Zopper sold its retail app to PhonePe, then raised $75M to embed insurance at checkout

Zopper is a Noida-based embedded-insurance platform that connects insurers with ecommerce, travel, lending and fintech partners through APIs.

Insurers will pay brokerage and SaaS fees to reach partners' customers at the point of sale, and a deep integration makes the partner hard to dislodge.

Founded in 2011 by Surjendu Kuila and Mayank Gupta as Zopper Retail, a hyperlocal point-of-sale platform for small and medium businesses. In 2018 the founders sold that business to Flipkart-owned PhonePe, and CEO Neeraj Jain and the engineering team moved to PhonePe.

The founders then pivoted Zopper into an insurtech SaaS business. Kuila told Inc42 the model sits between insurers and ecosystem partners, earning a brokerage fee when a partner distributes an insurer's product plus a SaaS fee for platform use. By revenue, about 50% came from the financial ecosystem, 30-35% from lifestyle and around 15% from digital partners.

Marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart struggle to monetise large customer bases and look for peripheral products to cross-sell

Digitisation made real-time bundling of insurance at the point of purchase possible, instead of selling through agents and banks

Deep integration with partners' core systems creates switching costs once embedded

Revenue from two sides, brokerage from insurers and SaaS fees from partners, means each policy through the pipe earns

Selling a first product to a strategic buyer can fund a sharper second business; here the integration depth with partners, not the product, is the moat.

As of September 2022 Zopper had raised $96M in total and planned to expand its platform, data capabilities and possibly acquire early-stage insurtechs.