Introducing Plum Lite - a self serve model for SMEs, Early Stage Startups and Gig workers

By Abhishek Poddar, Co-Founder and CEO, Plum

When we started Plum in November 2019, we had a focal vision - that of insuring 10 million people, in what is a heavily underserved market. According to the 75th National Sample Survey, over 80% of Indians do not have a health cover. Among rural Indians, 85.9 percent don’t have any health expenditure coverage. In the case of urban Indians, it is marginally better at 80.9 per cent.

As our journey progressed, our vision expanded and we now work in the entire gamut of transforming employee healthcare experience as feedback from our customers. 24 months down the line, I am proud to say that we have crossed the following milestones:

1000+ customers ranging from small, mid to large organisations
1000+ employees attending and availing our wellness and healthcare initiatives on a weekly basis

However, we are on a serious mission and must look ahead. While we have started making early inroads, we are well aware that there are still segments of the society that find it hard to access a high-quality health benefits plan, let alone Group Healthcare Insurance.

Among them are key being: Early-stage startups, SMEs and the entire Gig community.

Introducing Plum Lite

As per the MSME Ministry data, India has 6.3 crore MSMEs. Similarly, India is likely to have 350 million gig jobs by 2025. Together these are high growth segments that are set to be important drivers of the Indian economy. Though, did you know that the current labour laws do not have any provisions for insurance benefits to be provided to gig workers in India? Further, companies with less than 7 employees can almost never provide group health insurance or health benefits to their employees from day one.

Since the beginning of our journey, we set out to redefine the odds and after launching covers for mental wellness, the LGBTQ community, we have now launched another path-breaking self-serve product, called ‘Plum Lite’ - a comprehensive health benefits membership specifically for Early-stage startups, SMEs and the Gig community.

Plum Lite Features — Features of Plum Lite

What Makes Plum Lite The First-of-its-Kind?

Our biggest insight for “Plum Lite” is that the best businesses struggle when purchasing health insurance and wellness benefits for their team. There are three major challenges.

Accessibility - smaller companies cannot access high quality insurance plans. It takes them months to build and negotiate a plan. With Plum Lite, companies as small as two can start thinking health-first from day one.
Affordability - health insurance is very expensive for smaller companies. In what could be a Jio-moment for health insurance, Plum-Lite starts at a monthly subscription of INR 85 per member/ per month.
Usability - employees of these companies are stuck when they have to actually use their insurance. Our model is self-serve, fully automated and claims can be made on WhatsApp as well.

We decided to build Plum to make employer health insurance affordable, accessible and high-quality. Moving forward towards our vision, with Plum Lite, early stage startups, SMEs and the gig economy can now provide quality healthcare to their employees.

How can you get early access?

As a Founder, I understand the struggles of building early stage teams and also having them covered by a high quality health benefits plan. Hence, I am especially proud of what we have created through Plum Lite (do take a look!).

If you are an early stage Founder, I am open for a chat and sharing my journey with you. You can write to me at abhishek@plumhq.com.

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Check out Plum Insurance here.