Turtlemint, a technology platform in the insurance distribution space, has closed a $25 million funding round led by Sequoia India, with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.

This Mumbai-based three year-old startup will use the funds to further scale up their digital network across India.

Turtlemint provides recommendations to customers based on proprietary algorithms and data analytics. It caters to nearly 25,000 licensed insurance experts (PoSP’s), across 700 cities, to help customers select and complete their insurance purchase using their proprietary MintPro app.

“A lot of customers, while depending on online research to learn more about the available policies, ultimately prefer to buy their insurance from an intermediary they can personally interact with. We developed MintPro to bridge this online-offline gap,” Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, Co-founder, Turtlemint, said.

This model has helped Turtlemint to provide insurance for customers and has widened career opportunities for insurance agents across Tier II cities in India.

Anand Prabhudesai, Co-founder, Turtlemint, said that the app helps PoSP’s sell multiple insurance policies from different companies to their clients — ranging from life to health to motor insurance — through a simple online process that requires no paperwork. “It’s all done on their smartphones,” he said.

Commenting on the funding, Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said: “Turtlemint has pioneered a new model that is not only bringing new agents into the insurance domain but is also helping them become more productive and effective with their customers by making them digitally savvy. Sequoia India is excited to partner with them from the early stages — the company is growing at a very fast clip and is well on its way to transforming insurance distribution in the country.”

Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, said that the digitisation of the insurance valuechain is a huge opportunity and benefits all the participants — customers by providing access to the right products, agents through significant business growth and productivity and insurers through improved transparency. “We have been impressed by Dhirendra’s and Anand’s vision and execution of transforming the insurance ecosystem by working in close collaboration with agents and insurers; and are privileged to have partnered with them from the concept stage,” he said.

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