Indian insurtech startup nets $15.6m from Tiger Global, Sequoia’s Surge

Plum, an India-based group health insurance startup, announced that it has raised US$15.6 million in series A funding led by Tiger Global. Existing investors such as Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund, and Gemba Capital also participated in the round.

The round also saw the participation of several founders of big Indian startups, such as Kunal Shah, founder of Cred; Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, co-founders of Unacademy; Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, and Ishan Bansal, co-founders of Groww; Ramakant Sharma and Anuj Srivastava, co-founders of Livspace; and Douglas Feirstein, co-founder of Hired.

Plum raised US$5 million last year.

Plum’s co-founders Saurabh Arora (left) and Abhishek Poddar / Photo credit: Plum

Founded in 2019, the company provides employee health insurance plans to companies that can then sell them to their employees. It requires clients to have minimum participation from seven employees so it can give them insurance with a cheaper premium.

The company is founded by former Google executive Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, who had previously founded customer engagement startup Airwoot that was later acquired by Freshworks.

Plum plans to use the fresh funds to scale their engineering, business development, and operations teams.

The insurtech startup said it has covered 90 million people in India to date and aims to reach more than 500 million people by 2030. It claims to have conquered almost 50% of the country’s US$3.5 billion health insurance market.

The company is currently looking to build deeper integration with leading insurers in the country, such as ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health, and New India Assurance.

The Bangalore-based startup currently has more than 600 companies onboarded as its clients, including startups Groww, Unacademy (whose founders are Plum’s angel investors), Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder, Smallcase, and Simpl.

It targets to help 10 million people in the country get insured by 2025.