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Startup Deep Dive : Nova Benefits — Profitable in 2026 after a Rs 4.6 crore FY25 loss

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Nova Benefits.

In FY25, Nova Benefits posted a net loss of ₹4.6 crore ($1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) even as its revenue fell 11% to ₹7.8 crore, according to Inc42 Datalabs. A year later the Bengaluru insurance broker was telling reporters it had turned profitable, with an annualised premium run rate of ₹150 crore ($15.6 million) flowing through its books.

Both statements are true, and the gap between them is the story. Nova Benefits does not sell health insurance itself — it is a licensed broker that places group health cover for other companies’ employees, which means the premium it moves and the revenue it keeps are two very different numbers. Understanding why a five-year-old startup can swing from loss to “profitable” inside twelve months, on a business that only books a sliver of the money passing through it, is the point of this piece.

Quick facts

Company Nova Benefits (NovaBenefits Insurance Brokers Private Limited)
Founded October 2020, Bengaluru; incorporated 18 November 2020 (YourStory; Tofler)
Founder(s) Saransh Garg (Founder-CEO) and Yash Gupta (Co-founder)
Businesses Group health insurance broking, employee wellness (telehealth, mental health, maternity benefits), and Reco, a newer commercial-insurance line (cyber, D&O, professional indemnity, property)
Latest FY revenue ₹7.8 crore (FY25, Inc42 Datalabs)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹4.6 crore (FY25, Inc42 Datalabs)
Listed Private; not listed on any exchange
Market value / last valuation Not independently confirmed; total disclosed funding of $11 million-plus across four rounds (Inc42 Datalabs)
Key shareholders / CEO Saransh Garg (Founder-CEO); investors include Titan Capital, Better Capital, Multiply Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group (SIG)

What Nova Benefits does

Nova Benefits is an IRDAI-licensed direct insurance broker that helps employers buy and administer group health insurance for their staff, then layers wellness services on top. A company signs up, Nova recommends and places a group health policy with an insurer, and employees get a web and mobile app to view their cover, find cashless hospitals and track claims. The company says it works with 500-plus client companies covering more than 200,000 employees, with clients including Snapdeal, Netflix, Tata group entities, Cipla, Shiprocket, Hitachi, Moneyview and Cleanmax (Nova Benefits website; The Financial Express, March 2026).

The origin

Saransh Garg had already done a stint as an investor at Accel Partners and then started a fintech company, Prodigal, which went through Y Combinator. Prodigal was built for the US market, and personal reasons brought Garg back to India. While running his own small outfit, he hit a wall that had nothing to do with fintech: he could not find a straightforward way to buy health insurance for his seven-person team. There was no single platform to compare plans, get unbiased advice, or get quick answers, and researching the options properly took hours he did not have (YourStory, April 2021).

He brought the problem to his friend Yash Gupta, who had worked at Samsung in South Korea and had experienced the opposite: comprehensive health cover, a point of contact for every claim, at zero out-of-pocket cost. Comparing notes, the two found what Garg later called “a rabbit hole of insurance problems” — Indian group policies that covered hospitalisation only, employees who did not know their own company offered a plan, and insurers with almost no API infrastructure to share claims data. In October 2020 they founded Nova Benefits to fix the experience end to end (YourStory, April 2021).

The founders did not start by trying to be a platform for everyone. They began by charging founders of other companies by the hour to shortlist and negotiate health plans on their behalf. When those founders started paying, Garg says the team realised two things at once: the service had real value, and the addressable market was every company in India, because every company is a potential buyer of employee health cover. That was, in his words, the “eureka moment” that turned an hourly consulting exercise into a broking business built on technology (YourStory, April 2021).

The struggle years

Nova Benefits’ setbacks are visible less in dramatic near-death stories and more in the numbers the company has had to publish as an IRDAI-regulated broker. Two are worth naming with their dates.

Neither event is the kind of company-ending crisis that makes for an easy narrative. Together, though, they describe a business that grew fast on early capital, then had to fund a period of higher spending — likely tied to building out claims operations, automation and the Reco commercial-insurance line — without a fresh external round to cushion the loss.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point on record is the one between FY25 and the company’s own account of where it stood roughly a year later. On one side: a FY25 net loss of ₹4.6 crore, revenue down 11% to ₹7.8 crore, and a negative net margin of 59.0% (Inc42 Datalabs). On the other side: a company statement, reported by The Financial Express in March 2026, that Nova Benefits had “turned profitable” while reaching an annualised premium run rate of ₹150 crore and cover for more than 200,000 employees.

