Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal has made one of his biggest startup investments in new age insurance tech startup Acko as part of its $65 million Series C round.

The round saw participation from existing backer Amazon, as well as Saif Partners and Accel Partners. This brings the startup's total fundraising to over $100 million.

Acko had raised one of the largest seed rounds of $30 million from Narayan Murthy's Catamaran, Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infosys, DSP BlackRock's Hemendra Kothari, Hexaware's Atul Nishar, SAIF Partners and Accel India, and raised another $12 million from Amazon last year.

In the new round, Bansal, former SoftBank managing partner Kabir Misra's RPS Ventures and Canada-based Intact Ventures came in as new investors. Sources privy to the developments told CNBC-TV18 that Bansal invested as much as $25 million in the round. Existing investors Amazon, Saif Partners, Accel Partners participated.

Acko was founded by Coverfox founder Varun Dua and started operations in early 2018. Dua said the company will use the new capital in building balance sheet for solvency capital to pay claims, as well as for scaling technology teams and products, and in marketing.

“Insurance companies need solvency capital to honour claims of customers. Secondly, we have 40-50 people on the technology side and we will grow the team 3x-4x. Lastly, we want to invest in building our brand," Dua said.

Acko uses a direct-to-consumer approach for distributing motor insurance but also offers bite-sized insurance products such as rider insurance, mobile and appliance protection, ticket cancellation etc. in partnership with over 15 players in the internet ecosystem such as Ola, Amazon, redBus, Zomato and UrbanClap. The company so far has distributed insurance policies to over 20 million unique customers.

Dua said having Bansal on board will help in working on scaling the company and added that he held talks with Sachin Bansal, the second Flipkart co-founder.

"Technology-led insurance is expected to play a significant role in the growth of the underpenetrated insurance sector in India. Acko is the pioneer of digital-native insurance and I am delighted to partner in its exciting growth journey," Bansal said in a statement.

"We continue to be impressed by Acko’s focus on data-led innovations in the insurance sector that are solving for important customer needs in this sector. We are always excited to work with companies like Acko that are led by missionary founders and management teams and we remain committed to investing in technology-backed innovations that address real customer problems," Amit Agarwal, senior vice president and country head, Amazon India, said in a statement.

First Published:Mar 13, 2019 9:25 PM IST