Established in 2020 by former co-founder of Truly Madly and a senior management member of Expedia and Make My Trip, Rahul Kumar and health insurance industry expert and head of product at Apollo Munch Health Insurance, Jayan Mathews, Vital intends to reimagine health insurance by personalising the coverage for each member based on their individual needs and going beyond hospitalisation to also include essential wellness expenses.
The D2C health insurance platform has co-developed the insurance cover with Care Health Insurance and integrated with Mfine, Healthians, Thyrocare, 1Mg, BeatO, Fitterfly, Fitternity, Cult fit, and Betterlyf, for the wellness benefits. It takes less than 60 seconds for a member to buy the plan and less than 2 minutes to intimate a claim or book an appointment through the Vital website and app, claims the startup.
Commenting on raising the capital, Rahul Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Vital said, “At Vital, we are leveraging technology and data science to build a more personalised experience with an integrated health and wellness approach and smarter product structuring to make the premiums much more affordable. Our goal is to not only stand by our members when they are sick but also manage their health with holistic wellness offerings and timely interventions to keep them from falling sick which means lower claim costs hence lower overall premiums.”
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Amit Ratanpal, Founder and MD, BLinC Invest, “Our co-founder approach to investing in the EdTech and FinTech sectors is backed by a detailed internal research. The country presently has one of the lowest health insurance penetrations in the world and the existing health insurance plans are usually enveloped with innumerable terms and conditions, resulting in utter confusion around the coverage eligibility and ultimately a bad customer experience. Making healthcare cover 100 percent digital, inclusive and affordable is a great way to solve the problem and Vital is on a mission to do that.”
“The funds will significantly help GetVital scale and transform the way health insurance is perceived in India,” said Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, co-founder and president, Venture Catalysts.
As per the recent InsurTech report by BLinC Invest, the Indian insurance industry has a market size of $106 billion and life insurance accounts for 75 percent of that after private players entered the industry in 1999 and contributed to its exponential growth. While globally, the industry has been attracting a lot of interest from the investor community, the Indian market is also producing InsurTech startups like Vital are successfully driving different parts of the value chain.
According to General Insurance Council data almost Rs 24,000 crore worth of claims have been paid under medical insurance due to COVID-19-related hospitalisation and associated expenses. During the pre-COVID times, the number of people who purchased comprehensive insurance plans was approximately 32 percent, while now after being hit by one of the biggest pandemics, this percentage has shot up to 55 percent.
