Coverfox investor Sanjib Jha appointed as interim CEO: Report

Sanjib Kumar Jha, co-founder of private equity firm Avaana Capital, has taken over as the interim CEO of Mumbai-based online insurance aggregator Coverfox, according to a report.

Additionally, Piyush Ranjan, former senior director of engineering, and head of technology and product at Ola Fleet Technologies, has also joined Coverfox as CTO, The Economic Times report added.

Jha, also an investor in the company, will be required to bring in fresh capital and continue the search for a strategic buyout, the report said, citing sources privy to the development. He replaces Premanshu Singh, who joined rival Paytm earlier this month as the senior vice-president of its financial services business. 

Apart from co-founding Avaana Capital with former TPG Growth senior executive Anjali Bansal, who is also an investor in Coverfox,  Jha is the founder and CEO of startup-focused lender IntelleGrow. He was also the lead advisor for micro, small and medium enterprises at the World Bank.

Before Ola, Ranjan founded DoorMint, a Mumbai-based on-demand laundry service platform. The IIT Kanpur alumnus started his career with online travel platform Cleartrip. 

Queries sent to Coverfox and Jha did not elicit a response at the time of publishing this report.

In June last year, Coverfox was in talks with Paytm for a potential acquisition by the Noida-based digital payments company, but a deal did not materialise. 

In March last year, it was looking to raise about $50 million in an equity funding round from investors in China, the US and the UK. 

Investors in the company include venture capital firms Accel and SAIF Partners; Catamaran Ventures, the personal investment unit of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy; San Francisco-based insurance giant Transamerica; World Bank group member International Finance Corp; and Dutch insurance, pension and asset management firm Aegon.

Coverfox was founded in 2013 by IIT Bombay graduate Devendra Rane and MICA-Ahmedabad alumnus Varun Dua. The latter quit the company in 2016 to float Acko General Insurance Company, an online insurance policy provider.

It competes with companies such as SoftBank-backed PolicyBazaar and Turtlemint.