Profitable PolicyBazaar Focuses On Health And Delays IPO

According to a NASSCOM-KPMG report, the Indian FinTech market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22% to be worth $2.4 billion in 2020 and is a hot favorite for VC funding. PolicyBazaar is a recent entrant to the Billion Dollar Unicorn Club, thanks to the $200 million infusion from Softbank.

PolicyBazaar’s Offerings

PolicyBazaar was founded in June 2008 in Gurugram, Haryana by Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal, and Avaneesh Nirjar. It started off initially as an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs and for price comparison. The Indian insurance market at that time was predominantly offline with little transparency. PolicyBazaar benefitted from its early move in the space and went on to become a marketplace for insurance policies.

Today, PolicyBazaar has over 100 million visitors annually and processes about 300,000 transactions per month. The company claims that its website is used to purchase over 20% of life insurance coverage and 7% of retail health coverage in India.

In 2014, the PolicyBazaar group launched an online marketplace called PaisaBazaar that helps consumers compare and choose from a varied range of financial products like loans, credit cards, and investment products.

This year in June 2018, PolicyBazaar expanded into the healthcare business with the launch of DocPrime. DocPrime is a subscription service that will allow consumers to book both online and offline appointments with its panel of doctors and medical consultants as well as book lab tests. DocPrime has tied-up with 14,000 doctors and 5,000 diagnostic labs and aims to expand its network to 1,50,000 doctors and 20,000 labs in over 100 cities.

PolicyBazaar’s Financials

EtechAces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd, which operates PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar, reported consolidated revenue of INR 213 crore ($29 million) for 2016-17. For the first time in the company’s history, it recorded a net profit of INR 12.9 crore ($1.7 million) for 2016-17 compared to net loss of INR 110 crore ($15 million) in 2015-16. For 2017-18, the company has reportedly earned a revenue of INR 350 crore ($47 million). It expects to double its revenue in the current year and increase its revenues to INR 1,500 crore ($200 million) by 2020.

PolicyBazaar makes about 75% of its revenues from insurance products and is profitable. About 20%-25% of PolicyBazaar’s revenue comes from selling health insurance products. PaisaBazaar and DocPrime are expected to be loss-making ventures for a few years.

PolicyBazaar has raised over $346 million in funding so far from investors including InfoEdge India, Intel Capital, Inventus Capital, Tiger Global Management, PremjiInvest, Steadview, ABG Capital, Wellington Management Leads, True North, IDG Venture Partners, and Softbank Vision Fund. Its last funding was in May 2018 when it had raised over $200 million at a valuation of over $1 billion in a round led by Softbank Vision fund.

Following the latest funding round, PolicyBazaar delayed its IPO plans and launched its healthcare business DocPrime. Last year, it was reportedly preparing to go public at the end of 2018 at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The company is overvalued, but if it delivers on the projected revenue without raising further funding, the valuation will get rationalized.

PolicyBazaar competes with Sequoia Capital-backed BankBazaar, Coverfox, Fairfax Financial Holdings-backed Digit Insurance, and Amazon-backed Acko.

I would like to know from the reader how they view online insurance? What is their experience with PolicyBazaar? What are the pain points in online insurance? Has PolicyBazaar been able to address them?

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