How Ankit Agrawal is building InsuranceDekho as fastest growing insurtech

InsuranceDekho was started in 2017 with a vision of democratising the Indian insurance sector by simplifying the insurance buying, selling, and claim process

“Roti, kapda, makaan aur insurance.”

When someone asks Ankit Agrawal, chief executive officer and founder of Gurugram-based insurtech startup InsuranceDekho, about the insurance sector, this is his first response. He believes that Covid has taught people the necessity of insurance.

Well, Agrawal’s company is one of the fastest growing insurtech companies in the last seven years. It was started in 2017 with a vision of democratising the Indian insurance sector by simplifying the insurance buying, selling, and claim process through a full-stack digital platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As per data, 10 Indians are buying insurance from InsuranceDekho every minute and it has served over 5 million customers since 2017. This in itself is an achievement for a bootstrapped startup with an investment of around $20 million. InsuranceDekho was in the news recently, when it raised $150 million in Series A funding – the largest Insurtech Series A funding in India and South East Asia -- from marquee investors like Goldman Sachs, TVS Capital, and LeapFrog Investments.

The founder has a personal reason to get into the business through its promoter company CarDekho, one of the largest online auto portals in the country.  After completing his graduation from the Department of Financial Studies, University of Delhi, Ankit worked for three years in the US with UBS. After that, he came back to India and worked with Anand Rathi Advisors and MoveInSync, where he held critical portfolios. He then joined CarDekho and started building its used-car loan business. It was during this time that he realised the difficulties of a customer in the insurance sector.

“Once my father got hospitalised. We thought insurance will settle our claims. However, it did not happen and they deducted several things saying all of those items are not covered. At that time, the thought came to insurance,” Agrawal adds. In 2016, he started building the insurance business and initially, it was a vertical of CarDekho. Ankit has set up and exponentially grown the Insurance business at CarDekho with InsuranceDekho, being formed in 2019 as a separate arm of the car-selling unicorn. Interestingly, InsuranceDekho saw a 16-fold increase in business from FY19 to FY22. The company at present has around 1,500 employees.

As part of its strategy to get aggressively into SME business, InsuranceDekho acquired Verak, a Mumbai-based SME insurance distribution company backed by Sequoia and LightSpeed and Gujarat based IRSS, in April this year.

Growth going ahead

“During the last financial year, we did about Rs 2,000 crore in premium and around Rs 600 crore in revenue. We will be a profitable company this year. This year we will be able to clock around Rs 4,000 crore in premium, doubling it from the current level,” Agrawal says. This growth is likely to be driven by a foray into new segments like SME insurance and higher business in new markets that it is aggressively increasing its presence.  

The company is at present having a network of 90,000 agents across the country and is onboarding five new advisors every hour. It offers over 410 insurance products across five categories (Motor, Health, Life, Travel, and Pet) in partnership with 46 insurance companies including the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). One advantage that the company is seeing in its growth ahead is that 83 per cent of its business is coming from tier 2 and beyond regions.

Going forward, it is the lower penetration of insurance in the country that is driving the company. According to estimates, insurance penetration in India is only around 4.2 per cent, compared to 11.4 per cent in the US and Canada, 9 per cent in advanced Asia Pacific, and 8 per cent in advanced Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Rather than seeing his company as a soonicorn, the founder likes to see it as a  cockroach startup. A cockroach startup is the company that moves forward like a cockroach, in spite of changing environments, market conditions and investment scenarios.

“I don’t believe in the concept of soonicorn, unicorn and decacorn. We are Cockroaches. Whether it is a bull run, bear run, or funding winter, it does not matter to us. We know how to do our business,” he adds.