InsuranceDekho: How Ankit Agrawal Built a Great Nationwide Insurance Platform District by District
Discover how Ankit Agrawal built InsuranceDekho from a CarDekho vertical into a nationwide insurance platform powered by technology and local agents. Ankit Agrawal built InsuranceDekho around a simple but difficult problem: insurance products existed, but they did not always reach India’s last mile. By combining technology with a large network of local insurance advisors, InsuranceDekho expanded across smaller cities, towns and villages, turning distribution into its biggest competitive advantage.
InsuranceDekho introduced when: The Insurance Problem Ankit Agrawal Noticed
The story of Ankit Agrawal InsuranceDekho did not begin with a grand plan to build one of India’s largest insurance distribution networks. It began with a simple observation about how difficult insurance could be for an ordinary Indian customer. In 2016, during a trip to Ballia, Agrawal asked his taxi driver about the vehicle’s insurance. The driver’s response made him realise that even a compulsory financial product such as motor insurance was not always understood at the last mile. For Agrawal, that raised a much bigger question: if people struggled to understand motor insurance, how would they approach products such as health or life insurance, which require even greater awareness and trust? That moment helped shape the idea behind InsuranceDekho. The problem, as Agrawal saw it, was not necessarily a lack of insurance products. India already had numerous insurers offering different policies. The bigger challenge was distribution — getting the right product to the right customer and explaining why it mattered. InsuranceDekho was therefore designed around a straightforward objective: take insurance closer to the customer.
How Ankit Agrawal Started InsuranceDekho
The Ankit Agrawal InsuranceDekho journey was closely connected with the CarDekho ecosystem. Agrawal had returned to India after working with UBS in the United States and had experience across financial and technology businesses before joining CarDekho. While working on insurance within the automotive ecosystem, he began seeing an opportunity much larger than vehicle insurance alone. InsuranceDekho emerged in 2016 as an attempt to build a dedicated technology-driven insurance distribution platform. Its early focus was naturally motor insurance because the business had a strong connection with the automobile market. But the underlying vision was broader. Agrawal and his team wanted to solve the distribution problem across insurance categories and geographies. Instead of asking how an insurance company could simply sell more policies online, the company began asking a more fundamental question: how can insurance become easier to access for someone who may not live in Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru? That question eventually became central to the InsuranceDekho business model and its expansion across Bharat.
Why InsuranceDekho Chose Local Distribution
The InsuranceDekho business model took a different route from the typical digital-first startup playbook. Rather than depending entirely on customers discovering and purchasing policies through an app or website, the company built a large network of insurance advisors. The reasoning was practical. Insurance is not always an impulse purchase. Customers often want someone to explain premiums, coverage, exclusions, claims and policy terms before making a decision. In smaller towns and villages, that human connection can be even more important. InsuranceDekho therefore trained and enabled local advisors to become the bridge between insurers and customers. According to Agrawal, the company chose this distribution-led approach because insurance ultimately depends on reaching people where they live. The model created a combination that became central to the company’s identity: technology at the centre and people at the last mile. Instead of treating traditional distribution as something to eliminate, InsuranceDekho turned local relationships into part of its technology-enabled growth engine.
How InsuranceDekho Expanded District by District
The most distinctive part of the InsuranceDekho growth story is its focus on geographical depth. Many consumer internet businesses measure expansion through app downloads, website traffic or metropolitan customers. InsuranceDekho has looked at the market differently. Its ambition has been to build a network capable of reaching customers in districts, towns and villages where insurance awareness and access can still be limited. In 2025, Agrawal said InsuranceDekho had about three lakh agents and coverage across 98% of India’s pincodes, with agents collectively selling around 10–15 lakh policies each month. He also spoke about an ambition to eventually reach all 600,000 villages in India. This district-by-district approach is slower and more operationally demanding than simply scaling a digital interface, but it creates something valuable: local trust. A customer who may hesitate to purchase a complicated financial product online can be more comfortable when a known advisor explains it in familiar terms. For InsuranceDekho, distribution became not just a sales channel but a long-term competitive advantage.
How Technology Powers InsuranceDekho
Local distribution alone cannot explain the scale that InsuranceDekho has achieved. Behind its advisor network is a technology platform designed to connect customers, insurance partners and distributors. The company has built technology and insurer integrations that allow its network to compare products, transact digitally and manage insurance journeys at scale. This creates an important balance in the InsuranceDekho model. The advisor provides the human relationship, while technology provides speed, product access and operational efficiency. The approach also reflects a broader shift in Indian fintech and insurtech. The strongest platforms are increasingly combining digital infrastructure with physical distribution instead of treating the two as competing models. InsuranceDekho’s technology therefore serves a larger purpose than simply creating an online insurance marketplace. It helps thousands of advisors operate more efficiently while allowing insurers to access a much wider customer base. In a country as geographically diverse as India, that combination can become a powerful growth engine.
