How Covrzy is Re-architecting Business Insurance for Indian Founders with a Tech-First Approach

Harsha Vardhan

August 28, 2025

You’re a founder. Your product is shipping, contracts are being signed, and growth is accelerating. In the middle of it all, a pile of jargon-filled insurance papers on Directors & Officers (D&O), Cyber Liability, Professional Indemnity, etc., lands on your desk. You skim, sign, and stash them. Months later, a regulatory notice arrives. A customer sues. Or a data breach hits. Suddenly, those forgotten papers are your company’s lifeline, and you realize you never really understood them. This is the silent ticking time bomb that thousands of founders live with.

Covrzy, a Bengaluru-based insurtech startup, is on a mission to defuse that bomb. Founded in 2023 by Ankit Kamra and Veera Thota, Covrzy is systematically dismantling the opaque, archaic, and intimidating world of business insurance and rebuilding it with first principles for the digital-native builder.

Backed by Antler and Shastra VC, Covrzy has already helped 800+ businesses like Redcliffe Labs, Skit.ai, Orange Health Labs, and Karbon Business get the right protection in place. In 2024, Covrzy crossed a key milestone by securing a full broking license from IRDAI. Notably, in 2025, Covrzy partnered with Namma Yatri to offer affordable health cover to 50,000+ gig workers and their families.

In a conversation with Team ProdWrks, Ankit Kamra explains how he built Covrzy to simplify complex liability insurance for businesses on one hand, and embed micro-insurance for the new-age startups on the other.

Understanding Pain Points in Business Insurance

Ankit Kamra is a veteran of India’s fintech revolution. With 14 years of experience spanning retail banking and pivotal roles at startups like Paytm, where he was an early employee witnessing the QR code explosion, his career is a map of India’s digital transformation. He’s also been a key founding member at a payday loans company, a founding member at corporate card provider Karbon Cards, and an early team member at Plum.

“As an operator in multiple startups, one pain point kept popping up: insurance was always like an afterthought, rarely the enabler,” Ankit recalls.

Especially for startups from pre-seed to Series B, there was a lot of ambiguity among founders. What am I doing right? Where am I signing? What kind of repercussions may it have tomorrow on my startup, on myself?

“Talk to just 10 founders within your closed circle,” Ankit challenges. “Ask them about their D&O insurance, or what a Professional Indemnity insurance is. You will not get a clear answer. You may not get an answer at all. That will give you a situation analysis of where we are as an ecosystem.”

It’s this pervasive lack of awareness of the strategic importance of business insurance and its specific applications that Covrzy is designed to solve.

Ankit says, “My goal was to eliminate all these risks and allow founders to just focus on what they are best at, which is growing their business. Covrzy was born to solve that by making business insurance accessible, digital, and contextual.”

Sizing Up a Vast, Underpenetrated Business Insurance Market

According to Ankit, out of approximately 60 million SMEs in India, and about 33 million that are GST-registered, the penetration of business insurance is shockingly low.

“The market is less than 0.7% insured with any business that has bought at least one business insurance policy. This means somebody who has purchased insurance to protect their business, whether it’s their stock or any sort of general or public liability policy.”

When compared to developed markets like the US or Europe, where penetration can be as high as 40-50%, the gap here in India is glaring. But Ankit is quick to add that it’s changing. He says that from 2014 to date, the business insurance market has been growing at 18% to 20% CAGR YoY. This is a sleeping giant beginning to stir, awakened by increasing regulation, growing customer awareness, and the rising complexity of digital-first business models.

Covrzy has strategically positioned itself within this burgeoning market by focusing on what Ankit calls “the most underserved segment”: early-stage startups and SMEs with a turnover between ₹1 crore and ₹50 crore and fewer than 500 employees.

This segment is large enough to have significant liabilities but often too small to have a dedicated risk management or legal team. A significant portion of Covrzy’s 800+ clients come from high-risk, high-growth sectors like fintech, logistics, platform aggregators, and B2B/B2C SaaS. These are precisely the companies building India’s future, and precisely the ones who can least afford a catastrophic, uninsured event.

Covrzy’s Playbook

Covrzy’s strategy is a two-pronged attack on the insurance industry’s inertia. On one front, they are building a seamless, digital-first B2B platform. On the other hand, they are pioneering an embedded, B2B2C distribution model.

1. The B2B Platform: Policy Issued in Under 5 Minutes

Procuring a business insurance like a D&O today is a torturous, month-long ordeal of PDFs, endless email chains, and opaque pricing. Ankit’s first act was to ask a simple question: why can’t buying liability insurance be as easy as renewing your car insurance on Acko?

“We were the first ones to actually build a checkout experience for a commercial insurance product,” says Ankit.

He gave us a demo to show its simplicity. A founder looking for D&O insurance logs in, enters a few key details about their company, and in minutes, is presented with comparable quotes. They can review the terms, select a policy, make a payment, and download the legally binding policy document on the spot.

“A process that takes one and a half months offline, with back and forth, can be done in five minutes,” he says.

Our immediate question to Ankit was, if it’s that simple, why haven’t the incumbents done it? The answer lies in the messy, unglamorous work of building infrastructure where none exists.

Ankit says, “You have to challenge the status quo. The first question I asked myself was, ‘Is it doable?’ The answer from the ecosystem was largely ‘no,’ because a lot of insurance companies don’t even have an infrastructure to date .”.

This is where Ankit’s experience in partnerships and product creation at places like Plum and Karbon Cards became Covrzy’s superpower. Instead of waiting for insurers to build modern APIs, the Covrzy team took a different approach.

