Orios And BEENEXT Lead Funding In Health Insurance Startup Kenko Health

Health insurance startup Kenko Health has raised $1.7 Mn as a part of its pre-series A funding round. The round was led by BEENEXT and Orios Venture Partners. Accelerator VC 9Unicorns and Waveform Ventures also participated in this round of investment. 

Founded in 2019 by Aniruddha Sen and Dhiraj Goel, Kenko Health aims to make health finance accessible and ROI-friendly by focusing on the consumer rather than the sale. It provides OPD benefits, such as medicalosts, doctor consulting fees, and diagnostic costs, within a predefined closed network. 

The startup is looking to build the country’s first health management organisation (HMO) a holistic concept where companies don’t just simply cover healthcare expenses, but also actively manage customers’ medical conditions, thereby leading to better long-term health outcomes.

The latest funding will be utilised for product development, specifically in the outpatient department costs (OPD) space and expanding the startup’s core team.

According to IRADAI, as of June 2021, stand-alone health insurance grew at 55% over the same period in the previous year. Currently, Kenko is competing with other insurance tech startups like Acko, Artivatic, Mantra Labs, Pentation Analytics, Policy Bazaar, among others. Other digital insurance startups catering specifically in the Indian health insurance space include startups digit, Plum, SecureNow, RenewBuy, and many others  

Most insurance companies in India cover only hospitalisation costs. This excludes doctor fees, medicine expenses, diagnostic tests and even non-prescription products and services, such as infant care, vision care, dental care, hair and skin care, and so on. 

Kenko aims to stand out in the market by offering coverage for all healthcare expenses: large and small, medical and over-the-counter (OTC), preventive and curative. It provides comprehensive plans focused on OPD and all subscribers get IPD coverage from an insurance company as part of their membership benefits.

“At Kenko, customer experience is of primary importance and, toward that end, we set out to create a unique system of benefit payout where the customer receives the cost of treatment directly into their bank account before the treatment starts. We are aiming to add 20K users to our programme this year and another 100 K next year,” said Sen.

According to an Inc42 report, the insurance tech segment is amongst the four fintech subsectors which had the highest CAGR (58%) between 2015-2020 (in terms of total funding). In the fintech funding space, Insurance tech is suggested to dominate the space along with consumer lending, B2B lending, and fintech SaaS.  

Recently, employee health insurance startup Onsurity closed a $16 Mn deal in a funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners. In June, another health insurance startup Vital had raised $3 Mn.