Avendus Advises Acko on Its Series C Funding of USD 65 mn

Founded by Varun Dua in 2016, Acko is India’s first digital-native general insurance company. The company offers an intuitive purchase experience, cheaper prices and stress-free claims. Acko addresses insurance needs across multiple touchpoints in daily lives of the ‘digitally-savvy’ consumers with its customer centric product design, instance-based products, customized real-time pricing, and instant claim verification and settlement.

Indian general insurance is a huge underserved market that is ripe for disruption. General insurers today face structural challenges such as information asymmetry, intermediary dependent distribution, branch-led geographic expansion and physically-intensive operations. 

Acko’s differentiated go-to-market has inherent advantages over traditional models. The company uses a direct-to-consumer approach for distributing motor and health products, allowing for favourable risk selection  and superior underwriting. Acko also offers innovative and bite-sized insurance products such as rider  insurance, mobile and appliance protection, ticket cancellation, etc. in partnership with 15+ leading players in the internet ecosystem such as Ola, Amazon, redBus, Zomato and UrbanClap. In a short span of 12 months of its operations, the company has distributed insurance policies to over 15 million unique customers.

With this latest round of Series C funding, Acko’s total fundraise stands at USD 107 million. Previously, Acko raised USD 30 million in seed funding, one of the largest seed rounds for the Indian start-up ecosystem and later raised Series B funding of USD 12 million led by Amazon.

The company is backed by Amazon, Accel, SAIF, Narayan Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, Swiss Re, Transamerica Ventures, Kris Gopalakrishnan – Co-founder of Infosys, Atul Nishar – Founder & Chairman of Hexaware Technologies, Hemendra Kothari of DSP Blackrock, Rajeev Gupta – Founder of Arpwood Capital, Subba Rao of NuVentures and Venk Krishnan.

Recently, Acko was featured in Business Today Coolest Startups list and LinkedIn’s Top 25 Startups in India list. It has also been ranked No. 2 in Insurance POST’s Top 100 Global Insurtech firms 2018, after Zhong An of China and ahead of US-based Oscar, both of which are unicorns.