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.

HR Tech Startup Skillenza Raises $1 Mn from CBA Capital, Blume Ventures and Tracxn

Bangalore-based VH Education Services Private Limited, which own and operates HR tech startup, Skillenza, has raised $ 1 million in a pre-Series A investment round, led by CBA Capital's Education Catalyst Fund (ECF) and contributions from existing investors Blume Ventures and Tracxn Labs Other new investors LetsVenture, CIO Angel Network, Keiretsu Forum, Hyderabad Angels also contributed to the round, reported Times of India.

The funds raised would be utilised to create new modules for assessment of software engineers and expand into tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India, a statement from the company said.

Subhendu Panigrahi, CEO, Skillenza, said in a media statement, "We are working on credentialing students coming out of engineering colleges and creating a global repository of final year undergraduates. These verified and ranked profiles will help companies to hire talent quickly."

Skillenza was founded in 2016 by Subhendu. Essentially, it is a an online platform for professionals that hosts challenges, coding assessments and hackathons to help companies hire engineers and for professionals, it allows to showcase their skills and build an experience graph. The data generated from each challenge is recorded on the platform and is used to create a very personalized experience graph for each user.

"With the infusion of new capital, we foresee that the team will execute ideas that will aid companies to hire the best talent at scale in India to start with and eventually at a global level," said Ashish Fafadia, partner, Blume Ventures.

Vishal Bharat, MD, CBA Capital, said, “What attracted us to Skillenza is its offering that combines the creative process with 21st century skills. It enables participants to explore their skills in the areas that are close to their heart.” The current round would be utilised to create new modules for assessment of software engineers and expand into tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India, a statement from the company said.

"We are working on credentialing students coming out of engineering colleges and creating a global repository of final year undergraduates. These verified and ranked profiles will help companies to hire talent quickly," said Subhendu Panigrahi, CEO, Skillenza.

"With the infusion of new capital, we foresee that the team will execute ideas that will aid companies to hire the best talent at scale in India to start with and eventually at a global level,” said Ashish Fafadia, partner, Blume Ventures.

Recommended By Colombia Vishal Bharat, MD, CBA Capital, said, “What attracted us to Skillenza is its offering that combines the creative process with 21st century skills. It enables participants to explore their skills in the areas that are close to their heart."

It may also be recalled that in March, Bengaluru-based ePoise Systems, a HR Tech startup that offers a cloud based SaaS solution, got acquired by global SaaS-based suites giant Zoho, for an undisclosed amount.

Prior to that, in last November, Bangalore-based Hush, an employee-focused HR tech firm founded by two former Yahoo employees, has raised ₹ 4.5 crores in funding.

In March 2018, Gurgaon based HR Technology startup Benepik had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of investors.

Unacademy Raises Additional $1M from Blume Ventures, Stanford Angels India and Marquee Angels

Unacademy, Indian free online learning platform, has raised additional $1 million in their second round of external investment. In April 2016, they raised their first round of funding worth $500k. The current investment round is being led by Blume Ventures, along with Stanford Angels India, WaterBridge Ventures, Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Shah, Sandeep Tandon, Ashish Tulsian, Tracxn Labs and most of their existing investors participating in the round.

Unacademy is India’s largest free online learning platform that allows educators to create courses using their app on various subjects, including exclusive content for various competitive exams. Their vision is to get the best minds of the country share their knowledge in an easily comprehendible form. More than 100 educators have created 200+ courses in the last eight months since the launch of their platform Unacademy.in. The platform attracts more than 1M video views monthly now, their growth so far has been mostly organic.

“What started as an experiment has today become one of the most reliable sources of online education. From content specific to competitive examinations to basic English learning techniques, we are in a process to make Unacademy the one-stop destination for online courses across myriad fields and subjects. From IAS topper 2016, Tina Dabi, to India’s first woman IPS officer, Kiran Bedi, we aim to get courses from only the best on our platform. Within two months, the Unacademy Create app will be made available to all, so anyone across the world can create lessons in any language they like. After a thorough screening process, we will make the relevant lessons available on our platform that will be free for all to see,” says Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy.

In a span of eight months, over 300,000 students have benefited from over 2,400 online lessons and specialised courses on cracking various competitive examinations, on our platform. Our success stories include thousands of students who have cracked toughest of examinations, improved their ability to speak and write better and increase their knowledge. Some of our students have today become educators on Unacademy and that is what we call a true educational revolution. India is home to 19 per cent of the world’s youth and we are empowering them to take on the world in a manner that classrooms will never do. Our vision is to partner with the brightest minds and have courses on every possible topic in multiple languages so that the whole world can benefit from these courses.

Karthik Reddy,Managing Partner, Blume Ventures, says, “Unacademy presents a great example of the beginnings of an incredible shift in India’s Internet—the ability of millions of new internet users using smartphones as their only access device to create and consume high quality curated educational content as easily as laying hands on a textbook. And the product is designed for both lightweight production and consumption—in that it’s ingenious. This can change learning to an entirely different plane and kill a lot of ineffective institutional frameworks. And it’s an absolutely crack team of young founders for whom all else, including the IAS, didn’t compare to the ambitiou” goal and impact that an Unacademy can have. This is why we think tech can be such a game changer even in education in this country.”

Sachin Bansal, Executive Chairman, Flipkart, says, ”Education and learning from the best suited teachers and professionals is a global problem, which, I believe, Unacademy solves seamlessly with its interactive and intuitive content. In a short span of eight months, the founding team has proved that leveraging technology to empower its educators and students is a problem that can be solved effectively at scale. I am impressed by the ease with which educators can speedily upload videos and touch a billion lives with effective lessons. I am confident that the strong founding team of Unacademy is well positioned to truly disrupt traditional classroom teaching with more impactful content, and I am proud to back the venture.”