Founder Saransh Garg framed the shift as a service story rather than a pure numbers story: “Reaching profitability while continuing to grow our corporate client base is an important milestone for Nova. Corporate insurance is ultimately a trust-driven business” (The Financial Express, March 2026). The company attributes part of the turnaround to automation — it says about 90% of reimbursement claim forms are now auto-filled, roughly 30% of underwriting work is automated, and around 30% of customer-support queries are handled by AI systems, cutting the manual cost of servicing each policy (The Financial Express, March 2026).

The money behind it

Nova Benefits has raised at least $11 million across four disclosed rounds since 2021, according to Inc42 Datalabs, with two additional 2022 rounds of undisclosed size layered on top of that figure.

What each backer changed, on the record: Better Capital’s Vaibhav Domkundwar — an early investor in fellow insurtech and fintech names Open, Rupeek and Riskcovry — backed Nova at seed on the thesis that “the fastest growing company in the category” needed capital to scale before incumbents caught up on technology (YourStory, April 2021). Titan Capital’s Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, as Snapdeal’s founders, lent a well-known consumer-internet network to a team that was still mostly unknown outside Bengaluru. SIG and Bessemer’s Series A, the largest round by far, marked the shift from an angel-and-seed cap table to global growth-stage investors underwriting a ten-fold jump in capital in under five months. A specific, current valuation for Nova Benefits was not independently confirmed by more than one source at the time of writing, so it has been left out rather than estimated.

How it makes money

Nova Benefits does not charge the companies that use its platform a subscription fee for the core broking service; in its early days it was explicit that the platform “is currently free for its clients” (YourStory, April 2021). As a licensed insurance broker, its revenue comes primarily from commission paid by insurers on the group health premium it places and renews on behalf of client companies, supplemented by up-selling wellness packages and value-added services. Its newer Reco brand extends the same brokerage model into commercial lines such as cyber, D&O, professional indemnity and property cover (The Financial Express, March 2026).

The company has not published a specific brokerage or take-rate percentage, so no figure is given here.

The numbers

Nova Benefits’ operating entity, NovaBenefits Insurance Brokers Private Limited, has two years of financials on the public record in enough detail to compare; earlier years have not been independently verified and are left out rather than estimated.

Metric (₹ crore unless stated) FY24 FY25
Revenue 8.73 (up 176% YoY, Tofler) 7.8 (down 11% YoY, Inc42 Datalabs)
Total expenses Not independently disclosed 12.4 (up 27% YoY, Inc42 Datalabs)
Profit/(loss) after tax Profitable (net margin +33.9%, Tofler); absolute figure not independently disclosed -4.6 (net margin -59.0%, Inc42 Datalabs)

Where the money comes from

Nova Benefits splits its client base by company size rather than by geography, and has recently added a second product line to diversify beyond group health.

The risks

The takeaway

The most useful lesson in Nova Benefits’ record is not about insurance at all. It is about the gap between the size of the business a company appears to run and the size of the business it actually owns. A ₹150 crore premium run rate sounds like a company several times larger than one booking ₹7.8 crore of annual revenue, and both numbers can be true of the same broker in the same stretch of time, because a broker’s balance sheet reflects its commission, not the money it moves for someone else. Founders and observers who confuse the two — inflating a platform’s importance by quoting the gross value flowing through it rather than what it actually keeps — end up misjudging exactly how fragile or how resilient a business is. Nova’s own FY25 loss, arriving in a year when its stated scale kept growing, is a reminder that in a commission business, growth in volume and growth in earnings are not the same graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does Nova Benefits do?

Nova Benefits is an IRDAI-licensed insurance broker that helps Indian companies buy and administer group health insurance for employees, and layers on wellness services such as telehealth and mental health support. It has more recently added a commercial-insurance brand, Reco, covering cyber, D&O, professional indemnity and property risks.

Who founded Nova Benefits, and when?

Saransh Garg and Yash Gupta founded Nova Benefits in October 2020 in Bengaluru, after Garg struggled to find a straightforward group health plan for his own small team (YourStory, April 2021).

How much funding has Nova Benefits raised?

Inc42 Datalabs lists at least $11 million raised across four rounds: a $1 million seed round in April 2021, a $10 million Series A in September 2021 led by Susquehanna International Group and Bessemer Venture Partners, and two further 2022 rounds of undisclosed size from AngelList and SHL Capital.

Is Nova Benefits profitable?

It depends on the year. Tofler’s filings-based data shows the company profitable in FY24 (net margin of +33.9%), then Inc42 Datalabs shows a net loss of ₹4.6 crore in FY25. The company told The Financial Express in March 2026 that it had since turned profitable again, at a ₹150 crore annualised premium run rate.

Who are Nova Benefits’ main competitors?

CB Insights lists Plum, Bharatsure and ekincare among its closest competitors, alongside other employee-benefits platforms such as Loop Health, Onsurity and Pazcare that operate in the same corporate health insurance and wellness space in India.

Sources

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

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