[Funding alert] Employee health insurance startup Plum raises $15.6M led by Tiger Global

Plum — the Bengaluru-based employee health insurance startup that provides health benefits to SMEs, corporates, and startups — recently raised $15.6 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from earlier investors — Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund, and Gemba Capital.

Angel investors, including Kunal Shah (Founder, Cred); Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh (Founders, Unacademy); Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, and Ishan Bansal (Founders, Groww); Ramakant Sharma and  Anuj Srivastava (Founders, Livspace); and Douglas Feirstein (Founder, Hired), also participated in the round. 

The health insurance startup has raised $5 million in earlier rounds last year.

In a statement, the startup said it will use the funds to further scale its engineering, business development, and operations teams. Plum is building newer insurance products for SMEs who have teams as small as seven employees and cannot afford to pay annual premiums. 

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Additionally, Plum is looking at building deeper API integrations with insurers like ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health, and New India Assurance.

Speaking on the development, Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder and CEO, Plum, said, 

“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.”

Founded in 2019 by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, Plum is re-imagining the employee health insurance stack by forging new underwriting and fraud detection algorithms. The platform’s real-time insurance design and pricing enable companies to buy insurance in just three clicks.

With over 600 organisations on-boarded, Plum claims to witness a growth rate of 110 percent quarter-on-quarter. The startup's client base includes SMEs, corporates, and Indian startups, including Groww, Unacademy, Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder, smallcase, and Simpl.

“As India’s healthcare insurance industry rapidly expands and transforms, Plum is well-positioned to make comprehensive health insurance accessible to millions of Indians. We are excited to partner with Abhishek, Saurabh, and the Plum team as they scale their leading tech-enabled platform to employers across the country,” said Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global.

The group health insurance market in India — which is almost 50 percent of the total $3.5 billion health insurance market — has seen an annual growth of about 25 percent in the last few years, 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.