Tiger Global-backed Plum rolls out healthcare arm with Rs 200 cr investment, looks beyond insurance broking

He clarified that the insurance broking business, which earns 5–7 percent commissions, remains core to Plum. But healthcare, he said, is a long-term bet to build a parallel revenue engine.

“This is not a product launch. This is us building a completely new business. Healthcare will eventually become a parallel business to insurance. We’re building Plum Health like a startup within a startup.”

The development comes as rival Loop Health sharpens its own preventive care strategy, recently appointing former Oura Ring CEO Harpreet Singh Rai as President of Healthcare, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported. Rai, who called this “India’s UPI moment in healthcare,” will oversee Loop’s diagnostics, telehealth, and clinical stack.

The YC-backed startup, which bundles insurance with unlimited primary care, is also evolving into a full-stack employer-led healthcare platform.

From claims to care

Plum’s expansion comes amid a broader shift in how companies allocate healthcare budgets. Poddar said that while insurance used to account for nearly 100 percent of corporate health spending, employers now direct 10–15 percent to non-insurance services such as diagnostics, OPD, mental health, and preventive care.

“That number was 1 percent a few years back. It’s going to become 30–40 percent of health benefits spending in 3–5 years.”

To address this demand, Plum is rolling out Plum Health Checkups, an at-home preventive screening service with over 200 biomarkers, including Apo A1 and Apo B for cardiac risk detection. The checkups are customised based on age and risk, enabled by API-integrated third-party labs and tracked via Plum’s platform.

AI-powered reports translate complex data into conversational summaries that employees can “chat with,” before booking a follow-up with Plum’s in-house medical team of 100 doctors.

“We’re not doing this as a one-time check-up that happens and nothing happens after that,” Poddar said. “We believe people don’t need just diagnostics. They need health. That means identifying risk early, building a longitudinal view, and taking action.”

The company said its health camps have already screened over 5,000 employees and identified chronic disease risk in 71 percent of them, pointing to an urgent need for proactive care in India's workforce.

Subscription-led model, funded in-house

Plum Health is being run as an independent business unit, led by Prayat Shah, former co-founder of Wellthy Therapeutics. It will have its own P&L, team, and growth roadmap. The model is subscription-based wherein partnered corporates select annual care packages tailored to their employee risk profiles and pay Plum upfront.

“The customer doesn’t just want to buy healthcare. They want you to make sure people use it, that it creates impact, that it builds loyalty. And we’re saying: hold us accountable for all that,” said Poddar.
Unlike insurance, which is commission-limited, healthcare gives Plum control over pricing and bundling.

“It’s slightly better than insurance in terms of margins. And the beauty is, we already have distribution, so the CAC is zero.”

The Rs 200 crore investment is being funded entirely from internal cash reserves and surpluses from Plum’s insurance business.

The company last raised $15 million in its Series A round in 2021, led by Tiger Global and backed by Peak XV’s Surge, Tanglin Venture Partners, Incubate Fund and Gemba Capital. It reported nearly Rs 70 crore in revenue in FY25, with six months of EBITDA profitability.

Plum also recently launched a personal insurance product for salaried individuals, signaling its entry into B2C.

“We now have three business lines—group insurance, personal insurance, and now healthcare. The future is about building around these adjacencies,” Poddar said.

Data insights

Unlike traditional brokers, Plum wants to own the healthcare experience and outcomes end-to-end. It is building a data infrastructure to track employee health risk scores over time, linked to diagnostics, doctor interactions, and preventive plans.

“We are taking a 10-year view,” said Poddar. “Can we build an outcome-based healthcare business? Can we prove that it reduces claims? Can we show that health risks actually go down over time? That’s what we’re tracking.”

In 2024, Plum facilitated over 1 lakh teleconsultations, with 20 percent of mental health-related queries. The company also offers OPD wallets, exclusive wellness discounts, and has tied up with labs across 4,000+ locations to enable home sample collection nationwide.

Despite the growing competition, Poddar believes the market is still nascent.

“We’re not competing with each other as much as we are displacing 100-year-old brokers. Even combined, we still serve less than 2 percent of the market.”

Plum currently works with over 6,000 companies and covers 6 lakh members across India. About 40 percent of its clients are ew age tech firms, with the remaining 60 percent being larger enterprises--both of which it now plans to upsell healthcare services to.