Lok Capital, IIFL Asset Management lead $19 mn funding in insurance platform RenewBuy

Insurance products aggregator RenewBuy has raised Rs 130 crore (about $19 million at current exchange rate) in its Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Lok Capital and IIFL Asset Management, a unit of financial services company IIFL Holdings.

Existing investor Amicus Capital also participated in the round. The company, backed by Singapore-based investment banking and advisory firm Mount Nathan Advisors, had previously raised Rs 60 crore in October 2017.

RenewBuy was co-founded in 2015 by Balachander Sekhar, former chief executive of Reliance Retail Insurance, former product and strategy head at MetLife Indraneel Chatterjee, former Infosys executive Sandeep Nanda, and

Devesh Joshi. It started by offering comparison and purchase options for automobile insurance. It has expanded to health and life insurance products and has launched TravAssured, offering travel insurance along with other travel products and services. 

Sekhar, chief executive at RenewBuy, said that the company will be able to turn profitable over the next 24 months. 

The firm, which has a presence in 450 cities and operates with an insurance brokering licence, will use the capital to expand to 1,000 cities and offer new products by 2022. 

“RenewBuy, owned by D2C Insurance Broking Pvt. Ltd, is Lok’s first investment in the insurance space,” said Venkatesh Natarajan, co-founder and managing partner at Lok Capital. 

IIFL Asset Management has been bullish on backing consumer tech, healthcare and financial services firms. It had recently backed Neewee Analytics.

Deals in the space

The financial technology and digital lending space has attracted interest from key investment firms including SoftBank and Tiger Global Management.

• May 2019: SoftBank Vision Fund led a $152 million Series F round in insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar.
• March 2019: Acko, which operates as an independent general insurance company, raised $65 million from a clutch of investors including Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and RPS Ventures.
• January 2019: Online insurance platform Turtlemint raised $25 million funding led by Sequoia Capital.