Plum Raises $15.6 Mn In Series A Funding Led By Tiger Global The platform is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of employee health insurance across India

Group health insurance startup Plum, which aims to provide accessible and affordable health insurance to millions of Indians, announced on Monday to have raised a $15.6 million in Series A funding round led by Tiger Global with participation from earlier investors Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital.

Angel investors in this round include Kunal Shah (founder, Cred), Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh (co-founders, Unacademy), Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain and Ishan Bansal (co-founders, Groww), Ramakant Sharma and Anuj Srivastava (co-founders, Livspace), and Douglas Feirstein (founder, Hired).

Plum has raised $5 million in earlier rounds last year.

"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. We are building Plum to enable a high-quality healthcare experience for every single employee and their family members," said Abhishek Poddar, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Plum.

The funds raised will be used to further scale engineering, business development, and operations teams. The company is building newer insurance products for SMEs who have teams as small as seven employees and cannot afford to pay annual premiums. Plum is additionally looking at building deeper API integrations with leading insurers like ICICI Lombard, Care Health, Star Health, and New India Assurance.

Plum is re-imagining the employee health insurance stack by forging new underwriting and fraud detection algorithms that allow companies with as few as 7 employees to benefit from group insurance. The platform's real-time insurance design and pricing enable companies to buy insurance in just 3 clicks. It also offers employees hassle-free claims experience through an integrated digital process, the platform shared.

"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," added Scott Shleifer, partner, Tiger Global.

Plum is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of health insurance in India by making it accessible, affordable, and usable for employees. With over 600 organizations on-boarded, Plum has been witnessing a growth rate of 110 per cent quarter-on-quarter and leads the industry with a Claims NPS of 79. Plum's client base includes SMEs, corporates, and fast-growing startups in India, including Groww, Unacademy, Twilio, CleverTap, UrbanLadder, smallcase, and Simpl.

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 but are expected to cover more than 500 million Indians by the end of this decade.