“We started working with a lot of insurers, understanding to what extent it is doable. Do they have API endpoints to collect information digitally? If not, can we build that infrastructure on their behalf? What is the way this information sharing will happen?”

This proactive, user-centric mindset to build the missing plumbing for their legacy partners allowed Covrzy to create the digital rails necessary for their five-minute checkout experience. Ankit shared that it required defining underwriting frameworks and building immense trust with highly regulated, enterprise-scale insurance companies.

2. The Embedded Insurance Route (B2B2C)

While the B2B platform fixes a broken process, Covrzy’s embedded insurance is where insurance moves from being a product you buy to a feature that is seamlessly integrated into platforms you already use. Covrzy’s partnership with Namma Yatri to insure the driver captains is the perfect example of this B2B2C model.

“We have created a gig worker insurance product where driver captains of Namma Yatri can insure themselves and their family members.”

But to do that, Ankit took a first-principles approach to understand the needs of the drivers. Covrzy’s team attended onboarding sessions with Namma Yatri while they were onboarding cab drivers and auto drivers.

“We were there on the ground, did a lot of surveys on what is the market ask, what sort of sum insured they are looking for, and what is the different sort of support they are looking at, whether it’s call-first or tech-first.”

This deep ethnographic research unearthed critical insights that shaped the final product:

Vernacular is Non-Negotiable: The platform was built in local languages to ensure comprehension and trust.
Context is Everything: The insurance product is embedded within the driver app, a familiar digital environment.
Payment Models Must Match Cash Flow: They designed flexible payment options, like weekly or monthly premiums, to align with a gig worker’s income cycle.

“The moment you make it easier for them to understand and consume the content, that’s when large-scale adoption happens,” says Ankit.

He says that this approach of deeply understanding the end user, their partner’s ecosystem, and then building for them is the key to successful embedded finance. It’s a playbook they are replicating with partners like FlixBus and YoloBus for trip insurance, proving the model’s versatility.

A Founder’s Guide to Building in Regulated Waters

The process to get Covrzy’s IRDAI broking license took eight to nine months, which is a lifetime in the startup world. Ankit candidly shares that navigating a regulated industry like insurance is daunting. His advice for founders entering similar domains is practical.

First, don’t let the regulatory timeline dictate your entire roadmap.

Ankit says, “Being a startup, you should be flexible on how to get the work done. A lot of fintechs that have now become NBFCs didn’t start as one on day one. You start with something that makes it easier for your end user to consume and buy, and once that starts happening, you figure out the next roadmap.”

Second, be deeply strategic about which license you need, and why. Ankit says that the key question to ask is: “For me to scale in the next year for what I’m building, do I really need a license?”

For Covrzy, the decision to pursue a broking license, and not just continue with a simpler (to obtain) web aggregator one, was driven by their product strategy. They needed the ability to underwrite higher-value, more complex proposals for their mid-market and enterprise clients, something a basic license wouldn’t permit.

So, what does Covrzy look like at scale? Ankit’s vision extends far beyond being just a better broker. He draws an analogy to the evolution of Policybazaar, which grew from a simple comparison site into a multi-vertical insurance behemoth.

He says, “At scale, Covrzy could become a specialized insurance company in itself. Today, you have general insurance companies and specialized health insurance companies. We think of ourselves as a specialized insurance company that focuses on digital-first products, specifically for B2B2C use cases.”

The Uncomfortable Truths of Building in a Legacy Market

Ankit is refreshingly candid about the fact that Covrzy is still far from achieving product-market fit. “100% no,” he laughed when we asked. “It’s too early. But there are quite a few early signals that are sounding positive.”

Ankit explains that these early signals are organic pulls that every early-stage founder looks for and knows intuitively when they experience them.

“For instance, your existing customers start referring your products to other customers in their circle. On the B2B2C side, your partners start going in-depth with you. They pick up one product, then another, then another. They start creating an ecosystem with you.”

This is reflected in Covrzy’s 95% renewal rate, a testament to their focus on hand-holding and service.

Breaking Assumptions in B2B Insurance

However, Ankit admits that this journey has been a steep learning curve, filled with shattered assumptions.

He says, “I thought if we made insurance very simple for founders or SMEs to buy, it's a no-brainer, they'll buy it. We thought people would buy it if it's cheap, it covers all the risk, it’s the best coverage, and it’s online. But what we realized was the market was entirely different.”

He shares three hard-won lessons that should be required reading for any B2B founder:

1. Awareness is Abysmal: The market is still driven by offline relationships. So, you aren’t just selling a better insurance product. You are also evangelizing an entirely new way of how businesses are thinking about risk.

2. Influence the Influencer: Sometimes, the path to the decision-maker (the founder or CFO) is through the person who has their ear. It could be an operations head, a finance manager. Identifying and empowering these internal champions can be more effective than a direct sales pitch.

3. Trust Trumps Everything: Even with matching price and a superior digital experience, insurance buying decisions of businesses are often made based on long-standing relationships with brokers. Building a new brand in insurance requires immense effort in trust-building, one customer at a time.

The metrics they track reflect this ambition. They monitor Gross Written Premium (GWP) and the number of policies issued (currently averaging 250,000-300,000 per month), but they also obsess over a “Claims Happiness Index”, which is an internal metric measuring how closely the settled claim amount matches the customer’s expectation.

This focus is what separates transactional businesses from enduring ones. And Covrzy is building this future with remarkable financial discipline. After closing last year with around $60,000 in revenue, Ankit shared that they are on track to 3-4x that this year, all while operating at break-even.