Bimaplan, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech start-up, has raised $3.5 million in a pre-series A funding round led by Orios Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from Finsight Ventures and 2am VC. This takes the total funding raised by the start-up to $6 million.

India’s insurance penetration is just around 4 per cent of its GDP, which is far behind the global average of 7 per cent. A large part of the country’s adult population, nearly 400 million people, does not have access to any kind of insurance, despite the sector growing at a staggering 17 per cent CAGR over the last two decades. 

Bimaplan seeks to address this protection gap and help provide financial security to this underserved segment of the missing middle of the population. The three-year-old start-up helps insurance companies create affordable products and acquire low- and middle-income groups of customers through its embedded insurance platform.      

It onboards organisations serving rural and semi-urban customers as channel partners and enables them to sell insurance products through its embedded platform. The start-up claims to have served over a million customers in the last two years since it began operations. 

Bimaplan has a 50-member team based in Bengaluru and Mumbai, and plans to hire across product, technology, and sales to strengthen the organization. It has set the goal of insuring 10 million lives in the next three years.

The insurtech start-up will use the funds to enhance the features and scalability of its technology platform and launch new products to cater to the needs of its customers. It also plans to strengthen its distribution network by expanding existing channels and launching new verticals to reach more people.       

Vikul Goyal, founder and CEO, Bimaplan said, “The missing middle is not a homogenous demographic. To reach the end customer, we need innovative channels not available through traditional insurance distributors. The latent demand for insurance is growing, given a large young workforce and an expanding middle class. With this new funding, we endeavor to build a sustainable and profitable distribution network, removing the inefficiencies across the value chain with our strong technology suite.” 

Sukhmani Bedi, partner at Orios Venture Partners added that building insurance products for the semi urban population belonging to tier 2 towns and above has proved to be challenging with online channels accounting for just 2 per cent of the premiums collected. “With their understanding of the sector and product first thinking, Bimaplan seems to have cracked the code for building insurance products for Bharat. We can not think of a better team to build an insurance solution for the 400 million uninsured in India,” he added.

The Indian insurance market is projected to continue to grow steadily at 15 per cent year-on-year over the next decade driven by increased awareness, technology adoption and regulatory tailwinds. The insurance regulator IRDAI has laid its vision of Insuring India by 2047 and has undertaken multiple initiatives to increase insurance penetration.