Tiger Global leads $15.6 mn round in health insurance startup Plum

Tiger Global's investments this year have helped Cred, Innovaccer, ShareChat and other companies to become unicorns.

Tiger Global led a $15.6 million investment round in group health insurance company Plum, said the Indian company on Monday.

Previous investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital also participated in the Series A round. The startup had raised $5 million in earlier rounds last year.

Angel investors 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 this round.

Plum said it would use the fresh fund for engineering, business development and operations. The company is building insurance products for businesses with seven employees or less and cannot afford to pay annual premiums. Plum is additionally looking at building deeper API integrations with leading insurers such as ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health and New India Assurance.

“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,” said Abhishek Poddar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Plum.

The group health insurance market in India, which is almost 50 per cent of the total $3.5 billion health insurance market, has seen an annual growth of about 25 per cent in the last few years and is doubling every three years. Group health insurance products cover about 90 million Indians. They are expected to cover more than 500 million Indians by the end of this decade.

Plum, founded by Poddar and Saurabh Arora in 2019, aims to accelerate adoption of health insurance in India by making it accessible, affordable and usable for employees. It has over 600 organisations such as Groww, Unacademy, Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder on-board.

“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.

Tiger Global has been on an investment spree in India in 2021 and has so far led funding rounds in Cred, Innovaccer, Infra.Market, Groww, ShareChat and Gupshup, helping them join the unicorn club. It had last week led a $30 million round in homegrown microblogging platform Koo.