Symbo - Providing Tech-Enabled Embedded Insurance Services for Businesses

Preeti Karna

May 27, 2022 — 10 min read

Symbo Success Story

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Symbo.

India is the second-largest insurance technology market in Asia-Pacific. Through technology, the insurance industry is revolutionized to a great extent. Indian customers are inclined toward tech-enabled services as it makes the process easier and more accessible. With the main insurance sectors being life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, and commercial insurance, insurance companies are innovating their services. Symbo is an insurtech startup that provides insurance covers for different businesses. Their newly launched insurance services are eyewear insurance, footwear insurance, and even fitness insurance.

Read the success story of Symbo, its founders, business model, insurance services, funding, and their marketing strategy.

Symbo - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Symbo
Headquarters	Mumbai
Industry	Insurtech
Founder	Anik Jain, Mitesh Jain, and Adrit Raha
Founded	2017
Total Funding Raised	$9.4 Million
Website	symbo.co

Symbo - About
Symbo - Industry
Symbo - Founders and Team
Symbo - The Idea and Startup Story
Symbo - Services
Symbo - Business Model and Revenue Model
Symbo - Customer Acquisition
Symbo - Challenges Faced
Symbo - Marketing Strategy
Symbo - Growth
Symbo - Funding
Symbo - Advisors and Mentors
Symbo - Acquisitions
Symbo - Competitors
Symbo - Tools Used in the Company
Symbo - Recognition and Achievements
Symbo - Future Plans

Anik Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Symbo

Symbo - About

Symbo is a leading embedded insurtech platform that enables any business to offer customized insurance and protection plans to their customers, right at the point of purchase. Its vision and mission are to be the world’s largest embedded insurance distribution platform providing best-in-class claims, consulting, and buying experiences to its customers and partners.

Insurance has always been a product that has been “sold” and not bought by the customer. However, they strongly believe that if you offer relevant coverage to the user in a contextual setting, the adoption of insurance will increase. They want to be the company that offers these innovative and relevant insurance products, with a very seamless and frictionless buying experience.

The core belief of the team is that insurance penetration can increase in a market like India if customers can experience the benefits of insurance at a smaller ticket size. An embedded distribution model can take this approach to masses.

Symbo - Industry

The global InsurTech market size is valued at $9.4bn as of 2020. India is the second-largest insurance technology market in Asia-Pacific and including Symbo, India has at least 66 insurtech companies accounting for 35% of the $3.66 billion in insurtech-focused venture capital invested in the APAC region.

According to a recent survey of 500+ bank customers in India from SurveyMonkey, 91% of Indian digital bank customers would be highly interested in receiving embedded insurance offers based on their transaction data, as would 95% of traditional bank customers. 'Convenience' is the primary driver for their interest, stated by 63%. This stands as a testimony that Indian customers are welcoming embedded insurance and the industry has a major shift toward the tech side of it while making the process of Insurance even easier and more accessible to all. It will not be long before all insurance companies will start going digital and get into the Insurtech space that Symbo is in today. While the space and services will go digital, they will also evolve drastically in their technology capabilities that will be used even 5 years from now. It is safe to say that there might be a time when Insurance of any kind will be available online and the customers will not have to worry about filling out cumbersome paperwork for the same. The next couple of years is going to be very intriguing to look forward to and see how fast this digitally driven world will change the insurance space in the best way possible.

Symbo - Founders and Team

Anik Jain, Mitesh Jain, and Adrit Raha are the founders of Symbo.

Anik Jain

He is the CEO & Co-founder of Symbo. He has 17 + years of experience working in various fields. He also has experience in leading business units at various levels like start-ups, changes management in a mature organization. He also tends to specialize in the areas of strategy, change management, P&L responsibility, insurance, team management, channel management, business development B2B, broking and sales.

