For more than half a decade, Zopper built a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, helping merchants with invoicing and payments through its point-of-sale platform. It sold that IP to PhonePe in mid-2018, but instead of joining the fintech giant, Zopper has been working on a new venture from scratch and independent of PhonePe. That business, an API platform for insurance infrastructure, said on Tuesday it has raised $75 million in new funding.

The New Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series C funding was led by Creaegis. ICICI Venture and Bessemer Venture Partners as well as existing backer Blume Ventures also participated in the funding, the startup said. Zopper, an 11-year-old startup, has raised $96 million to date. It didn’t disclose the valuation at which it closed the round.

Zopper works with insurance providers and creates byte-sized, personalized products that it then supplies to distribution partners. This approach differentiates Zopper from many of its competitors in India that are aggregating coverages from different manufacturers and attempting to cut the distributors and directly reach consumers.

"If you look at the penetration of insurance in India today, it's just 3 to 4%," said Surjendu Kuila, founder and chief executive of Zopper, in an interview. "If you're trying to bring new people to the fold of insurance, you just cannot sell them schemes that are priced above $37 to $50 a year."

Offering customers slivers of insurance coverages in smaller sachets, too, hasn't proven successful because there's no margin for anyone to make money, he said.

Zopper is attempting to solve this by partnering with banks, non-banking financial institutions, retail chains, mobility firms that already have a captive customerbase. "These partners need an insurance platform, and that's what we provide," he said.

Kuila claimed that no other firm is taking this approach and hence has not been able to lower their cost of customer acquisition. "That's the reason why even Policybazaar [online insurance aggregator that became a public company last year] is not profitable," he said. Zopper, in contrast, has been profitable for over 18 months, he said.