Insuretech platform Turtlemint raises USD 30 million
To boost insurance & financial product penetration at the grassroots
Mumbai, 17 November, 2020: India’s leading insuretech platform Turtlemint, has secured USD 30 million (INR 225 Cr), in a round led by GGV Capital. New investors American Family Ventures, Mass Mutual Ventures and SIG Ventures, along with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Blume Ventures, and Trifecta Capital also participated in the round.
Insurance has primarily been an offline product in India, wholly reliant on paper-based and offline processes, with more than 90% of the products sold by advisors who act as conduits between insurance companies and customers. These advisors play a critical role in bridging the gap in tier 2/3 towns and cities, where low physical presence of insurance companies greatly impacts seamless access to insurance products and information.
Equipping advisors with digital tools that can help them tackle an otherwise cumbersome offline process, efficiently and at scale, is crucial to improving insurance penetration in India. Launched in 2015 with this mission, Turtlemint is a deep tech platform that helps advisors educate customers and recommend products that are best suited to meet their unique requirements, enabling them to purchase insurance seamlessly.
The company does this by providing a wide variety of product offerings and a customized recommendation tool through a simple mobile app that empowers advisors to be truly digital and future-ready. In addition, the platform allows for instant online issuance, making the purchase process across 40+ insurers transparent and paperless, while reducing the average turnaround time to less than 10 minutes versus prevalent industry average of 48+hours.
Commenting on the development, Turtlemint Co-Founder, Dhirendra Mahyavanshi said, “For over five years, Turtlemint through its PoSP (Point of Sales Person) model has been empowering insurance advisors in 5000+ metros, cities, and towns across India. Aside from ease of doing business, sales growth is crucial for an advisor. The Turtlemint platform enables this through tools like a mobile CRM to manage customers, a repository of video content that they can use for customer education, and social media marketing features for driving insurance awareness. Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, consumer awareness and demand for health and term-life insurance has shot up. In this time, we saw our advisors wholeheartedly embrace our digital solutions, resulting in a 2.5x** boost to their business.”
With insurance penetration at just under 3.5%, among the lowest in the world, there is a huge need and opportunity for the insurance sector to grow fast in India. This requires the creation of skilled manpower in every part of the country; experts who are trusted, have the right local context and can guide customers correctly in their local languages.
Anand Prabhudesai, Co-Founder, Turtlemint, shares, “Continuous education is a very important aspect of being a successful financial entrepreneur. To this end, we have created an online education product with a wide range of courses on financial products, advice-based sales techniques and other soft skills. Our content is now available in 7 regional languages and 20,000+ learners are active each month on our edtech platform. A lot of these are first-time advisors who are taking their first steps towards starting their advisory business. Our target is to create a million successful financial entrepreneurs over the next 3–5 years. We are thankful to our investors who have joined with us in this journey and encouraged us to dream big.”
The Turtlemint platform currently partners with 40+ insurers, and serves more than 1.5 million customers from quote to claims. The funds raised will be utilized to bolster the product/platform by investing in cutting-edge technology solutions, significantly scale geographic penetration in tier 2/3 towns and upskill advisors and customers through training and content.
Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners added, “Turtlemint is demonstrating the non-linear impact of a technology and product led approach in the insurance ecosystem to provide significant value-add to consumers, advisor partners and insurance companies. We have been privileged to partner with Dhirendra and Anand from the concept stage to their emergence as market leading platform.”
**2.5x boost: For advisors conducting business digitally as against advisors issuing via offline mode (internal study)
About Turtlemint: Turtlemint.com was started in April 2015. Founded by IIT-B & IIM-C alumni, with a combined work experience of more than 30 years in insurance and technology companies. Today, the platform has a PoSP network of over 100,000 that cater to more than 1.5 million customers. It has also fostered partnerships with an overwhelming majority of Indian insurance providers. Headquartered in Mumbai the company offers insurance advisory solutions through the mobile platform and has a Pan India presence in more 5000+ metros, cities, and towns.
For details please visit https://www.turtlemint.com.
Twitter : https://twitter.com/helloturtlemint
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/turtlemint/
