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Insurance-tech startup Plum Benefits raises funding from Incubate Fund, others

By Narinder Kapur

  • 14 Jul 2020
Insurance-tech startup Plum Benefits raises funding from Incubate Fund, others
Credit: 123RF.com

Plum Benefits Pvt. Ltd, which helps companies set up group health insurance programmes, has raised Rs 7 crore ($927,994 at current exchange rate) in a seed funding round.

The round in the Bengaluru-based startup has been led by seed-focused Incubate Fund, with participation from Gemba Capital and Tracxn Labs, Plum said in a statement.

Other participants in the round include angel investors such as Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam of Praxify Health, Belong.co co-founder Sudheendra Chilappagari, Pando founder and chief executive officer Nitin Jayakrishnan, and Xiaomi executive Alvin Tse.

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Plum was set up last year by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora. Poddar, an alumnus of Stanford University, has worked with companies including Google and McKinsey. Arora has worked with Freshworks and also set up customer relationship management company Airwoot, which was acquired by California-based Freshworks.

The two say Plum helps employers and employees with policy flexibility and transparent pricing. It guides companies on setting up a personalised group health insurance programme in under an hour.

The startup says it is working with nine insurers and that it has signed up over 100 clients within four months of its launch. It will use the capital it has raised to scale up its business and engineering teams.

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“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 Southeast Asia and Latin America,” Poddar said.

Incubate Fund India founder and general partner Nao Murakami said the investment in Plum would help the startup bridge the gap between insurance companies and the needs of employees and employers.

The bet on Plum highlights growing investor interest in the insurance-technology segment.

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In May, rural-focused insurance-technology platform GramCover raised pre-Series A funding from new and existing investors including United States-based EMVC and Omidyar Network India.

Also in May, Riskcovry raised capital in a pre-Series A round led by Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund. Other participants in the round included Varanium Capital and Better Capital. Riskcovry says it provides businesses with large captive user bases “insurance-in-a-box” solutions.

Prior to that, in March, startup incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts committed an undisclosed sum to Insurance Samadhan, which operates an insurance grievance redressal platform.

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