Plum raises USD 15.6 mn in funding led by Tiger Global

The series A round also saw participation from earlier investors – Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital, a statement said. 

Angel investors Kunal Shah (founder, 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. 

Plum had raised USD 5 million in earlier rounds last year. 

The funds raised will be used to further scale engineering, business development and operations teams, the statement said. 

With over 600 organisations onboarded, Plum has been witnessing a growth rate of 110 per cent quarter-on-quarter, the statement said. Its client base includes small and medium enterprises, corporates and fast-growing startups in India, including Groww, Unacademy, Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder, smallcase and Simpl. 

Plum said it is building newer insurance products for SMEs who have teams as small as seven employees and cannot afford to pay annual premiums. 

The company is also looking at building deeper API integrations with insurers like ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health and New India Assurance. 

''Plum aims to reach a milestone of 10mn 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,'' Plum co-founder and CEO Abhishek Poddar said. 

Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global, said 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,” he added. 

Plum said the group health insurance market in India, which is almost 50 per cent of the total USD 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, but are expected to cover more than 500 million Indians by the end of this decade, it added.