For Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, it all started with getting more people to take up health insurance.

But in the process, their seven-year-old startup, Plum Insurance, seems to be solving another critical issue that makes health insurance a dreaded affair: the claims process.

“The mission has been to positively impact the health and well-being of people that we touch,” Poddar tells Fortune India. The company began by partnering with corporates to expand insurance and healthcare benefits for employees. “We took a path of working with organizations rather than going to people directly. We believe that's the fastest and the most meaningful path to getting to the same mission of healthcare impact.”

Today, Plum counts some 6,000 organisations across India—including CRED, Meesho, PhonePe, Swiggy, Tata CLiQ, Urban Company, WeWork, and Zomato—as its clients, delivering insurance and healthcare benefits to more than 600,000 employees. On March 26, the company announced raising an additional Rs 193 Crore ($20 million) in Series B funding. The round was led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from existing investor Tanglin Venture Partners, which increased its stake, and new investor GMO Venture Partners, a Japan-based global technology investor.

The fundraiser also came after Plum’s first full year of EBITDA and cash flow profitability. “The first product that we started with was getting people insured in all different ways, be it health, life, accident, critical illness, all different kinds of insurance,” Poddar says. “But People buy you because they want to get the best possible experience at the time when they are at the hospital. So, we spent the last 6 years just solving for claims as a problem rather than insurance as a problem.”

A survey by Local Circles, a market research firm, conducted in March this year, found that over 4 in 10 health insurance policy owners who have made a claim in the last 3 years said the insurance company rejected or only partially approved it for invalid reasons. The survey also found that 5 in 10 health insurance policy owners surveyed who filed a claim said it took between 6 and 48 hours for it to be approved and for them to be discharged, even though India’s insurance regulator, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), has been enforcing a smoother claim process.

“If you talk to anyone who has ever gone through a claims experience, 9 in 10 people would say it was not a good experience,” Poddar says. “There is a very small amount of trust.  When we started, the claim processing time was roughly 50 to 60 days. Roughly two months changed to weeks, and now our speed is in the 2 to 3 days kind of a range.”

Since launch, Plum claims to have processed more than 500,000 claims, with the median cashless hospital discharge time reducing to 47 minutes, from 180 minutes in 2019, compared with an industry benchmark of 90 minutes.

Median reimbursement turnaround time for Plum has improved to 1.5 days, from 25 days in 2019, and is now below the industry benchmark of 12 days, Plum says. The company says 78% of claims are now resolved without human intervention, up from 34% in 2022, versus an industry norm of under 20%. Last year, the company also ventured into preventive care, primary care, mental wellness, and tele health, helping employers offer a more holistic healthcare experience to their teams.

“Plum has reimagined employee health insurance by focusing on one of the moments that matters most to users: the claim,” GV Ravishankar, Managing Director, Peak XV, says. “The team has built a fundamentally better product and customer experience, from onboarding and coverage design to claims resolution and preventive care.

Focus on corporate well-being

Plum started out with a clear mandate, to target the corporates.

“We did a lot of research in the field of the global market, and if you look at how countries have evolved over a long period of time, you would see a pattern that any country that is now considered a developed country has a very high penetration of health insurance,” says Poddar. “That kind of penetration is led only by two different mechanisms. One is the corporate-sponsored insurance, and the other is government-sponsored insurance.”

Personal health insurance in India currently accounts for just 10.3 percent of the overall business, according to policy think tank ORF. That’s also why corporate insurance plays a critical role in improving the market. “If you follow the last 20 years of health insurance adoption in India, you will see the steepest growth curve in the corporate insurance,” Poddar says. 

That’s also why Poddar, who had previously worked with McKinsey and Google, and Arora, who had worked with Freshworks, decided to build an insurtech company.  “We could really build an institution out of India and hopefully for a very long period of time, and hence insurance is one of those spaces that is evergreen as a strong tailwind and will still exist 100 years from now, even after all of us,” Poddar says. “We were also looking for a problem statement that actually has a positive impact on the lives of people.”

Since launching services, Plum has been busy using technology to make the entire claims process easier by digitizing documentation, eliminating the back-and-forth of documents, and reducing fraud.  Today, the company generates revenue from two streams. While insurance partners provide a brokerage fee for the corporates, they bring on board, the company has also been creating and selling healthcare products, such as checkups and teleconsultations.

Post the latest fundraise, the company will now be valued at more than $125 million and will use the funds to invest in talent, technology, enterprise-grade security, AI-driven claims operations, and deeper integrations with HR and payroll systems. “The goal is not to stop here. The goal is to bring the days to hours and minutes,” Poddar says. “I think it is now time to have an employee benefits platform for the world coming from India.”