How InsuranceDekho Moved Beyond Motor Insurance
Motor insurance gave InsuranceDekho an important starting point, but the company has increasingly diversified into non-motor categories. Health, life and other insurance products offer a much larger opportunity because they allow the company to serve customers beyond their vehicle ownership needs. This shift is important for the company’s long-term business model. A customer who first enters the platform through motor insurance can potentially become a customer for health, life or other forms of financial protection. InsuranceDekho’s FY26 annual report shows the scale of this transition. The combined InsuranceDekho-RenewBuy business reported gross written premium of about ₹6,700 crore in FY26, while non-motor products accounted for 21% of business. The report also said that 53% of partners sold non-motor products, showing that the advisor network is increasingly being used to distribute a broader range of insurance products. The strategy is clear: move from selling individual policies to becoming a wider insurance distribution platform.
InsuranceDekho Growth Reaches a New Scale
The latest numbers demonstrate how far the InsuranceDekho growth story has travelled from its early days. InsuranceDekho’s FY26 annual report describes the year as a defining period for the combined business, with gross written premium reaching approximately ₹67 billion and the company achieving business profitability. The report also highlights 25 Indians insured every minute and 34 new partners onboarded every hour during FY26. Around 87% of premium came from Tier 2 cities and beyond, reinforcing the importance of smaller cities to the company’s strategy. The combined platform also had approximately 3,600 full-time employees. These numbers reveal something important about InsuranceDekho’s expansion: its growth has not been built solely around India’s largest urban markets. Bharat has been at the centre of the model. The company is effectively building an insurance distribution infrastructure where technology, advisors and insurer partnerships work together to reach customers who were traditionally harder to serve.
Why Bharat Became InsuranceDekho’s Advantage
For Ankit Agrawal InsuranceDekho, Bharat is not simply a market segment. It is the foundation of the company’s strategy. India’s smaller cities and towns contain millions of potential insurance customers, but reaching them requires more than a digital advertisement or a simple checkout page. Customers need awareness, guidance and trust. That is where InsuranceDekho’s advisor-led model becomes significant. The company’s FY26 data shows that 87% of premium came from Tier 2 cities and beyond. Its network therefore gives it access to a customer base that many digital-first businesses may find expensive or difficult to reach. This creates a potentially powerful cycle. More advisors can create greater local awareness; greater awareness can generate more customers; more customers can make the platform more attractive to advisors and insurers. The model also gives InsuranceDekho an opportunity to expand insurance penetration in places where financial protection has historically been underdeveloped. In that sense, its business ambition and the larger goal of financial inclusion begin to overlap.
InsuranceDekho and the RenewBuy Merger
The next chapter of the InsuranceDekho success story is now being shaped by consolidation. InsuranceDekho and RenewBuy announced plans to merge in 2025 in a share-swap transaction that valued the combined business at around ₹7,400 crore at the time of the announcement. The merger brings together two significant insurance distribution businesses and creates a larger platform with greater distribution capabilities. By July 2026, the companies were reported to be close to completing the merger, with plans for a potential IPO of up to ₹4,000 crore in FY27 and a proposed draft red herring prospectus filing by September. If those plans progress, the public-market journey would represent a major milestone for a company that started by identifying a basic last-mile insurance problem. The merger also changes the scale of the challenge ahead. Growth will no longer be only about adding districts and advisors; it will also be about integrating operations, maintaining profitability and building a business capable of meeting the expectations of public-market investors.
What Ankit Agrawal’s Journey Teaches Entrepreneurs through InsuranceDekho
The biggest lesson from the Ankit Agrawal InsuranceDekho journey is that India’s next generation of large businesses may be built by solving distribution problems rather than simply creating another digital product. Agrawal identified a gap that looked ordinary on the surface: insurance products existed, but millions of people were not being reached effectively. Instead of trying to remove the human element from insurance, InsuranceDekho used technology to strengthen it. That decision allowed the company to build a network across India’s diverse geography while keeping local advisors at the centre of customer relationships. The journey also shows why building for Bharat requires patience. District-by-district expansion does not always create the instant excitement of a consumer app, but it can produce something far more difficult to replicate, a deep distribution network. From a conversation with a taxi driver in Ballia to a platform reaching 98% of India’s pincodes, the story of InsuranceDekho is ultimately about understanding where the real problem lies. Ankit Agrawal did not simply build another insurance platform. He built a system designed to take insurance to the places where the industry had historically struggled to reach.
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