We missed this earlier.
Insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar is set to go public via a Rs 4,000 crore initial public offering, Mint reported last week. The public listing will lead the company to dilute 15% stake. Etechaces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd., the parent company of PolicyBazaar and lending marketplace PaisaBazaar, has invited proposals from at least eight investment banks for the proposed IPO and will shortlist merchant banks next month. MoneyControl reported on Monday that Kotak Mahindra Capital, Morgan Stanley, ICICI Securities, and Citibank are likely to be advisors.
In July 2020, PolicyBazaar CEO Yashish Dahiya had said that the company plans to go public in India before September 2021 and raise $500 million at a valuation of $3.5 billion.
PolicyBazaar’s investors include Temasek Holdings, Tencent Holdings, Softbank Vision Fund, Info Edge India, Tiger Global Management, True North, Steadview Capital, Ribbit Capital, Inventus, Chiratae Ventures, and Wellington Management.
PolicyBazaar had said last July that it expects to return to profitability in FY21 given the demand surge for insurance products amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In FY21, the company expects to post revenues of Rs 1,000 crore and a marginal profit. It also estimates insurance premium collection for the current fiscal year to be at Rs 6,000 crore from Rs 4,000 crore in FY20.
Policybazaar was profitable in FY18, but in the following two financial years, it did not make profits. Despite booking a loss, its revenue jumped three-fold while it doubled both market share and valuation at the end of FY20, said Yashish Dahiya, chief executive of Policybazaar, in a statement last year.
In November, one of PolicyBazaar’s earliest investors, Info Edge, had said that the company has been preparing itself for an IPO. Info Edge’s CFO Chintan Thakkar had said that a company’s journey from start-up to IPO is quite long and one needs to be prepared for it. Talking about both PolicyBazaar and Zomato, he had said that “there is definitely an intention behind it [the IPO], but when it will happen is a premature question to answer,” he said. The focus then was to assess whether a company is ready, “so that when you finally decide that you want to go for it, we will go for it”.
