Health insurance startup Plum raises Series A funding in round led by Tiger Global

Plum Benefits Pvt Ltd, a group health insurance startup, has raised $15.6 million (Rs 113 crore) in a Series A funding led by US investment firm Tiger Global Management LLC.  

Existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital also participated in this round.  

The startup also raised capital in this round from angel investors including Cred founder Kunal Shah; Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh; Groww founders Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain and Ishan Bansal; Livspace founders Ramakant Sharma and Anuj Srivastava; and Hired founder Douglas Feirstein. 

In November 2020, Plum raised about $4 million.

The company is building newer insurance products for small and medium enterprises that have teams as small as seven employees and cannot afford to pay annual premiums.  

Plum is additionally looking at building deeper API (application programming interface) integrations with insurers like ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health and New India Assurance, the company said.   

Plum claims to have witnessed a growth of 110% quarter-on-quarter. It has onboarded 600 organisations that include small and medium enterprises (SMEs), corporates and fast-growing startups in India such as Groww, Unacademy, Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder, smallcase and Simpl. 

Abhishek Poddar, co-founder and chief executive of Plum, said that the company aims to insure one crore people by 2025.  

"With Plum, we are making the process transparent, affordable and easy, using tech at scale. The adoption of health insurance by startups, SMEs and corporates is increasing exponentially, and is further accelerated by the pandemic,” Poddar added. 

Plum was founded in late 2019 by Poddar and Saurabh Arora. Poddar, a Stanford University alumnus, has worked with Google and McKinsey, and built technology companies. Arora led product and engineering teams at Freshworks, and had previously built Airwoot which was acquired by Freshworks.

“As India’s healthcare insurance industry rapidly expands and transforms, Plum is well positioned to make comprehensive health insurance accessible to millions of Indians,”  said Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global.  

The group health insurance market in India, which is almost 50% of the total $3.5 billion health insurance market, has seen an annual growth of about 25% in the last few years and is doubling every three years. Group health insurance products cover about 90 million Indians and are expected to cover more than 500 million Indians by the end of this decade, Plum said.