float, a Bengaluru headquartered digital lending startup, last month. In 2015, Amazon also picked up a minority stake in financial services marketplace BankBazaar.

Founded in 2017 by Varun Dua, who is also founder & CEO of Coverfox.com, Acko Technologies is a parent company of Acko General Insurance.

In May 2017, Acko had received $30 million (about ₹200 crore) even before its launch and it was also touted to be one of the largest seed rounds for the Indian startup ecosystem.

Last month, Acko launched in-trip insurance program for riders of cab hailing firm Ola across more than 110 cities in India. Through this, Acko covers riders for obvious items like minor accidents, and eventualities like missing a flight due to traffic delays. The insurance claim system is built into the Ola app to simplify the process for users.

“We will be beefing up the technology. It’s heavily intensive, both, operationally and technology-wise to set up claims across the country…The other thing will be to scale up our marketing efforts and the business overall,” Varun Dua, chief executive of Acko, told a business daily.

Speaking about this investment, Amit Agarwal, senior vice president and country manager at Amazon India, said in a statement: “Acko is a young and nimble startup bringing technology and data-led innovation to the insurance sector to deliver a better insurance experience for customers."

"We are excited to back companies that are focused on using technology for enhanced customer experience and are led by missionary founders and management teams," he added.

[Top Image - Varun Dua | Image Source - BWDisrupt.businessworld.in]