Mumbai-headquartered online insurance distribution platform Turtlemint has closed a $25 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital India along with contribution from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.
This startup will use the latest funds to further scale up their digital network across India.
So far, Turtlemint has raised a total of $31 million in funding over three rounds, according to the data by Crunchbase.
Founded in 2015, by Kunal Shah, Anand Prabhudesai and Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, Turtlemint provides recommendations to customers based on proprietary algorithms and data analytics. It caters to about 25,000 licensed insurance experts (PoSP’s), across 700 cities, to help customers select and complete their insurance purchase using their proprietary MintPro app.
“A lot of customers, while depending on online research to learn more about the available policies, ultimately prefer to buy their insurance from an intermediary they can personally interact with. We developed MintPro to bridge this online-offline gap,” said Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, one of the Co-founders of Turtlemint.
“This model has helped Turtlemint to provide insurance for customers and has widened career opportunities for insurance agents across Tier II cities in India,” he said.
Anand Prabhudesai, Co-founder, Turtlemint, said that the app helps PoSP’s sell multiple insurance policies from different companies to their clients — ranging from life to health to motor insurance — through a simple online process that requires no paperwork. “It’s all done on their smartphones,” he said.
Commenting on the funding, Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said: “Turtlemint has pioneered a new model that is not only bringing new agents into the insurance domain but is also helping them become more productive and effective with their customers by making them digitally savvy. Sequoia India is excited to partner with them from the early stages — the company is growing at a very fast clip and is well on its way to transforming insurance distribution in the country.”
Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, said that the digitization of the insurance value-chain is a huge opportunity and benefits all the participants — customers by providing access to the right products, agents through significant business growth and productivity and insurers through improved transparency. “We have been impressed by Dhirendra’s and Anand’s vision and execution of transforming the insurance ecosystem by working in close collaboration with agents and insurers; and are privileged to have partnered with them from the concept stage,” he said.
Turtlemint competes with MintWise, Coverfox Insurance, and BankBazaar.com. However, other players such as PayTM amd flipkart are also entering online insurance market.
Paytm, which began operations in 2010 as a digital wallet service, has now diversified into financial services, and is looking strongly to cash in on insurance premiums. In February 2017, Paytm registered two insurance entities, Paytm Life Insurance Ltd and Paytm General Insurance Ltd with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
In May last year, Acko Technologies, an Insur-tech startup based out of Mumbai, had raised $12 million in a funding round led by Amazon Inc.
In the same month, Gurgaon-based digital-only insurance platform Toffee Insurance had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Kalaari Capital, Omidyar Network and Accion Venture Lab.
Source – Business Line
