GramCover Insurance Brokers Pvt Ltd, which runs rural insurtech startup GramCover, announced a Series A fundraising of $7 million co-led by Siana Capital, a Bengaluru-based fund that invests in companies during their early to middle stages of growth, and Inflexor Ventures, an early-stage venture capital (VC) fund.
Stride Ventures also participated in this round alongside existing investors Omidyar Network India, Flourish Ventures and Emphasis Ventures (EMVC), GramCover said in a statement.
With this fundraise, the New Delhi-based rural insurtech startup will strengthen the technology and product offerings to significantly scale up the business and support functions.
GramCover will also enhance the availability of various insurance products and services on ‘GramCover Partner’ application and expand its point of sale network, tech, sales & operation teams across multiple geographies, the statement added.
Unitus Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to the company on the transaction.
Dhyanesh Bhatt, co-founder and group CEO at GramCover, stated, “We are excited about our Series A fundraise with seasoned tech-focused investors like Siana Capital and Inflexor. We, at GramCover, will be strengthened by their deeptech domain expertise and their startup experience as we work towards building a growth and profitability-focused rural insuretech organisation.”
The firm had raised an undisclosed sum in a pre-Series A round from EMVC, a US-based boutique strategic venture firm focused on early-stage fintech and insurtech, and Omidyar Network India, an impact investment firm.
GramCover is a tech-enabled insurance marketplace for rural India that has adopted a technology-led distribution and servicing model customised for rural India to minimise the inefficiencies and transaction costs involved in protecting people’s assets and families.
Founded in 2016 by Jatin Singh, GramCover aims to solve the rural insurance challenge with a business model to achieve ‘efficiencies of scale’ aiming to reduce costs and increase penetration in rural areas by leveraging technology and an innovative distribution approach.
"The GramCover team has understood the key nuances of scaling up the non-urban segment of insurance distribution which is a gigantic opportunity in India. With a solid end to end deep-technology platform in conjunction with a human-assisted local agency network, we feel GramCover is well positioned to continue its high growth trajectory..,” said Dinesh Goel, partner at Siana Capital.
Pratip Mazumdar, partner of Inflexor Ventures, said, "Our investment in GramCover stems from Inflexor's conviction in backing technology-led enterprises working towards deepening the insurance penetration, to create a meaningful impact in a large, under-insured market…"
VCCircle had reported in 2016 that GramCover had raised seed funding from Omnivore. The startup began its journey in 2018 insuring around 1000 farmers.
Over 3.2 million Indian farmers have purchased insurance through GramCover since inception till FY21, and the company has customers in 13 states, 50 districts, 450 blocks and 8,000 villages.
In FY21, the company worked with more than 1.7 million rural customers providing insurance across products like crop, motor, livestock and health worth Rs 110 crore in premiums.
The company aims to continue on its growth trajectory and would like to insure more than 10 million farmers in the next two to three years with a premium target of Rs 1,000 crore.
Other firms in the space
Early this year, cloud-based general insurance company Digit Insurance had been valued at $1.9 billion, following an $18.4 million (Rs 135 crore) funding round from returning investors A91 Partners, TVS Capital and Faering Capital.
In March, Invictus Insurance Broking Services, which runs insurtech platform Turtlemint, raised an undisclosed amount from Singapore-based Jungle Ventures as part of a growth funding round.
In the same month, Omidyar Network India, Pune-based Pentathlon Ventures and Delhi-based DMI Sparkle Fund had invested $5 million (around Rs 36.6 crore) in a Series A round of funding in Bengaluru-based Riskcovry.