Mitesh Jain

He is a CTO & Co-founder and is an Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in Technology Consulting and product management. He is also an Entrepreneur with experience in incubating business initiatives, evangelizing stakeholders, influencing industry thinking, and launching and scaling up products to deliver strong business impact. He also has Strong experience in solving large-scale problems in a complex regulatory environment through deep product thinking and focus on impact.

Adrit Raha

As a Co-Founder & Co-CEO, he has shared responsibility for overseeing all aspects of the business - from the company’s mission, vision and goals to setting strategy, and direction, and, most significantly, managing my super talented troupe. He is of the strong belief that technology, platforms and protection (be it health or insurance) have, is, and will always continue to evolve, and it so happens that tech innovation is the current now. Hence - Symbo

Symbo has 100+ employees giving out their best services

Symbo - The Idea and Startup Story

Symbo was founded in 2017 with a focus on context-based, need-focused insurance that aims to help customers buy insurance covers based on their personalized needs. During the initial years, they tried to solve the problem of insurance distribution via multiple mechanisms because their vision was always to make insurance accessible to the masses. At one point they had an agent network of 1000s of agents who were using Symbo’s technology platform to distribute insurance.

One such mechanism they experimented with was embedded insurance. They worked closely with an initial set of partners to understand what kind of risks and issues their customers are facing and they co-created unique insurance products for them.

Some of the categories they launched were eyewear insurance, footwear insurance, and even fitness insurance. The customer response to these products was extremely encouraging prompting them to double down on the embedded distribution.

As of today, Symbo has over 30+ insurance partners and over 30 insurance products which are being distributed via partners.

Symbo - Services

Symbo works with partners across e-commerce, retail, fintech, and other categories. By integrating Symbo’s powerful Covergateway API, a business can instantly start offering insurance products to their customers, right at the point of purchase.

The API issues policies in real-time and Symbo has deep integrations with leading insurers in India. The entire buying journey for the users is very seamless, they can choose to purchase the coverage for the product they are buying with a simple opt-in. The claims are also handled in a digital-first way. Customers need to just upload their policy details and photographs and within 48 hours, Symbo’s claim specialists review the claims.

Their USP is that they give customized embedded insurance to the customers according to their needs, and providing API to other businesses not only benefits their customers but the online sellers as well. With a simple opt-in in the purchase journey, consumers can insure the product they are buying against common issues like accidental damage, theft, etc which standard warranties might not cover. The insurance coverage is powered by leading insurers in India and some of their largest partners include Lenskart, Bata, and Decathlon, among others.

While Symbo’s core vision was always to make insurance accessible by innovative distribution methods, Symbo pivoted from an agent-first business model (POSP) to an embedded distribution platform in the last year. The Symbo is a part of Symbo Platforms Pte, which also runs an Enterprise SAAS platform for insurance companies to manage their distribution.

Symbo - Business Model and Revenue Model

Being a platform business, Symbo’s business model is to enable distribution along with its partners and monetize by having a share in every transaction.

SAAS Platform

Insurance companies buy their product to enable capabilities for themselves to have a fleet of insurance agents at their fingertips who are accompanied by a dashboard. This product acts as a centralized tool with tons of features to make the insurance journey better for agents, buyers, and companies. As an InsurTech company, all Symbo wants to do is make insurance better by implementing automation in the tool. This entire stack has all the capabilities and features that companies would want for example monthly subscription, data, analytics, reports, super-admin, 5-level user roles, agent onboarding, and state-of-the-art UI. They have crossed $1M in this line of business.

Embedded

This is the heart and soul of Symbo. In this model, they sell $1.5 per policy (which is their average order value) contributing to their overall GWP. Part of this is sent to the Insurer to the onboard partner and they take a certain revenue share out of this as Monthly Recurring Revenue. Currently, they have 10 partners onboarded with them with around 150k policies solder per month.

Symbo - Customer Acquisition

In the early days of Symbo’s embedded business, they used to spend time at the store understanding customers’ buying behaviour. They worked with the brands to learn about the top reasons their customers were unhappy and created coverage plans that were relevant to the brand’s customers.

