Indian health insurtech startup Plum secures $15.6m to boost business

Indian group health insurance technology startup Plum announced that it secured $15.6 million in a Series A funding round that will help fund its expansion and scale its engineering, business development, and operations teams.

The funding round, which followed a $5-million fundraising last year, was led by New York-based investment company Tiger Global and participated by existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund, and Gemba Capital.

A number of angel investors, including Cred founder Kunal Shah, Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, and Groww founders Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, and Ishan Bansal also joined in the funding round.

Plum, founded in late 2019 by Poddar and Saurabh Arora, is building new insurance products for small and midsize enterprises that cannot afford to pay annual premiums.

The startup said it has onboard 600 organizations from across SMEs, corporates, and growing Indian startups such as Grow, Unacademy, and others.

With the fresh funding, Plum said it is looking at building deeper relationships with leading insurers like ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health, and New India Assurance.

“The adoption of health insurance by startups, SMEs and corporates is increasing exponentially and is further accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” said Plum co-founder and CEO Abhishek Poddar.

He adds that Plum is being built to enable high-quality health care experience for every single employee and their family.

Plum operates in the bustling health insurance market in India, which accounted for 2.73% of the global life insurance market in 2019.

During fiscal 2019-20, India’s life insurance industry recorded a premium income of ₹5,72,910 as against ₹5,08,132 crores in the previous financial year, registering a growth of 12.75%.

The group health insurance market is estimated to account for almost half of the country’s overall health insurance market, which is a $3.5-billion sector.

“Plum aims to reach a milestone of 10 million lives insured by 2025, by changing employee health insurance space,” Poddar said.