Flourish Ventures, a venture capital spinoff from Omidyar Network, is understood to be closing an investment in Indonesian insurance tech company, Qoala.id., according to sources aware of the development. Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment arm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched Flourish Ventures in March last year to focus on financial services, particularly the fintech space.
While financial details could not be ascertained, industry sources peg the Series A round to be around $5 million. Flourish Ventures did not respond to a DealStreetAsia query seeking comment. And, Qoala.id founder and CEO Hershet Lunani replied: “I can’t comment at this time but…happy to have a chat in a couple of weeks on this.”
Qoala.id partners with insurers to offer cover against phone screen damage, e-commerce logistics, and flight delays. It underwrites risk for high-frequency events, provides digital fraud detection technology, and offers a photo-based claims process.
So, users don’t need to fill cumbersome paperwork and can simply upload photos of their documents using the Qoala app. The company also promises to process claims immediately so that payments are released within a day. However, it charges a fee for the use of its platform as well as insurance services. Qoala also works with travel-booking service platforms such as PegiPegi (acquired by Traveloka in 2018), PadiCiti, and MNC Travel.
In April 2019, Qoala closed its seed round that added over $1.5 million to the startup’s capital base. The investment was led by Sequoia India’s seed-funding arm Surge with participation from returning Singapore-based backer SeedPlus and Massachusetts-based MassMutual Ventures.
According to CrunchBase data, its investors include Seedplus, Genesia Ventures, Central Capital Ventura, Surge, Mass MutualVentures.
Till 2018, Omidyar Network had globally invested $200 million across over 45 startups in financial services including 13 in India. From 2019, Flourish claimed to have a capital pool of around $300 million to invest in global frontier financial services companies, over a five-year period according to media reports.
Of the $300 million, it has invested over $60 million by the middle of 2019, according to media reports. In 2019, Flourish invested in neobank Yelo and digital lender Shubhloans in India and made follow-on investments in fintech startups ZestMoney, Indifi, Kaleidofin and also in Toffee, an online insurance platform. These were co-investments with Omidyar Network India.
Indonesia, south-east Asia’s largest market, has been seeing deal activity in the insur-tech space. One of the prominent deals includes Pasarpolis that saw Indonesian unicorns, Gojek, Tokoedia and Traveloka, investing in the insur-tech startup.
