Startup Deep Dive : RenewBuy — it built a 6-lakh-agent insurance network, then merged away its own name

By March 2026, the insurance-advisor network that RenewBuy had spent eleven years building covered more than six lakh digital partners and had helped write a combined premium book above ₹6,600 crore ($687.5 million, at $1≈₹96.0) a year. Five months later, on 1 September 2026, the company stopped operating under its own name at all, folded into a rival it had been racing for a decade.

That is not the plot twist it sounds like. RenewBuy’s revenue climbed from ₹86.93 crore in FY21 to ₹441.8 crore in FY25, according to Registrar of Companies filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42 — a five-fold jump in four years. But its losses grew even faster for most of that stretch, nearly tripling in FY22 alone, and the “profitable by year-end” promises its own co-founder made in 2023 never arrived. This is the story of an insurtech that solved distribution in small-town India and never quite solved its own balance sheet — and of the merger that became its way out.

Quick facts

What RenewBuy does

RenewBuy did not underwrite insurance; it distributed it. Operating under a composite broking licence from IRDAI, the company built a mobile-first platform that let independent, trained advisors — registered as point-of-sales persons, or POSPs — compare and sell motor, health, life and travel policies from a panel that had grown to nearly 40 insurers by late 2025, according to Inc42’s reporting on the merger clearance. The pitch to a customer in a tier-three town was the same as the pitch to an advisor: one app, many insurers, instead of the single-company tied-agent model that had dominated Indian insurance distribution for decades. By late 2023, RenewBuy said its advisors were converting leads at a rate six to seven percentage points higher than traditional tied agents, a gap it attributed to being able to shop a customer’s price and cover across insurers rather than pushing one company’s product, per Balachander Sekhar’s interview with Business Today in November 2023.

The origin

Balachander Sekhar arrived at the idea after two decades inside the industry he wanted to disrupt. An alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta, he had been chief marketing officer at PNB MetLife, chief executive of Reliance Retail Insurance, and head of bancassurance at ABN AMRO before co-founding RenewBuy in 2015 alongside Devesh Joshi, Harman Preet Singh, Indraneel Chatterjee and Sandeep Nanda, per Crunchbase’s company record. His insight was structural: India’s insurance-selling workforce was overwhelmingly made up of tied agents who could offer only one insurer’s products and who rarely ventured past the country’s biggest 20 to 30 cities, leaving hundreds of millions of people in smaller towns effectively unreached. RenewBuy’s answer was to arm a distributed, technology-equipped advisor network with a multi-insurer app and push it deliberately into places larger insurers’ branch networks did not reach — a bet that, within a decade, would have RenewBuy sourcing 70% of its business from beyond India’s 30th-largest city and 35% from beyond its 100th, according to Sekhar’s November 2023 comments to Business Today.

The struggle years

The advisor network scaled quickly — from roughly 95,000 advisors in earlier reporting to more than 100,000 by mid-2023 and over 120,000 “digitally active” advisors by late 2023, per Entrackr’s July 2023 report and Sekhar’s subsequent interview — but the losses scaled faster. RoC filings reported by Entrackr show revenue growing from ₹86.93 crore in FY21 to ₹190.84 crore in FY22, a 2.2x jump; over the same year, the net loss went from ₹33.98 crore to ₹98.94 crore, a 2.9x jump — losses growing faster than the top line that was meant to justify them. FY23 was worse in absolute terms: revenue rose to ₹287 crore, but the loss widened again to ₹197 crore, per Entrackr’s later reporting citing the company’s FY24 filings for comparison.

The company had also told the market to expect better. In the same July 2023 report announcing its $40 million Series D tranche, RenewBuy said it was targeting profitability at the PAT level and an IPO by the end of 2023. Neither happened. FY24’s loss did narrow, to ₹114 crore, but by October 2024 — instead of an IPO announcement — Inc42 and Business Standard were both reporting that RenewBuy was in merger talks with rival InsuranceDekho. Even that path needed a bridge: in June 2025, RoC filings showed RenewBuy raising a further $10 million from existing backers Apis Partners and 360 One specifically, Entrackr reported, “to support RenewBuy’s business operations and expansion until the merger is finalised” — a company that had promised an IPO twenty months earlier now needed fresh capital simply to stay funded until it could be absorbed by someone else.

