[YS Exclusive] Ensuredit raises $4.2M in Pre-Series A funding

Gurugram and Bengaluru-based insurtech firm Ensuredit has raised $4.2 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Cover Genius, a US-based insurtech firm for embedded insurance.

The funding round saw participation from leading investors such as 9Unicorns, NexStep Discovery, CP Ventures, Venture Catalysts, and IPV. Apart from the new investors, existing investors also participated in the latest round.

The company said it aims to utilise the funds to ramp up product offerings and expand the technology team.

Founded in 2019 by Amit Boni, Rohit Sadhu, and Vikas Ranga, Ensuredit focuses on working closely with insurance distributors (brokers, NBFCs, banks, etc.) to enhance their sales force acquisition and productivity and enable them to onboard more insurance manufacturers and channel partners.

Amit Boni told YourStory, “We are passionate about delivering innovative technology and digitisation solutions to the insurance industry, with a special focus on insurance intermediaries and distributors. We aim to empower them with technology, which is critical to the industry’s goal of making insurance available to every Indian.”    

Ensuredit started by digitising journeys in retail insurance and then moved to micro insurance and sachet-sized products, which are like group insurance-led products. “We are adding a lot of insurance categories and new channels to the platform,” said Amit.

The company plans to expand its playbook to include motor insurance service providers (MISP) and OEMs. The addition of MISP and OEMs will go live in August, and other categories of insurance players, including those in commercial lines of insurance, are also set to come in.

Ensuredit plans to deploy more context-relevant artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer-vision-based products, which will make the customer journey easy.

The company said it is building a computer-vision-based solution for break-in in the digital insurance journey. Break-in, in insurance, happens when an insurer fails to renew the insurance, with the surveyor having to survey the vehicle. This breaks the process by making the digital journey go offline.

According to Amit, it is important to come out a with a solution for this, as 30-40 percent of cases in motor insurance renewal have break-ins.

“We are using computer vision as a solution to create break-in solutions so that the process and the system can still be entirely digital. This will allow the insurer to complete any journey digitally without any breaks,” said Amit.

The startup also plans to use machine learning and data science to figure out commission reconciliations to have the right kind of policies tagged to the right kind of commission rates. This will ensure the right kind of reconciliation, so that agents get their money in time.

“We are interested in solving the key problems faced by the industry,” said Amit.

Ensuredit also plans to optimise sales teams and customer onboarding, providing deep business analytics and preventing leakage in financial reconciliation.

Having Cover Genius on board

Cover Genius, US-based insurtech firm for embedded insurance, has a presence in India through Ola, Flipkart, and Pepperfry. Its investment in Ensuredit has two parts to its—a partnership and an investment, according to Amit.

“From a partnership perspective, we are very clear that if we combine our strengths in certain areas and jointly go to market, we can provide more concrete solutions to a lot of market participants,” said Amit.

Angus McDonald, CEO and Co-founder, Cover Genius, said, “As Cover Genius deepens its global capabilities, especially in the Indian market, which is highly underinsured, we are eager to help Ensuredit use its technology to bring relevancy to the traditional insurance market. Having successfully partnered with some of India’s largest digital companies such as Flipkart and Pepperfry, we believe this region is poised to adopt an embedded protection model.”   

Plans ahead

“In the next 12 to 18 months, we should be the de facto product company. Anyone who thinks about digital distribution should reach out to us, and we can help them become a digital company,” said Amit.

Ensuredit aims to enable tech-led delivery of more than a million insurance policies in the current fiscal year. Currently, the company has close to 90 clients.