Health Care's The Best Policy

With investment from SoftBank, India’s biggest online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar is ready for its next big foray: Health care on tap

- Harichandan Arakali

Yashish Dahiya has come a long way from the time he first took his laptop to Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s office and showed him a comparison of prices at which the founder of Info Edge could buy insurance for his car. That was mid-2008.

“The story for us was much bigger than that, but for a long time he ignored that, and trusted us that there was a business opportunity there,” Dahiya recalls, sitting in his Gurugram office. Dahiya, and cofounders Avaneesh Nirjar and Alok Bansal were starting out building an insurance comparison business, PolicyBazaar, and Bikhchandani and partner Hitesh Oberoi handed the trio “pretty much the biggest cheque they’d written at the time,” Dahiya says.

The ₹20 crore from Info Edge, which runs the online job portal Naukri. com, made for a fairly large seed fund. As things panned out, it was the next round, led by Intel Capital in 2011, which became the official Series A round, and Info Edge participated in that as well. The early bet has made Info Edge one of the largest investors in Etechaces Marketing and Consulting, PolicyBazaar’s parent, which also owns the online lending marketplace PaisaBazaar.com.

But that “bigger story” of Dahiya’s is beginning to come together only now, a decade after his 2008 meeting with Bikhchandani, and is testimony to the tenacity and staying power of the triathlete who completed the Iron Man last year.

This June, Japan’s SoftBank Group agreed to lead an investment of $238 million in Etechaces, making it India’s latest unicorn. Of the $238 million—which includes $200 million in primary investments and $38 million in secondary investment—SoftBank is investing $150 million, while Info Edge is putting in $58 million, with the rest coming from other investors.