Startup Circle: Pazcare, one-stop solution for all employee benefits

Pazcare is a one-stop solution for all your employee benefits and group health insurance requirements. They help employers make informed decisions about their employees’ healthcare needs and also help them design customized workplace benefits. Founded in early 2021 by Sanchit Malik and Manish Mishra in Bengaluru, Pazcare is redefining the way employee benefits are managed in India. It enables real-time management of employee benefits and streamlines them in one place.

Sanchit Malik, Co-Founder & CEO, Pazcare Passionately working for Pazcare to make it a success in the insurtech industry. Previously, Co-founded Townscript (Acquired by Bookmyshow), a self-serve ticketing platform, and ran it for 7 years before selling it to Bookmyshow. He is passionate about the insurance space and aims to make insurance accessible to all employees in India. He often talks about startups, employee benefits, and insurtech.

Speaking to CIOL, Sanchit Malik, Co-founder & CEO, Pazcare, has shared his views about the need for a MSMEs to accelerate digital transformation in insurance for employees. He talked about his startup journey and also, and he speaks about the growth plans he has for pazcare.

Tell us about Pazcare and your offerings?

We are primarily a B2B company, with over 1.5 lac employees on our Pazcare platform. We are building full stack employee benefits platform covering insurance, health and financial requirements. Keeping the individual employee at center we are launching flexi benefits feature as we understand not everyone has the same requirement.

Among our host of services includes:

1. In Insurance - Group Health Insurance, Group Personal Accident, Group Term Life Insurance
2. In Health & wellness - Doctor consultations, Mental Wellness sessions, Health Checkups, Women wellness, medicines, ambulance services, fitness sessions and regular wellness sessions for employees.

Tell us about its specialization. Tell us about the team.

Founded in 2021 by entrepreneurs Sanchit Malik (CEO) and Manish Mishra(CTO). Sanchit Malik is a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit history. He was the Co-founder of Townscript which was acquired by Bookmyshow. Manish Mishra has been a core team member of startups, helping them build scalable platforms from scratch. He was the ex-Director of Engineering at Mindtickle and Cleartax before starting Pazcare. Key Executives include Prashant Desai (VP- Sales), ChetanPaliwal (VP - Insurance Solutions) Abhishek Mahato (Head of Operations), ShalakaParate (Business Manager), AkshayBhaskarwar (Business Development Manager) and Dr Kshama Vyas (Senior Customer Success Manager).

What is the USP of your company that sets you apart from other players in the industry? 

Pazcare is the fastest-growing employee benefits platform in the country. It is the only one in the industry providing employers with a comprehensive digital suite of offerings to cater to employees across a wide range of benefits from insurance to mental wellness.

We provide HRMS integration with various HRMS tools automating the addition and deletion of employees into insurance. Specifically for employee support queries, claims, and tracking we have a WhatsAppchatbot. For a clear and comprehensive understanding of policies and usage of multiple benefits across various categories, we have a web and mobile app, which also has a digital dashboard ensuring transparency in employee endorsements, CD balance and claims management.

Why do we need MSMEs to accelerate digital transformation in insurance for employees?

At Pazcare we want to transform employer-employee relationships at scale. Employer-employee benefits have a big disconnect as the service is primarily offline. Given the people-driven process of servicing customers, traditionally followed by insurance brokers and employee benefits companies, they find only enterprises as viable business opportunities, thus neglecting the SMBs.

We are solving this problem by digitally connecting all the stakeholders and bringing everything together on one platform. Over the coming years, Pazcare aims to widen its offerings beyond healthcare and be the one-stop-shop for all kinds of employee benefits.

How did you get the idea of this solution and what were the primary consideration points you set out to solve when you started?

Running my last startup called Townscript, I realized that it is difficult to provide employee benefits and insurance to your employees even if you had the budget and willingness. The large brokers would either not like to service you or it was a pain to manage unless you had a dedicated HR person looking into it. This was the inspiration. In the initial days, I spoke a lot to other SMB business founders & employers, I could clearly see everyone resonating with the issue. Furthermore, on talking to the employees I realized even if they got some option it was one solution fit all which was not used to them in most cases. A large percentage did not even know that their company had provided them with any such benefit.

What were the challenges you faced setting up the product?

The biggest challenge in building a technology product for insurance is bringing together multiple stakeholder (insurer, TPA, broker, HRs, employees) functions involved in a policy and keeping them in sync considering the insurance industry is still not very digital. Digitizing all these offline processes is a mammoth task.

How has your revenue grown with the brand evolving during the pandemic?

As India is transitioning from a developing country to a developed country, we see a huge potential for growth in the financial service industry. The insurance industry has been growing in double digits for the last few financial years and it is expected to double in the next 3-4 years. The pandemic accelerated the growth of the Health & Life insurance industry. It made all of us realize the value of this product. We saw this opportunity, we want to contribute to the growth of this industry through technology driven solutions

What has 2021 changed for you? How are things now?

 Pazcare is growing 6x Year on Year with Net revenue retention of more than 120%.

The major reason for our robust growth has been high retention rate of existing cohort of customers.

What are your growth priorities for 2022-2023?

Since our Series A, we have scaled up our growth teams and opened up offices in different geographies across India. We hope to accelerate growth with robust sales & marketing engines.

Funding

In June we raised a Series A funding of 8.5 Million dollars. Pazcare will use the funds to improve its product line and expand its business. To this date we’ve raised 12.5 Million dollars.