GramCover hires former Policybazaar tech head as CTO

Rural insurance technology platform GramCover has appointed Shailendra Tewari as its new chief technology officer (CTO).

Tewari will lead GramCover’s technology vertical to automate and digitalise various business processes and devise operational solutions of the sales and service teams, the company said in a statement.

“We are solving the rural insurance challenge. My efforts would be towards taking technology to the doorsteps of the real population of India. This will need a massive drive for simplification of products and processes, working in tandem with all other initiatives, to succeed,” Tewari said.

Tewari was one of the founding members of SoftBank and Temasek-backed Policybazaar, and was its technology lead for two years.

“With his rich experience in the insurance sector, GramCover will create scalable systems and processes that will facilitate the growth of GramCover in the years to come across insurance products, payment solutions, CRM and data analytics,” Dhyanesh Bhatt, CEO and co-founder of GramCover, said.

Founded in 2016, the platform runs a point-of-sale (PoS) network across the Indian countryside, which it uses to deliver insurance products for crop, livestock, health, motor, life and asset insurance.

Registered as a composite broker at the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), the startup raised its first known funding from Omnivore in the first year of its existence. Research platform VCCEged pegged the deal size at $1.2 million.

Last year, it raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a bridge round, dubbed a pre-Series A round, from returning investor Omnivore, and new investors EMVC, Flourish and Omidyar Network India. 

The company is currently active in West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Assam and Uttar Pradesh, and claims to have brokered insurance premiums worth $13 million till date.