Accel & SAIF-backed Coverfox is making deft moves at keeping its platform digital-ready for the Millennial generation. It’s success strategies? Simplicity of product and platform which result in speedy navigation & transactions, and a paced foray into commercial car insurance for the Ubers & Olas of India.
Can an insurance policy be issued online just as hotel and flight tickets are on MakeMyTrip and similar such websites? This was the premise on which Varun Dua and Devendra Rane built their maiden venture, Coverfox. The company, today, is positioned as an online insurance portal housing 200 employees, 28 car, bike, home, health and travel insurance companies (of the 30 in these categories across India), and recording a turnover of Rs. 100 crore in 2016 (calendar year) on its premium insurance segment alone.
While these numbers seem promising, a chat at length with its co-founder, Dua reveals that the journey was anything but smooth, what with the business being built in a highly regulated industry.
A media & advertising graduate from MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmadabad), Dua made an entry into the insurance industry by chance. “This was around 2001, when private players were just beginning to make a foray into India’s insurance industry and I had prepared a dissertation about how this move will impact the industry,” he recalls. The project got picked up by TATA AIG and soon enough he landed a plump job in its marketing division. Thereon, for the next five years, Dua moved from AIG to Franklin Templeton Investments, absorbing along the way valuable information about product innovation and early adoption and evolution of technology in the financial services and insurance industry. “In fact, this laid the foundation for me to learn nuances of this industry from ground-up; that too, at a time when it was witnessing drastic changes,” he adds.
This story is from the October 2016 edition of The SmartCEO.
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This story is from the October 2016 edition of The SmartCEO.
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