For city-born Ankit Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of InsuranceDekho, a series A funding of $150 million led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and TVS Capital Funds is a major milestone.
Avtaar Ventures and LeapFrog investments had also participated in the equity raise, which was at an estimated soon-to-be unicorn valuation.
The deal is also one of the largest ever Series A round in the Indian insure tech industry. InsuranceDekho was incubated within India’s leading auto-tech and IPO bound Unicorn — the CarDekho group.
The InsuranceDekho brand name is owned by Girnar Insurance Brokers Pvt Ltd, which was incorporated in 2016 and was granted a licence to act as a direct insurance broker by IRDAI in 2017.
“We figured that the majority of the people still prefer to buy insurance from their regular adviser. So, we created a one-stop solution where we empowered agents to sell insurance more productively. As of today, we have 46 insurance companies on our platform and we are present in 98 per cent of pin codes in India,” Agrawal told The Telegraph adding that the startup is looking to expanding its network deeper into its existing markets.
“We need to go beyond the urban regions for more insurance penetration and we are also expanding our reach. We will continue to build on our tech-based solutions and empowered advisers so that they can serve every village and region of India by the end of the year,” he said.
As a CEO, Agrawal said that he spends a significant amount of time interacting with agents on the field and the start-up puts significant effort into training the agents to sell insurance.