Binny Bansal has made an additional investment of $20 million in Acko General Insurance, an insure-tech startup, lifting his total exposure in the company to $45 million. Bansal, the co-promoter of Flipkart and who left it under some unsavoury circumstances after the Walmart takeover, had already made an investment of $25 million in Acko. This is the largest investment by the young entrepreneur in a single entity.
Acko General Insurance is the disrupting force in the car and bike insurance space dealing directly with the customers and offering attractive premiums, far below the traditional players. The company has been promoted by the co-founder of Coverfox — an online insurance aggregator.
Besides these regular policies for car and bike insurance, the company has been able to develop bespoke insurance products for customers like Amazon, Ola and Zomato. For Amazon, the products sold on their platform like mobile phones can be insured. In the case of Ola, it is for the drivers and for Zomato, the food delivery executives and so on.
There are several investors in Acko, apart from Binny Bansal. Amazon, Accel, SAIF Partners, RPS Ventures, and Intact ventures have all made investments in Acko General Insurance. In the current round of fundraising through which Acko wants to mop up around $40-42 million, Ascent Capital, Baring Private Equity Partners India and Ventureast are also expected to participate.
In all, Acko General Insurance has raised around $100 million so far. The fresh investments will all be domestic funds, the company has stated in a filing with the authorities. Under Indian laws, insurance companies cannot have more than 49% equity held by any foreign entity.
As for Binny Bansal, GreyOrange and Mobikon are two ventures which have benefited from investments made by him. While the former is into robotics, the latter runs a data exchange platform.
Binny Bansal is also floating a separate fund to invest in startups. It will be a technology focused fund with a corpus of around $300-400 million and may look at early stage startups for investments. The fund is yet to be functional and the projected schedule is for a March 2020 launch.