Kiran Bedi, Lt Governor, Puducherry, and also an educator at Unacademy, says, “ It took me ten minutes to make a video lesson on ’Time management and productivity’ on the Unacademy Create app, and impact a million lives with my learning. The overwhelming response from students, along with the simplicity with which the app has been designed, encourages working professionals to share their experience. It is an unconventional way for students to get the perspective of real life challenges and lessons and makes me believe everyone can be a teacher. I urge Unacademy to conduct lessons and workshops in Puducherry. Unacademy cuts across boundaries. It’s truly global and in one’s own hands.”

Gurgaon Based Food Ordering Startup Twigly Raises $600K in Seed Funding

Gurgaon-based food ordering startup Twigly has raised $600,000 in seed funding from Bengaluru-based Tracxn Labs, Hyderabad Angels, Freecharge founder Kunal Shah and Flipkart vice-president (engineering) Gaurav Bhalotia, among others. The company is looking to expand its kitchen-on-cloud business to Delhi and Bengaluru during the next 6-10 months. Also, the startup will use the money to expand into new cities and towards building a food brand that will be made available in supermarkets and online platforms.

Twigly, inspired by US-based Sprig, was founded in August 2015 by Sonal Minhas, Rohan Dayal and Naresh Kumar Kachhi. the company is currently in the process of creating back-end infrastructure to manufacture its private label products. You can expect its products to be available in places such as Godrej Nature’s Basket and Le Marche within the next six months, as per LiveMint report.

Twigly works on an online kitchen model where the food is made at a central kitchen and shipped to customers directly. The menu is limited and changes on a weekly basis. The company runs two kitchens in Gurgaon and delivers close to 150 orders a day and targeting to serve about 1,000 orders a day in the next three quarters. The company’s foray into packaged food category is expected to further boost sales.

“We aim to scale the business to $100 million in sales in the next seven to eight years,” according to Minhas. Twigly, which went live seven months ago, has a customer base of 6,000 people and currently has a 50-member team.

In November last year, Twigly raised $200,000 from angel investors, including Amit Gupta, co-founder of InMobi, Mukul Singhal of SAIF Partners, TracxnLabs, an incubator backed by Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Deepak Singh of Anzy Careers.

Other players operating in the space include TinyOwl which merged with logistics firm RoadRunnr (Carthero Technologies Pvt. Ltd) in May to start a new entity called Runnr to stay afloat. Internet-first kitchen Spoonjoy and restaurant aggregator Dazo, which had marquee investors Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal, Google India chief Rajan Anandan and Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, have shut down their shop in October after failing to raise substantial funds.

Cookifi Secures Seed Funding From Kunal Shah and Other Angels Through TracxnSyndicate

Cookifi, chef and cook hiring platform, has raised an undisclosed seed funding from Kunal Shah, Chairman of FreeCharge, and Aneesh Reddy Co-Founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, Tracxn Labs, Venkat Tadanki, CEO of Secova, Krishna Mehra, Co-Founder at Capillary Technologies, Amit Rathore, Founder and CEO, Quintype, and other angels through TracxnSyndicate.

Currently operational in Bangalore, Cookifi provides a personal party chef at your doorstep at your convenience on a click. Cookifi caters to a wide demographic of users celebrating their kids’ birthday, hosting get-togethers, private parties, kitty parties and likes. It also serves homemakers, working professionals and big families who want cook on demand.

The funding will enable the company to expand its operations in other cities and extend its technology solution for a better user experience. Cookifi aims to leverage technology to provide customization when it comes to house party chefs and menu planning. Cookifi uses an advanced chef allocation algorithm (using variables such as spice preferences, cuisine preferences) to help customers get what they want with minimum effort.

Ajay Modani, Co-Founder, Cookifi said, “One of the most important things when you are planning a party at home, be it a kids birthday, get together or day-to-day cooking, is food and there is a huge gap between high volume caterers and regular cooks. There was no right platform or source to hire professional chefs or cooks for such occasions. Cookifi is using technology to make chefs and cooks more accessible to book on demand, with the ease of a tap.”

Cookifi has selected cooks listed on its platform through its strong on boarding process, ensuring adherence to cleanliness standards and immediate escalation handling. The company has Cook on Demand feature to cater to working professionals who want to book a cook as and when required with an ease of click.

According to Prachi Malu, Co-Founder, Cookifi, “It is very difficult to find a service provider who matches your expectations viz. taste of food, budget, cleanliness and discipline. We analysed and understood that there is a huge market potential for such player and fill the gap given that quality should be the focus.”

Cookifi enables the customer to discover chefs and cooks around them and provide a perfect hiring solution, aimed at being quick, easy and reliable. Customers can hire a cook on a tap or a click. The built-in artificial intelligence capabilities helps customers to do less and get more in a simpler manner. Transparent pricing and quick online payments provide a hassle-free experience. A two-way feedback mechanism helps Cookifi to maintain a high-quality standard. After each job, the customer can rate the service provider and similarly the service provider can rate the customer.

"Keeping current traction in mind, we estimate on an average a customer will use Cookifi on Demand three times a month and Cookifi experience once in a month. With this, we estimate the market size to be $20.6 billion in top six cities of India,” said Harsh Singla, Co-Founder, Cookifi.

According to Neha Singh of Tracxn, “ "We're convinced by Cookifi’s mission to organise a large addressable market in the unorganised sector. We see a growing appetite for an on-demand chef service as India’s millennials work longer hours than the previous generation, and they don’t have the time or inclination to cook an elaborate meal. Building a world class customer experience is at the core of such a service, and we're confident that the Cookifi team will maintain it at scale."

The company was founded in June 2015 and has already served over 3500 customers so far.