Plum is an employee insurance provider on a mission to make group health insurance more seamless and affordable for India’s small businesses and middle class. The platform also provides guided support, making it easy to apply for and access insurance claims.
Currently, India has one of the lowest penetration rates for health insurance. Only 18% of people in urban areas and 14% in rural areas are covered under health insurance of some kind. A big reason for this is the lack of employer-driven insurance. Purchasing and setting up group health insurance plans is a tedious, opaque and costly process that can take months. To make insurance affordable and accessible, Plum has negotiated and built a new level of underwriting and fraud detection rails with a wide range of insurance companies. This has allowed the startup to offer insurance pricing of up to 80% less than what is currently offered in the market, to even the smallest organisations.
With a focus on providing a seamless customer experience, Plum’s platform provides companies with a dashboard that they can use to easily manage employees’ insurance. Employees can also access an app with 24-hour support that they can use for queries and concerns, as well as initiate claims.
Because of Plum’s affordability and ease-of-use, the startup has already added hundreds of companies to its customer base since its product launched in March 2020 – among them, startups like Happay, ClassPlus and Fyle, as well as large organisations like Twilio, Livongo, and Sunidhi Group.
Plum was founded by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora in Bengaluru, India in November 2019. Before Plum, Abhishek co-founded RentZeal and led the product team at HyperTrack. He also worked at Google and McKinsey, and is a Stanford University and IIT Kanpur graduate. Saurabh founded Airwoot, an AI-based customer service company that was acquired by Freshworks. After the acquisition, he led engineering and product teams at FreshWorks.
*Angel investor: Ramakant Sharma