[The Turning Point] How this insurtech is helping insurance agents go digital

Turtlemint, a Mumbai-based insurance advisor focused startup, recently secured $120 million in a Series E funding round led by Amansa Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Its recent fundraise brought the seven-year-old startup closer to the unicorn tag, with valuation at $900 million, according to media reports. The startup has raised $190 million so far.

Turtlemint intends to use the fresh funds to expand in new geographies, scale its leadership team and strengthen its product stack. 

Over the years, the startup has tweaked its offerings, including doubling down on building a tech stack that helps insurance agents match their customers with the right insurance policy and building a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model to get ahead in the insuretech game.

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The origin

Founded in 2015 by Dhirendra Mahyavanshi and Anand Prabhudesai, Turtlemint is a digital platform designed to help financial advisors understand the need of the customer and allows them to insure their community of customers.

It enables financial advisors to instantly match each customer with a suite of products that is best suited for their unique needs through a digital solution, removing the hassles of paperwork.

When it started out in 2015, the problem that it took up to solve was to help customers determine the difference between the policies and what actually suits their needs.

In a 2016 interview with YourStory, Dhirendra, Co-founder of Turtlemint emphasised that consumers were finding it difficult to zero in on the right insurance policy.

Back then Turtlemint focussed on providing personalised insurance platform that gave recommendations to different customers on the basis of different algorithms and data analytics.

It also offered offline insurance assistance which acted as its revenue generator before the platform was ready to go live.

Keeping up with the times

Before building Turtlemint, Dhirendra and Anand worked at Quikr. Dhirendra has also worked at ICICI Lombard while Anand, a graduate of IIT Bombay, has worked with Nokia and Yahoo.

Due to their understanding of insurance requirements across domains, the co-founders knew that insurance advisors and agents are vital to grow a venture in the space. The duo also had an understanding of the pain points in the sector, namely the outdated pen-and-paper methods adopted by agents which made customer onboarding slow and inefficient.

“We saw very limited effort towards helping insurance agents digitise their work, where they could have all the necessary tools at their disposal,” Dhirendra had said in a previous conversation.

This led to the company looking to build tools to help insurance advisors.

Turtlemint’s technology platform is primarily through an app, where insurance advisors can have access to information on insurance products and policies. The platform also contains training modules and materials, master classes, and more.

It has also digitised the entire process of training, licensing, and verification making customer onboarding hassle free. It also helps agents to give customised recommendation to clients,

In 2021, Turtlemint said that 65-70 percent of its business is from locations beyond metros.

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The journey

“Our biggest USP is that we are democratising tech, which is making insurance accessible and available. We are not eliminating the distributor of these products but empowering them,” says Dhirendra.

Today, Turtlemint also provides other services such as buying insurance policies across both life and non-life segments. It also provides its technology platform to other companies under a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model.

The Turtlemint advisor community today claims to have over 160,000 insurance advisors using the platform in more than 15,000 pin codes in India. With over 2500, it claims to have sold over 40 lakh policies and has a customer base of 35 Lakhs. It has a target to onboard over 1 million advisors by 2025 and continue to increase its footprints in tier 2, tier 3 cities and beyond

In November last year, Turtlemint acquired Pune-based cloud data analytics company, IOPhysics Systems, for an undisclosed amount.

In its recent funding announcement, the startup said that it has expanded to the Middle East market by providing digital journeys for insurance to banks and other distributors and is looking to expand in South East Asian markets as well.

"We are also leveraging our technology expertise to offer our solutions to financial institutions both in India as well as the Middle East where we partner with leading banks for API-based solutions,” said Dhirendra during the funding announcement.