Digit insurance raises second round of funding

BENGALURU: General insurance startup Digit Insurance has raised Rs 315 crore in a second round of funding from Fairfax Holdings mainly aimed at expanding its footprint across the country to smaller towns and strengthen its tech platform as well. This is Prem Watsa owned Fairfax’s second investment in the company, which put in Rs 350 crore in the first round in 2017.

Fairfax is also the largest shareholder of Digit. Digit Insurance is a subsidiary of GoDigit Infoworks which has raised the funds, while it has channelised Rs 310 crore into Digit Insurance, Rs 5 crore has been invested in the parent company.

Armed with the total funds of Rs 665 crore Digit is aiming to make buying and claiming insurance products simple and completely digitised for Indian consumers. The company has come up with innovative products like jewellery insurance, insurance against flight delays and others.

“We are looking at major expansion opportunities for our product line as well as our locations of operation and staff strength, looking at the growth path we felt the need for this second round of funding,” said Kamesh Goyal who is the chief executive officer and the other major shareholder after Fairfax in the company.

Goyal said that the locations that they are targeting are spread across towns like Siliguri, Ranchi, Patna, Gauhati in the east, Nagpur in Maharashtra, Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir among other places.

“Though our product line is mainly digitised, we have some physical presence in these locations mainly for sales support and relationship management,” he said. “We have 525 people at present and we wish to scale it up by another 200 by September this year.”

The company which claims to settle claims within 10 to 20 minutes over a phone call, is targeting to reduce the time taken to seven minutes. Over mobile, the company is settling around 20 claims per day which they intend to scale up to around 100.

With around 12 partnerships with corporate entities like Flipkart, Amazon, Paytm, Sterling Resorts and 1500 retail agents across India, Digit is already selling around 6000 policies per day.

“Among the policies sold the major chunk in terms of the number is from travel segment, we also have motor insurance policies whose premium amount adds up to become larger than other categories,” said Goyal. “Going ahead we will stress on project insurance with an average tenure between three to five years.”