This start-up is NOT in a race to become a unicorn!

Most entrepreneurs have one dream: making their start-up a unicorn. It gives them a gate pass to that elite club where success is measured in terms of the valuation of the company. However, not all founders fall in the same line when it comes to joining the unicorn race. For some sustainable growth scores above the rapid growth. 

“We are not in the race to become a Unicorn. Valuation is not a metric that we chase and optimise. We are building plumhq.com for the next 50 years to 100 years. If you take that long view, you would optimise for the real business metrics like number of lives that we impact and customer satisfaction. This should result into real revenue and real profit. If we do this right, the valuation would be a by-product. All companies, that generate revenue and profit, automatically get great valuation and become a unicorn,” says Abhishek Poddar, Co-Founder and CEO of Plum, an employee benefits focused insurtech company. A company is called unicorn when its valuation crosses $1 billion. 

Plum is an employee health insurance platform which provides health benefits to corporations. The platform enables real-time insurance design and pricing to enable companies to buy insurance in three clicks besides offering employees online claims experience through an integrated digital process. Plum is backed by Tiger and Sequoia and its customers include Unacademy, Meesho, Groww, Simpl, among others.

“We currently cover a few hundreds of thousands of lives. We have an aim to aim to cover 10 million lives in the next few years. We have built Plum very efficiently so far, and have over 75 per cent of our investor’s money lying with us which we intend to use over the course of a couple of years to expand our business,” says Poddar.

The company is currently clocking Rs 300 crore in annual premium and registered a significant growth of 700 per cent in 2021-22. “We aim to grow our business at the same pace by building world class claims and healthcare experience for the employers and employees,” says Poddar.

According to a study done by Plum 30 per cent of its clients have parental covers too as a part of their Group Health Insurance (GHI) policies. Most of these companies are first-time insurance buyers with an average employee strength of less than 100 and the average age of employees being 30 years and parents being 57.5 years. Plum has also witnessed an increase in the average sum insured in its policies from Rs 3 Lakh to Rs 5 Lakh per family over the past two years.

Also read: Beauty D2C brand Plum raises $35 million in Series C