The turning point

The turning point was not a product launch or a viral quarter; it was the moment two loss-and-profit statements were placed side by side. When merger talks were first reported in October 2024, RenewBuy was carrying a FY24 net loss of ₹114 crore on ₹410 crore of revenue. InsuranceDekho, the Girnar Software-backed rival it was in talks with, was profitable that same year — Inc42 reported InsuranceDekho posted a ₹85.7 crore net profit in FY24, before slipping to a ₹47.5 crore loss in FY25 on operating revenue that had surged 73.5% year-on-year to ₹1,290 crore. One company had the network and the small-town reach; the other, for a while, had the profit. The logic of combining them showed up in the price: reports around the deal’s signing in May 2025 pegged the combined entity near ₹7,400 crore, with InsuranceDekho valued around ₹5,400 crore against RenewBuy’s roughly ₹1,800 crore — before the numbers were revised upward by the time the Competition Commission of India cleared the deal in November 2025, to a combined valuation near $1 billion (₹8,000 crore), split roughly ₹5,000-plus crore for InsuranceDekho and ₹3,000 crore for RenewBuy, per Inc42’s reporting on the CCI approval. Nine months after that clearance, on 1 September 2026, the merger closed and RenewBuy’s standalone brand was retired.

The money behind it

• Series C, June–August 2021: $45 million led by London-based Apis Partners, topped up by a further $10 million from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in August 2021, taking the round to roughly $55 million, as widely reported at the time.
• Artivatic.AI acquisition, 21 February 2022: RenewBuy acquired the AI-led insurtech Artivatic.AI in a roughly $10 million cash-and-share-swap deal, adding over 400 APIs and more than six patents in claims and underwriting technology, per Life Insurance International’s report of the deal.
• Debt round, November 2022: $8.5 million in venture debt from Stride Ventures and InnoVen Capital.
• Series D, July 2023: $40 million from Japanese insurer Dai-ichi Life Holdings, which Entrackr reported valued RenewBuy at about $364 million and gave Dai-ichi roughly an 11% stake.
• Bridge round, June 2025: $10 million from existing investors Apis Partners and 360 One (formerly IIFL Wealth), including ₹45 crore ($5 million) from Apis and named individual investors Gaurav Deepak, Gauri Taneja, Sanjay Kaul and Derrik Roshan Dsouza, per RoC filings reported by Entrackr, explicitly to fund operations through to the merger’s close.
• Total raised: about $143.10 million across nine rounds over the company’s life, per Inc42’s company profile, consistent with the roughly $133 million tally (equity plus debt) reported by Entrackr through the 2023 Series D before the 2025 top-up.

How RenewBuy makes money

RenewBuy’s revenue came from commissions and fees paid by insurers for policies sold through its platform, not from underwriting risk itself — the same basic mechanism as any insurance broker, run at a much larger and more distributed scale.

• Money in: override commissions from its panel of insurers (nearly 40 of them by late 2025) on every motor, health, life and travel policy sold through a RenewBuy-affiliated POSP advisor, plus renewal commissions on policies that stayed on the books year after year.
• Money out: commission payouts to the advisor network itself, technology and app development, advisor recruitment and training across 800-plus cities and towns, and customer-acquisition spend to keep the funnel of both advisors and end-customers growing.
• Where the margin sits: in the spread between what insurers pay RenewBuy for distribution and what RenewBuy pays its advisors and platform costs to generate that distribution — a spread that RoC filings suggest stayed negative through at least FY24.
• Neither company disclosed a specific commission or take-rate percentage in the sources reviewed for this piece, so that figure has been left out rather than estimated.
• The part people get wrong: RenewBuy was frequently described as an insurance company. It was not one — it never carried underwriting risk on its own balance sheet. Its business was building and running the sales network, not the policies themselves.

The numbers

Revenue climbed every year on record; profitability did not follow in a straight line. Figures below are from Registrar of Companies filings as reported by Entrackr and Inc42.

The FY24 revenue figure is reported by Entrackr as ₹410 crore and by Inc42 as ₹410.4 crore — the discrepancy is within rounding of RoC-filing summaries and both are shown for transparency rather than reconciled into one invented number.

Where the money comes from

• Product mix: motor insurance made up roughly 75% of RenewBuy’s business, with health and life insurance together accounting for the remaining 25% and growing over the two years to November 2023, per Sekhar’s interview with Business Today.
• Geographic mix — the surprise: 70% of RenewBuy’s business came from beyond India’s 30th-largest city, and 35% from beyond its 100th, spread across more than 800 cities, towns and districts (Business Today, November 2023; Entrackr, July 2023). For a venture-funded insurtech, the centre of gravity sat firmly outside India’s metros.
• Distribution scale: the advisor network grew from roughly 95,000 to more than 120,000 “digitally active” advisors between 2022 and late 2023 (Entrackr; Business Today), and the merged InsuranceDekho–RenewBuy entity reported more than six lakh digital partners as of 31 March 2026 (Inc42, September 2026).
• Combined-entity reach post-merger: the merged platform reported coverage of 98.57% of India’s pin codes, 750-plus insurance products across motor, health, life, travel, commercial and corporate lines, partnerships with 52 insurers, and more than two crore policies facilitated since inception, as of 31 March 2026 (Inc42, September 2026).

