India's PolicyBazaar raises $75m for Middle East expansion

The investment will initially focus on an existing PolicyBazaar subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and involve the development of customized motor, health, and life insurance products for the region. It is being called the largest funding round ever targeting UAE’s online insurance space.

PolicyBazaar’s UAE business currently has about 10 lending and insurance partners and more than 50 products on offer. Total insurance sales in the country amount to about $100 million to date. This figure is hoped to grow 10x within 18 months.

It comes within weeks of Mumbai-based GP Bay Capital making a secondary investment of undisclosed size in PolicyBazaar and the company confirming plans for an IPO within 15 months. PolicyBazaar would seek to raise INR40 billion ($553 million) at a valuation of $3.5 billion, Livemint reported.

Last year, SoftBank Vision Fund acquired a 15% stake in PolicyBazaar in a deal that valued the company at around $1.5 billion. It invested $130 million, including $50 million in primary capital and $80 million for shares sold by existing investors Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, and Inventus Capital India.

Vision Fund also led the $200 million round in 2018 that established PolicyBazaar’s unicorn status. The company has raised more than $600 million since 2011, when Intel Capital became one of its first institutional investors.

Previous backers also include Temasek Holdings, Premji Invest, True North, IDG Ventures India, Wellington Management, and InfoEdge. Tencent Holdings reportedly acquired a 10% position through a secondary transaction with Tiger in 2019, but PolicyBazaar has since sought to remove the tech giant from its cap table, citing a desire to reduce exposure to Chinese capital.

PolicyBazaar’s core offering is a platform that allows individuals to compare competing bids for financial products. The company is best known for its general and life insurance marketplace, though it also provides quotes for consumer lending and credit through companion site PaisaBazaar. It has more than 100 million visitors a day and facilitates around 400,000 transactions a month.

Falcon Edge is investing via its Alpha Wave Incubation Fund (AWI), a $300 million vehicle launched last year and backed entirely by ADQ, a state-owned holding company in Abu Dhabi. AWI invests in Indian and Southeast Asian businesses looking to enter the Middle East.

“PolicyBazaar has shown stellar innovation, execution, and relentlessness in establishing itself as the market leader in online insurance aggregation in India,” Navroz Udwadia, co-founder of Falcon Edge, said in a statement. “We believe the playbook it has established over the last 10 years in being the most efficient sales channel for insurance manufacturers, can act as a catalyst to gain market leadership in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council].”

Falcon Edge, which maintains an office in Abu Dhabi, has about $5 billion in assets under management and is an active investor in India.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• MENA
• Expansion
• Financials
• Technology
• India
• Falcon Edge Capital
• Fintech
• insurance
• Financial Services
• TMT