Insurtech startup Nova Benefits raises $1 million in fresh funding

Insurtech startup, Nova Benefits, on Wednesday said that it has raised $1 million as a part of its seed funding round led by Multiply Ventures, Better Capital and Titan Capital.

Other angel investors who participated as a part of this round include - Sumit Maniyar, chief executive of Rupeek Gold Loans and Ashish Goyal, co-founder of Early Salary.

According to the company, it will use the capital to integrate with insurance and human resource management companies to co-create new categories of health insurance products and expand its engineering and business development teams.

The startup has built an employee benefits platform centered around corporate health insurance. It helps corporate employees digitally access insurance cards, find cashless hospitals and make claims within Nova’s platform. Nova also consults companies to help them choose the best health plans for their employees.

“Through process improvements like doing a document deficiency check at the time of filing a claim, we’ve reduced the average (insurance) claim settlement time by several days. For human resource professionals, within organisations, Nova eliminates redundant processes like monthly addition and deletion of employees by integrating with the human resource management systems like Darwin Box, Greytip, Keka, ZohoHR and several others”, said Saransh Garg, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nova Benefits.

In seven months of launch, Nova has on-boarded more than 70 clients with 25,000 members on its platform. Nova’s present clientele include - Snapdeal, Yulu Bikes, Chumbak, Fisdom and Dealshare among others.

“Employee insurance and benefits is a deeply broken experience. We were impressed with Nova’s unique approach, and it has been incredible to see them become one of the fastest growing companies in the category in a matter of just 7 months”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital.

"India has one of the lowest health insurance penetrations in the world and these needs to fundamentally change. Making corporate health insurance more accessible, affordable and transparent is a great way to solve the problem. Nova benefits is on a mission to do that,", said Bhushan Patil of Multiply Ventures

Companies in India, usually only cover in-patient hospitalization as part of health insurance. The health insurance coverage provided is typically in the 3-5 lakh range which is inadequate, the company said.

Nova plans to solve this by providing flexible options to the end-employees to purchase add-on coverages. Moving forward, the company looks to operate in a hybrid model where employers and employees both contribute towards providing adequate healthcare coverage.