PolicyBazaar appoints new CEO and COO for healthcare arm DocPrime

DocPrime.com, the healthcare venture operated by insurance selling platform PolicyBazaar, has appointed a new chief executive officer and chief operating officer, a company statement said.

Ashish Gupta, who is PolicyBazaar’s chief technology and product officer, will be elevated as the CEO, while former Apollo Munich Health Insurance executive Richit Ummat was named as the COO, the statement added.

Gupta will continue to serve as PolicyBazaar’s CTO and CPO until successors to his positions are hired, the statement added.

“Both of them bring diversified experience spanning nearly three decades in technology, business development, strategic planning and sales. This is exactly the combination we are looking to make a deep-rooted impact among the masses for providing quality medical services to the customers by leveraging technology,” Yashish Dahiya, PolicyBazaar’s group CEO and co-founder, said in the statement.

Gupta, an IIT Delhi alumnus, joined PolicyBazaar as group CTO and CPO in November 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. In his previous professional stints, he had served as CTO and vice president at online health store Healthkart. He also co-founded CouponVoodoo, a coupon venture focused at consumers, and ed-tech venture Study Places.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Ummat had previously worked at Apollo Munich Health Insurance as associate vice president in the consumer sales vertical. Prior to that, he with Dhanlaxmi Bank, Reliance Capital and ICICI Bank.

The two new appointments come less than three months after PolicyBazaar raised $200 million (Rs 1,360 crore) in a Series F round led by SoftBank Vision Fund and other existing investors. The round valued PolicyBazaar at about $1 billion, catapulting the firm into the haloed unicorn club—an industry term for startups valued at $1 billion or more.

DocPrime

Though the company had not officially confirmed it, PolicyBazaar’s entry into the healthcare sector had been reported by media outlets since March this year. Dahiya, in an interaction with TechCircle last month, said that the majority of the Series F capital that it raised will go towards financing this venture.

 “We have tentatively planned a $100-million investment over the next two years for the healthcare venture. But we will see how that progresses. PolicyBazaar doesn’t require investments. The investment is going to go more towards PaisaBazaar and the healthcare venture,” Dahiya said.

DocPrime will run as a digital doctor-on-call service. According to the statement, for the service, the company aims to expand its doctor network to over 1,50,000 in more than 200 specialities and 20,000 labs, which will have a capacity to conduct more than 5,000 tests on its platform by March 2019.

PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar

Founded in 2008 by Dahiya and Alok Bansal, PolicyBazaar has raised capital across at least five rounds. Its early investors were Info Edge, Intel Capital and Inventus Capital, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of News Corp VCCircle. Steadview Capital, ABG Capital and Ribbit Capital have also put in money into the firm.

It offers various financial products, including insurance policies and loans, and helps consumers select a scheme based on an analysis of products, price, quality and key benefits.

PaisaBazaar was set up in 2014 and was en route to clock Rs 400 crore in revenue, Dahiya had said at the time of PolicyBazaar’s Series E capital raise. He added that the company planned to launch overseas operations, with West Asia, and more specifically Dubai, to be its first port of call.

PolicyBazaar clocked Rs 358.27 crore in revenue for the financial year through March 2018. This is up from Rs 212.87 crore for 2016-17 and Rs 109.54 crore the year before, a regulatory filing by the firm's investor Info Edge showed.

The filing didn’t disclose the profit or loss numbers. According to VCCEdge, PolicyBazaar had swung a net profit of Rs 75.8 crore for 2016-17 from a loss of Rs 79.5 crore the year before.