Digital gold micro-savings platform Jar plans to enter the health and general insurance segment by the end of the year 2025, as it looks to offer complete financial services to its users.
“It is a natural progression for us … Gold will be the centre pillar for a lot of middle-class families. Insurance will be the next progression for us, so Jar will be the platform for all the financial needs in all forms and factors,” co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Nishchay AG told Moneycontrol.
Jar is in talks with a couple of partners to be a distribution player for general and health insurance products, Nishchay added.
“Insurance penetration is still (in) very early days and there is a lot of market opportunity… To start with, we need to look at what is the simplest form of insurance and we will launch more products in a phase-wise manner,” he said.
The Jar app was founded in 2021 by Nishchay and Misbah Ashraf and is built on the idea of helping Indians make investing a habit.
As of May, the startup clocked Rs 100 crore in annual recurring revenue with 20 million total users, Nishchay said. It is adding 0.5 million new users a month.
“We are continuing to grow at a very healthy pace, we are doing really well from where we started. Most of our revenue comes from old users and adding more new users now for the past seven-eight months,” Nishchay said.
The firm recently entered the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending business through Jar Plus in partnership with the non-banking financial company (NBFC) LenDenClub.
Also Read: Tiger Global-backed fintech Jar to enter P2P lending business with Jar Plus
P2P lending is a system connecting borrowers and lenders directly. Platforms like Jar help NBFCs source customers. The NBFCs then evaluate the borrowers and obtain consent from lenders to disburse a loan. This is considered a high-return alternate investment mechanism.
In February 2022, the startup bagged $32 million in Series A funding led by US investment firm Tiger Global. The app, which can look at the transaction history, rounds up an individual’s daily spending and puts some money aside as an investment.
Also Read: Tiger Global-backed savings startup Jar to foray into the digital lending business
Jar has been diversifying its revenue streams through different products. It recently entered the digital lending business to accelerate its monetisation efforts after generating just about Rs 8.7 crore in operating revenue in FY23, its first full fiscal year. The firm reported a net loss of Rs 122 crore.
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