iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
India, which is the second-most populous nation in the world, has one of the lowest health insurance coverage in the world. One key reason is, many employers do not offer insurance to their employees.
A Bangalore-based startup named Plum is on a mission to change this, by making it easier and more affordable for more firms in the nation to provide insurance coverage to their employees.
On Monday, Plum had raised $15.6 million in its Series A funding to accelerate its growth. Tiger Global led the new funding round, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund, and Gemba Capital. TechCrunch reported earlier this year that Plum was in talks with Tiger Global for the new financing round.
Kunal Shah (founder of Cred), Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh (founders of Unacademy), Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain and Ishan Bansal (founders of Groww), Ramakant Sharma and Anuj Srivastava (founders of Livspace), and Douglas Feirstein (founder of Hired) also participated in the new round, which brings one-a-half-year-old startup’s to-date raise to $20.6 million.
With this round, the startup has raised a total of $20.6 million in funding, till date.
According to the company, it will use the funds to further scale its engineering, business development and operations teams.
Founded in 2019, Plum provides an employee health insurance stack by forging underwriting and fraud detection algorithms that allow companies with as few as seven employees to benefit from group insurance.
It also claims to offer employees a hassle-free claims experience through an integrated digital process.
“Plum aims to reach a milestone of 10 million lives insured by 2025, by changing the employee health insurance space. 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 ongoing covid-19 pandemic. We are building Plum to enable a high-quality healthcare experience for every single employee and their family members,” said Abhishek Poddar, co-founder and chief executive officer, Plum.
