How Ankit Agrawal is constructing InsuranceDekho as quickest rising insurtech

“Roti, kapda, makaan aur insurance coverage.”

When somebody asks Ankit Agrawal, chief govt officer and founding father of Gurugram-based insurtech startup InsuranceDekho, in regards to the insurance coverage sector, that is his first response. He believes that Covid has taught folks the need of insurance coverage.

Effectively, Agrawal’s firm is likely one of the quickest rising insurtech corporations within the final seven years. It was began in 2017 with a imaginative and prescient of democratising the Indian insurance coverage sector by simplifying the insurance coverage shopping for, promoting, and declare course of via a full-stack digital platform powered by synthetic intelligence and machine studying.

As per knowledge, 10 Indians are shopping for insurance coverage from InsuranceDekho each minute and it has served over 5 million clients since 2017. This in itself is an achievement for a bootstrapped startup with an funding of round $20 million. InsuranceDekho was within the information just lately, when it raised $150 million in Collection A funding – the biggest Insurtech Collection A funding in India and South East Asia — from marquee buyers like Goldman Sachs, TVS Capital, and LeapFrog Investments.

The founder has a private motive to get into the enterprise via its promoter firm CarDekho, one of many largest on-line auto portals within the nation.  After finishing his commencement from the Division of Monetary Research, College of Delhi, Ankit labored for 3 years within the US with UBS. After that, he got here again to India and labored with Anand Rathi Advisors and MoveInSync, the place he held essential portfolios. He then joined CarDekho and began constructing its used-car mortgage enterprise. It was throughout this time that he realised the difficulties of a buyer within the insurance coverage sector.

“As soon as my father obtained hospitalised. We thought insurance coverage will settle our claims. Nonetheless, it didn’t occur and so they deducted a number of issues saying all of these gadgets aren’t coated. At the moment, the thought got here to insurance coverage,” Agrawal provides. In 2016, he began constructing the insurance coverage enterprise and initially, it was a vertical of CarDekho. Ankit has arrange and exponentially grown the Insurance coverage enterprise at CarDekho with InsuranceDekho, being fashioned in 2019 as a separate arm of the car-selling unicorn. Curiously, InsuranceDekho noticed a 16-fold enhance in enterprise from FY19 to FY22. The corporate at current has round 1,500 staff.

As a part of its technique to get aggressively into SME enterprise, InsuranceDekho acquired Verak, a Mumbai-based SME insurance coverage distribution firm backed by Sequoia and LightSpeed and Gujarat based mostly IRSS, in April this 12 months.

Development going forward

“Over the last monetary 12 months, we did about Rs 2,000 crore in premium and round Rs 600 crore in income. We might be a worthwhile firm this 12 months. This 12 months we can clock round Rs 4,000 crore in premium, doubling it from the present stage,” Agrawal says. This development is more likely to be pushed by a foray into new segments like SME insurance coverage and better enterprise in new markets that it’s aggressively rising its presence.  

The corporate is at current having a community of 90,000 brokers throughout the nation and is onboarding 5 new advisors each hour. It gives over 410 insurance coverage merchandise throughout 5 classes (Motor, Well being, Life, Journey, and Pet) in partnership with 46 insurance coverage corporations together with the Life Insurance coverage Company of India (LIC). One benefit that the corporate is seeing in its development forward is that 83 per cent of its enterprise is coming from tier 2 and past areas.

Going ahead, it’s the decrease penetration of insurance coverage within the nation that’s driving the corporate. In accordance with estimates, insurance coverage penetration in India is barely round 4.2 per cent, in comparison with 11.4 per cent within the US and Canada, 9 per cent in superior Asia Pacific, and eight per cent in superior Europe, Center East and Africa (EMEA). Somewhat than seeing his firm as a soonicorn, the founder likes to see it as a  cockroach startup. A cockroach startup is the corporate that strikes ahead like a cockroach, despite altering environments, market circumstances and funding eventualities.

“I don’t consider within the idea of soonicorn, unicorn and decacorn. We’re Cockroaches. Whether or not it’s a bull run, bear run, or funding winter, it doesn’t matter to us. We all know easy methods to do our enterprise,” he provides.