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Bengaluru-based health insurance startup, Plum has raised Rs 7 crore in series Seed round funding from Incubate Fund, Gemba Capital, and others.
The new round of funding led by Incubate Fund, it also saw the participation of 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.
In a statement issued, Plum said, “The company plans to use the funding to scale business & engineering teams, to solve some of the hardest engineering challenges in Insurtech and build innovative distribution channels.”
Founded by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora in late 2019, Plum provides high-quality healthcare experience to employers and employees with customizable plans and transparent pricing. Plum additionally helps employees with improved health benefits, including doctor consultations, health check-ups, fitness & yoga, mental wellness, nutrition, and dental care.
Speaking on the fundraise, Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder & CEO of 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 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,” Poddar 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 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 compliance),” Saurabh Arora, Co-founder & CTO of Plum said.
Commenting on the investment, Nao Murakami, Founder & 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 products. Abhishek and Saurabh have a very clear vision that aligns with what we see as a future of health insurance in India,” Nao said.