PLUM: Group health insurance made fast and simple

(L-R) Co-founders Saurabh Arora and Abhishek Poddar

The world is witnessing new and unexpected diseases every day—Covid-19 is a stark example of this. Treatment of these diseases can wipe out the entire savings of a household. This is leading to increased awareness and penetration of health insurance, but not many Indians can afford it. Most need their employers to sponsor insurance.

However, the current health insurance stack isn’t prepared to serve this market shift of rapid adoption of employee health insurance. When purchasing health insurance for their teams, even the best businesses experience challenges around accessibility, affordability and usability.

Plum, a group health insurance startup, is re-imagining the employee health insurance stack by forging new underwriting and fraud detection algorithms that allow firms with as few as seven employees to benefit from group insurance. Its real-time insurance design and pricing enables firms to buy insurance in just three clicks. It also offers employees a hassle-free claims experience through an integrated digital process.

Plum, founded in late 2019 by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, recently announced it had raised $15.6 million in Series A funding from investors led by Tiger Global with participation from earlier investors—Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital. With over 600 companies on-boarded, it has been witnessing a growth rate of 110{de3fc13d4eb210e6ea91a63b91641ad51ecf4a1f1306988bf846a537e7024eeb} 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.

Poddar, co-founder & CEO, Plum, said, “Plum aims to reach a milestone of 10 million lives insured by 2025, by changing the employee health insurance space. 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, further accelerated by the pandemic. We are building Plum to enable a high quality healthcare experience for every single employee and their family members. ”

India’s group health insurance market, which is nearly 50{de3fc13d4eb210e6ea91a63b91641ad51ecf4a1f1306988bf846a537e7024eeb} of the $3.5 billion health insurance market, has been growing at around 25{de3fc13d4eb210e6ea91a63b91641ad51ecf4a1f1306988bf846a537e7024eeb} annually the last few years, doubling every three years.