Unilazer boosts stake in Indian insurance aggregator EasyPolicy
Online insurance policy aggregator EasyPolicy has secured INR210m ($3.25m) in funds from existing investor Unilazer Ventures, owned by entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala. The latest cash injection takes Unilazer's stake in EasyPolicy to 55%, but the firm's operations will continue to be carried out by its founders. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India recently released a series of guidelines aimed at online insurance aggregators.

EasyPolicy which is an online platform used for insurance policy aggregating has seen yet another investment from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures. In a round of funding that happened in November last year, EasyPolicy raised somewhere between $8-10 million and was used to enhance its distribution system in tier II and III cities as well as the range of products it offers.

EasyPolicy was founded in 2011 by Alok Bhatnagar, a former executive from Thomson Reuters, Neeraj Aggarwala, and Divyanshu Tripathi, founding member of PolicyBazaar.

Even before the funding round in November, the insurance aggregator secured Rs. 15 crore from Unilazer Ventures itself in January, 2016 when the latter invested in it for the first time. In that round, Unilazer secured about 20% stake in the company.

Now almost a year later, Screwvala’s firm has increased its stake in the company to a whopping 55%, making it the company’s largest investor. It invested about 21 crore rupees this time. In spite of this large stake, major operations in the company will still be carried out by the founders of EasyPolicy and not taken over by Unilazer.

On this development, Screwvala commented saying,

The entire insurance sector is pushing to massively increase penetration and make insurance affordable and we want to be part of that ecosystem and initiative In the startup ecosystem, you often have to create markets. Here, the market already existed, but you need to channelise it because the growth potential is maximum

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) also released a number of regulations and guidelines recently which provide online insurance aggregators in the country with structure and details for their different activities.

The functions that companies such as EasyPolicy and PolicyBazaar are allowed to carry out include renewal of health and automobile general insurance by reaching out to the general population that is interested in these products. These companies generally earn on the basis of commissions from these transactions.

Unilazer has stopped expanding and investing in newer initiatives and has decided to focus on its existing ventures including EasyPolicy and UpGrad, an online education company it seeded a few years ago, in 2015.