Insurtech startup InsuranceDekho acquires Lightspeed-backed Verak

Ankit Agrawal, co-founder and CEO, InsuranceDekho

InsuranceDekho’s founder and CEO Ankit Agrawal announced that the insurtech startup has acquired Verak, a Mumbai-based SME insurance distribution startup. This comes less than two months after InsuranceDekho raised $150 million in a Series A round.

Agrawal took to LinkedIn to share the development. “Since its inception, Verak has had a solid foundation and ventured into the untapped micro-business insurance scheme, bringing small shopkeepers under the insurance umbrella for the first time and registering 30 percent MoM premium growth every month,” he wrote.

Agrawal added, “With this acquisition, InsuranceDekho will have a stronger foothold in this rapidly growing market and a stronger presence in the SME insurance vertical and micro-business insurance schemes.”

With this acquisition, Agrawal plans to explore ways to expand business operations and provide a wide range of services to customers to improve their life even further.

Less than a year-old, Verak is its founder and CEO Rahul Mathur’s second venture after he decided to shut down his insurtech startup BimaPe, which was a part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 cohort. BimaPe had raised $545,000 until then in its pre-seed round led by Lightspeed India, Titian Capital, iSeed and Gemba Capital among others.

Mathur took to Twitter in September 2021 to announce the rebranding and shutting down of his previous platform BimaPe.

Speaking of Mathur, Agrawal said, “Rahul holds a strong pedigree in the insurance sector, carrying work experience in the Indian and Global landscape. Both Ish (Ish Babbar, co-founder & CTO of InsuranceDekho) and I are convinced of the sheet of passion he brings to the table.”

Founded in 2016 by Agrawal and Babbar, InsuranceDekho is the insurance arm of the car-selling unicorn CarDekho.

In February this year, InsuranceDekho raised about $150 million in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and TVS Capital Funds. According to media reports, post this round, the startup was pegged at about $450-500 million in valuation.

Speaking to Moneycontrol earlier, Agrawal had said, "With this funding, we want to build for Bharat and take our distribution to another 300-400 cities, continue building our tech stack and products, work on branding, and look at a couple of mergers and acquisitions opportunities that we have identified across technology and geography expansion capabilities.”