The risks

• Concentration in a single, regulated product line. With roughly three-quarters of its business in motor insurance as of late 2023 (Business Today), RenewBuy’s fortunes were tied closely to a segment whose third-party premium rates are set annually by IRDAI — a regulatory lever the company itself did not control and that can compress or expand distribution margins at will.
• Persistent, widening losses funded by serial capital raises. Net losses ran from ₹34 crore in FY21 to ₹197 crore in FY23 before narrowing to ₹114 crore in FY24 (Entrackr), a trajectory that forced the company to keep returning to investors — including a bridge round in June 2025 explicitly raised to fund operations “until the merger is finalised” (Entrackr) — rather than reaching self-sustaining profitability on its own.
• Loss of independence and integration risk. As of 1 September 2026, RenewBuy no longer exists as a standalone brand; its network, technology and people are being folded into InsuranceDekho under InsuranceDekho’s founder-CEO Ankit Agrawal (Inc42, September 2026). Merging a south-India-weighted advisor network with a north-and-west-India-weighted one, under new leadership, carries the ordinary execution risk of any large post-merger integration — management attention, technology-stack consolidation and advisor retention all have to hold at once.

The takeaway

RenewBuy proved a real thesis: India’s smaller cities and towns had genuine, underserved demand for insurance, and a distributed, multi-insurer advisor network could reach them more effectively than tied agents ever did. What it could not prove, across a decade and roughly $143 million of outside capital, was that this kind of reach could be built profitably on its own. Revenue rising five-fold between FY21 and FY25 was not enough by itself; the losses in between rose just as fast, and an IPO promised for the end of 2023 quietly became a merger by 2026. The lesson generalises past insurance: scaling a network is not the same accomplishment as scaling a margin, and when the two diverge for long enough, the exit is not always a listing — sometimes it is folding into whoever solved the profit side of the same problem first.

Frequently asked questions

What did RenewBuy do?

RenewBuy was an IRDAI-licensed insurance broker that distributed motor, health, life and travel insurance policies from a panel of nearly 40 insurers through a network of technology-equipped, independent advisors, reaching more than 800 cities and towns across India.

Who founded RenewBuy, and when?

RenewBuy was founded in 2015 in Gurugram by Balachander Sekhar along with Devesh Joshi, Harman Preet Singh, Indraneel Chatterjee and Sandeep Nanda, per Crunchbase’s company record; Sekhar previously held leadership roles at PNB MetLife, Reliance Retail Insurance and ABN AMRO.

How much money did RenewBuy raise, and from whom?

RenewBuy raised about $143.10 million across nine rounds over its life (Inc42), including a $45 million Series C led by Apis Partners in 2021 (topped up by $10 million from IFC), a $40 million Series D from Dai-ichi Life Holdings in 2023 that reportedly valued it at about $364 million (Entrackr), and a $10 million bridge round from Apis Partners and 360 One in 2025.

What happened to RenewBuy in the InsuranceDekho merger?

After merger talks first surfaced in October 2024 (Inc42; Business Standard) and the Competition Commission of India cleared the deal in November 2025, RenewBuy formally merged into InsuranceDekho on 1 September 2026. The combined company operates under the InsuranceDekho brand, led by InsuranceDekho co-founder Ankit Agrawal, while RenewBuy’s founders continue with the merged organisation.

Was RenewBuy ever profitable?

No net profit was found in the RoC filings summarised by Entrackr and Inc42 for FY21 through FY24. Losses widened from ₹33.98 crore in FY21 to ₹197 crore in FY23 before narrowing to ₹114 crore in FY24; a FY25 profit or loss figure for RenewBuy specifically was not found in the sources reviewed.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “RenewBuy secures $40 Mn in ongoing Series D round”, July 2023
• Entrackr, “Renewbuy raises $10 Mn from Apis Partners and 360 One: Report”, June 2025
• Entrackr, “InsuranceDekho and RenewBuy officially announce merger”, September 2026
• Inc42, “InsuranceDekho, RenewBuy Nearing Merger At Unicorn Tag”, October 2024
• Inc42, “CCI Greenlights InsuranceDekho, RenewBuy Merger With Artivatic”, November 2025
• Inc42, “InsuranceDekho + RenewBuy: Ankit Agrawal On Making Of A Pan-India Insurance Distribution Giant”, September 2026
• Inc42, RenewBuy company profile (funding total, FY25 revenue), accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “InsuranceDekho merger to create new leader in segment, says RenewBuy”, October 2024
• Business Standard, “InsuranceDekho, RenewBuy merge to form largest AI-led insurance platform”, September 2026
• Business Today, “We are doing 70% of our insurance business beyond the 30th city: Balachander Sekhar of RenewBuy”, November 2023
• Life Insurance International, “RenewBuy acquires Artivatic.AI to bolster insurtech capabilities”, February 2022
• Crunchbase, RenewBuy company profile (founders, funding rounds), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, RenewBuy company profile (headquarters, employee estimate), accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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