Insurer Acko raises $65 mn in round led by Bansal, others
MUMBAI: Online insurer Acko General Insurance Ltd on Tuesday said it has raised $65 million in a round led by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and a fund led by former Softbank managing partner Kabir Misra. Apart from Bansal and Misra, the other new investor was Intact Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurer Intact Insurance.
Existing investors Amazon, Accel Partners, SAIF Partners and Techpro Ventures, the family office of Hexaware founder Atul Nishar, also participated in the series C round.
The deal also marked RPS Ventures’ second investment, after it backed social commerce platform Meesho in November last year.
Avendus Capital was the banker to the deal.
Acko, founded by Varun Dua, plans to invest the funds in technology and analytics, besides advertising and branding. In 2017, the company had raised $30 million seed from Accel Partners, SAIF Partners, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.
In May 2018, it raised another $12 million in a round led by Amazon India and Ashish Dhawan, founder of homegrown private equity fund Chryscapital.
It employs about 50 people on the technology side, which it wants to grow by three- to fourfold in the next 18 months, Dua said over the phone.
Acko has insured about 200,000 vehicles since 2017 and reached out to 20 million customers through bite-size offerings, Dua said.
It refers to tie-ups with companies such as Ola and Amazon to insure rides or packages as bite-sized insurance. Acko also plans to launch new products such as health and travel insurance towards the end of 2019.
Dua said India’s non-life insurance market is worth about $25 billion, and is growing at 15-20% compounded annually.