Insurtech platform BimePe shuts down; founder announces focus on new product
Rahul Mathur, the startup's Founder and CEO, said one of the reasons behind shutting down BimaPe was the startup not being able to reach the product-market fit metrics it set in March 2021.
Insuretech startup founder Rahul Mathur on Wednesday said that he is scrapping his company Engaged InsureTech Pvt Ltd's flagship brand and product, , 10 months after building it, and unveiled a new brand, Verak Insurance.
BimaPe, a product that aims to simplify insurance for working professionals and helps users manage their family's insurance, is owned by Engaged InsurTech Pvt Ltd, the parent company. Verak Insurance, Rahul's new focus, will remain a part of the broader parent entity.
The team that developed BimaPe will divert its attention to Verak, and all investor capital will be used to growing the new brand, Rahul tweeted.
Verak is expected to be launched publically in March 2022, although it will open to limited users for beta testing. Rahul said the product has recently crossed the $20,000 monthly net revenue milestone.
Why BimaPe was scrapped
Rahul said that despite BimaPe organically growing at 30 percent month-on-month for the past half-a-year, he decided to wind it down because of three reasons:
- Not being able to hit the product-market fit metrics it set out in March 2021
- After receiving customer feedback: "We’ve realised that many well-wishers and users care more about us (as a team), rather than us (as a company offering a product) — which is nice but not enough to build a real business," Rahul wrote in a blog post.
- Finding a bigger problem to solve — which is what its new pivot, Verak Insurance, is largely about.
The founder-CEO also laid out some mistakes the team made, including giving more precedence or focusing more on the product vision than the strategy that could help it convert its vision into a set of actions, and launching too fast, which resulted in the startup's small engineering team getting bogged down with the maintenance of multiple features.
"We learned a lot by launching fast but we also missed out on the focus that a gradual launch provides," he wrote in a blog post.
BimaPe's backers included Y-Combinator, Titan Capital, iSeed, and Gemba Capital. Details around Verak and its focus were not revealed by the company and its founder.
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Edited by Kanishk Singh