Online insurance seller Turtlemint turns to international markets, looks to expand its tech team aggressively

• Turtlemint works as a technology partner with financial institutions in the international markets.
• Therefore, the company has been hiring 50-60 individuals across verticals on a monthly basis.
• It also hopes to onboard a million financial advisors by 2025 who will sell policies on their platform.

Mumbai-based online insurance seller Turtlemint is planning to expand further in international markets, as per the cofounder of the company. The six-year-old startup, which is termed as a soon-to-be unicorn by several reports, launched its operations in UAE earlier this month in association with one of the largest financial players.

A unicorn, in startup parlance, is a company valued at above $1 billion.

Turtlemint is also in talks with banking partners in Southeast Asia and Middle East as a part of its international expansion play.

Turtlemint has both business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) offerings in India. It directly sells insurance policies to customers through its platform under the B2C offerings as well as onboards financial advisors to sell these policies to customers under a business-to-business-to-customer (B2B2C) offering. It has 1.2 Lakh insurance advisors on its platform.

The company also works as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company and rents out its technology to financial institutions to sell insurance online under the B2B offering.

The company will solely focus on the SAAS offering when it comes to international expansion and the revenue from these markets would come from subscriptions of its software

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, cofounder and chief executive of Turtlemint, in an interaction with Business Insider, highlighted that the company is underway to close ₹500 crore revenue run rate for the financial year (FY) 2022. This is double of ₹250 crore reported in FY21.

However, he did not share the contribution of their international markets in revenue growth. “Initially [we are in] an investment timeframe, so I really can't comment on the revenue that will come from international,” he added.

Turtlemint to go big on tech hiring to advance its tech stack

Turtlemint has raised close to $69 million to date from marquee investors like Nexus Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Jungle Ventures and GGV Capital. The company raised $46 million in the first half of 2021.

The company has used this funding to expand its presence in India from 11,000 pin codes to 14,000 pin codes and invested heavily on its technology. Mahyavanshi added that they have hired about 500 employees in their technology team since April 2021 to create a tech architecture that can be deployed in both B2B and B2C offerings.

The company is currently hiring about 50-60 employees on a monthly basis. It is also looking to onboard 10,00,000 financial advisors -- or point of sale persons (POSP) who sell the policies -- on its platform by 2025. The company expects its business to grow ten-fold by 2025. It aims to serve 6 million customers by then.

The company claims that it currently issues 35 lakh policies annually and 10,000 policies daily.

Commenting on the possibility of any upcoming fundraise, Mahyavanshi said “We're adequately funded for now because we had raised [a funding in March 2021] but also our model is very good from an unit economics point of view. But having said that, as we have aggressive plans in other markets and also to scale up significantly in India and at the right time, we will definitely look at setting more funds.”

Insurtech segment bound to grow this decade

Devendra Agrawal, founder of Dexter Capital, noted that the Indian insurtech segment is a very large subsector of fintech and is largely dominated by traditional companies. There is very little
little innovation and user friendliness in the current offering, he added, but as more startups emerge in the segment there would be scope for much greater innovation.

“The newer segments in insurtech are likely to focus on [three things]. First, new product launches, which would also lead to unbundling of insurance and investment a number of risks, which are not underwritten today. Second, we should also expect user friendliness to be a big focus and some start-ups would focus on that. Third, insurance has traditionally been sold directly to consumers through bancassurance or insurance agents, we would find newer channels like get customers on-border via corporates and then upsell them directly,” he said.

Other players in the online insurance play are PolicyBazaar, Digit Insurance, BankBazaar, Coverfox and others. ACKO General Insurance is one of the startups that issues their own insurance policies instead of being a third-party seller.

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