GramCover Insurance Brokers Pvt. Ltd, a rural insurance-technology platform, has raised capital in its pre- Series A funding round from new and existing investors.
The funds were raised from EMVC, a US-based boutique strategic venture firm focused on early-stage fintech and insure-tech, and Omidyar Network India, an impact investment firm, GramCover said in a statement. However, it did not disclose the amount it raised.
Flourish, an evergreen early-stage venture firm spun out of Omidyar also pooled in the capital. Existing investor Omnivore also participated in this funding round, it added.
Jatin Singh, the co-founder at GramCover, said that India’s farmers and rural communities are massively under-insured, and the startup is working to design and distribute innovative insurance products to meet their needs.
“Our vision is to cater to 5 million rural consumers in the next two years,” he added.
Singh is the founder of weather forecasting services provider Skymet Weather Services Pvt. Ltd in which Omnivore is also an investor.
Noida-based GramCover is a tech-enabled insurance marketplace for rural India. It is creating an ecosystem for the delivery of insurance products including crop, livestock, health, motor, life, and asset insurance that address the needs of rural India.
VCCircle had reported in 2016 that GramCover had raised seed funding from Omnivore.
Insurance technology startup funding
The most heavily funded company in this space is the online insurance selling platform PolicyBazaar.com. In 2018, it had last raised a whopping $200 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund at $1 billion valuations. Last year in November, Tencent picked up a stake in PolicyBazaar by purchasing part of the stake held by US-based Tiger Global.
Other well funded startup in the space is online insurance aggregator Coverfox. The company mobilised Series C capital in numerous tranches between 2016 and 2018.
In March, Sanjib Jha, a co-founder of growth-stage venture investor Avaana Capital, took over as the interim chief executive of Coverfox.
Jha replaced Premanshu Singh, who quit as Coverfox’s CEO last month, according to Singh’s LinkedIn page.
In another deal in the space, insurance grievance-redressal platform Insurance Samadhan raised a seed funding round from startup incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts earlier in March.
In February, insurance web aggregator Easypolicy, backed by Unilazer Ventures, merged peer company Quickbima with itself.