They spoke to as many customers as possible during their store visit and explained to them the benefits of insurance and started to sell the initial set of policies.

A lot of their learnings during the initial days of their field visit came to use as they started to scale. They spent a lot of time with store managers and staff to train them on how to sell Symbo’s products. Their marketing collaterals are designed to keep the end customer in mind.

They also ran a few joint offers and promotions with their partner brands that have led to significant product awareness and growth.

Symbo - Challenges Faced

Pivots are always challenging. As they moved from a traditional broker to a technology-first insurtech platform, they had to build the product to support the new use cases, at scale. Since they enable sales of insurance within the partner’s point of sale, they had to build the right integrations and user journeys to ensure the purchase journey is seamless for the user.

Their relationships with insurer partners were one key element that helped them execute the pivot smoothly. They had tremendous support from all the insurers for them to become an embedded insurtech platform, right from the product they wanted to enable integrations with their systems.

It is hard to market a product that lacks quality and easy for products that shine bright with quality. They knew that they have the best technology for embedding insurance be it any way possible - standee QR code or website integration. And with that, they needed to market strongly.

The moment they received a few references from their clients they immediately knew they are marketing it right. The joy of achieving successful word-of-mouth in the days of the Internet is as overwhelming as getting ample leads with low costing clicks as they have been doing before. However, they think there is still a long way to go.

Symbo - Marketing Strategy

They invite you to have a look at the Kanban board at their office where they have brainstormed many marketing campaigns and PR ideas. They have sufficient ideas with them (inside the Insurance sector itself) to create an ever-lasting dent within the subconscious of the masses. They have not set out any campaigns right now as they have kept them occupied with digital advertisements on different platforms. They will be capitalizing on our data and coming out “strong and viral” with their campaigns very soon.

Symbo - Growth

The embedded insurance business is focused on India, while the SAAS platform business has customers across Southeast Asia.

Some of their notable insurer partners are:

Reliance General Insurance
TATA AIG Insurance
HDFC ERGO
Max Bupa Health Insurance
BAJAJ Allianz
Religare

The list of distribution partners continues to grow with brands like Lenskart, Red tape, and Decathlon being some of their key relationships. With over 2M policies issued, they are growing over 30% MoM.

The plan for the next 2 years is to be able to provide customized embedded insurance in as many spaces as it is possible for us. Like most high-growth startups they are in talks with a bunch of investors and would bring in the right strategic partner who can help them fuel the business expansion.

Symbo - Funding

Symbo has raised a funding of $9.4 Million in March 2021.

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors
March 2021	Series A	$9.4 Million	Led by CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund and San-Francisco-based investment firm. Think Investments, with participation from existing investors Integra Partners, Insignia Ventures, and AJ Capital

Symbo - Advisors and Mentors

Mr Sanjeev Jha has been their mentor. He has worked, and had experience, across geographies including India, the Middle East, South Asia, South East Asia, Europe and North America. He has been an advisory board member for Symbo for a year now. Apart from Symbo, he is also an advisory board member for many other companies.

Symbo - Acquisitions

Symbo has acquired ReLeague Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. in August 2018.

Symbo - Competitors

Some of the top competitors of Symbo are:

Acko Insurance
Turtlemint
Cover Genius
Toffee Insurance
Zopper Insurance.

Symbo - Tools Used in the Company

They use all the white-label assets and make full use of open source tools and data available and give due credits wherever required.

Symbo - Recognition and Achievements

Symbo has been awarded the “Digital Insurance Innovation” of the year award from ET BFSI at the World BFSI Congress and Awards 2020.

The startup has also won the “Digital-Insurance Broker” award at SBR Technology Excellence Awards in the year 2020.

Symbo - Future Plans

At this point, they are focused on growing their partner base and growing the number of policies. Having seen some of their initial categories like eyewear, and footwear scale, they are working with the insurer to make the program and coverage a lot more exciting for the customers as well as introduce newer categories.

FAQs

Who is the founder of Symbo?