PolicyBazaar Raises USD 200 Million in SoftBank Led Funding Round

In a latest fund-raising round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, India’s leading insurtech brand, PolicyBazaar.com has signed for USD 200 million plus. Info Edge, the owner of the job portal Naukri.com, also participated in the funding round. The announcement was made by ETechAces Marketing & Consulting Pvt. Ltd (ETechAces), which owns PolicyBazaar and lending marketplace, PaisaBazaar.com.

Founded in 2008, PolicyBazaar.com and its mobile app help provide all the information a user needs to know before buying a policy. The company also supports users with getting their rightful claims, as well as insurance companies fighting fraud.

“We are very pleased to welcome Softbank Vision Fund on board as our stakeholder. SoftBank’s culture of backing disruptive businesses and industry leaders with long-term capital investment gels well with our own values and vision of creating a transparent and empowering financial products marketplace. We hope to gain a lot from their global footprint and experience,” said Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder & Group CEO, EtechAces.

Recently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) projected that digital influence on insurance purchases will grow to 50% for life insurance and 75% for general insurance by 2020, which translates to nearly INR 1,20,000 crore of new insurance premiums becoming digital by 2020. Quoting this data, PolicyBazaar has said that in their press release that they believe this will enable it to grow at a CAGR of 80%+ over the next three years, which could lead them to achieve 10 million transacting customers by 2020.

Munish Varma, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said, “Over the last decade, PolicyBazaar has become synonymous with online insurance shopping in India. We believe that the Indian insurance market continues to remain massively under-developed and PolicyBazaar, supported by SoftBank’s capital and ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the adoption of insurance products in the country.”

PBee, Big Data, Voice Analytics: Digitization is Pushing Results in Policybazaar

Apart from Softbank, ETechAces boasts of investors, such as Temasek, Tiger Global Management, True North, InfoEdge, Premji Invest, besides investments from other PE funds and family offices.

PolicyBazaar has grown their traffic from 180,000 visitors in 2008 to a 100 million annual visitors with nearly 300,000 sales transactions a month. Currently, PolicyBazaar claims nearly 25% of India’s life cover, and more than 7% of India’s retail health business. Not only do they account for almost half of all internet-based insurance purchases in India, but they are also more than doubling annually.

Policybazaar has been digitizing its processes to provide its customers with a smoother user experience. They have launched a self-inspection video for renewing lapsed motor insurance coverage. They have also introduced Amazon’s Polly for offering Text-to-Speech (TTS) services and a chatbot called PBee based on Google’s Dialogflow platform. Moreover, they are using data analytics and big data to serve customers better.

PaisaBazaar.com, which ETechAces started in 2014, is an online financial marketplace for investment and lending products like loans and credit cards. With more than 300 products on offer, it is currently in collaboration with over 75 partners across lending and investment categories. The company disburses loans worth INR 360 crore in a month to over 450 cities and towns.