In India, health insurance penetration is one of the lowest if we compare it with other countries. Only 18% of people from the urban area have joined some health insurance scheme, whereas 14%rural people showed interest in health insurance. But Indians spend a lot on health-related issues. 2% of this total spending comes from health insurance.
Plum, a health insurance provider, wants to reduce this big gap between health instance schemes and the Indians. The company believes that Indian needs innovative health insurance products to attract customers. Indian Government has also initiated the Ayushman Bharat scheme to provide health cover to 40% of poor people. What about the remaining 60%? They can buy individually or their employer will help them in getting health insurance.
In developed countries, health insurance is either provided by the government or employers. For India, it will take the next 10-20 years to have health insurance coverage for all. Organizations like Plum, PolicyBazar, Digit are trying to bring positive change in the health insurance sector.
How Plum is Bringing the Positive Change in Group Health Insurance Market?
Plum provides health insurance cover to the companies for their employees in the group. Earlier there was a tedious process to avail the employee insurance. If you have fewer employees, it becomes more difficult to get health insurance for staff. The group health insurance market has shown a 25% year-over-year growth.
When Plum started meeting organizations for group health insurance, they found that organizations dropped the insurance idea in between after finding the process complicated.
Plum brought some exceptional changes in this field. It considered 6-8 employees company also to provide group health insurance. Earlier health insurance providers used to ignore such companies due to limited staff.
Plum also addressed the issue of high fluctuations in the health insurance prices within the same demography. Why companies should wait for month end to add new employee cover? Why can’t we provide real-time pricing to the organizations? Why they should wait for few weeks for the final quotation? Plum is trying to address all these issues practically.
Plum is building a modern health insurance environment that will make corporates life easier. Flexibility, transparent offerings, and a better user experience are the main objectives of Plum while providing the group health insurance. The company is taking the help of the latest technology to bring a user-friendly environment. The company’s policy to eliminate the agents and brokers will bring a positive change in the health insurance field.
Plum, Founded in 2019 by Saurabh Arora and Abhishek Poddar, released its beta product in March 2020. It became an instant hit. Since the beta release, the company has 100+ employers as the client. These employers are a combination of startup and multinational companies. These companies joined Plum to get affordable great product experience for their teams.
Future of Group Health Insurance and Plum Funding Details
Plum raised a total of Rs 7 crore in the seed funding round. Incubate Fund, a Japan-based Seed Investor, led this funding round with other investors like Gemba Capital, Tracxn Labs, Praxify Health founders Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam.
With the seed funding round money, the company wants to establish a technical team to solve insurance tech issues. It also plans to increase distributive channels for easy access to the customers.
In a recent funding round in November 2020, the company raised a total of Rs 30 crore. This funding round was led by Sequoia Capital’s Surge Ventures who invested Rs 16.65 crore. Tangline Ventures contributed 11.8 crores in this funding round. After this funding round, the Plum market cap stands at Rs 140 crore.
The group health insurance industry will be worth Rs 100,000 crore by 2025. Plum wants to help every small or big company to provide the best health insurance cover to all employees. The company wants to provide health services in such a way that it will be a defacto firm for group health insurance.
Currently, group health insurance has a 50% health insurance market share in India. It’s doubling after every 3 years. In the future, Plum will play a key role in facilitating the group health insurance.
