On a Tuesday evening in Erode, Tamil Nadu, Karthik is back at his dining table.
The 42-year-old has spent most of his working life selling life insurance the analogue way—door to door in his small town. Now, Karthik is a point-of-sale person for Turtlemint, one of the thousands of advisors who sell insurance under its broker licence.
On his Turtlemint Pro app, a row of motor, health, and term plans glows on screen as he walks a young bank clerk and his wife through premiums and add-ons. They know him from their housing colony. When they sign, they’re not really trusting a new-age fintech brand; they’re trusting Karthik. Turtlemint is just the software in the middle.
Over a thousand kilometres away, Anya, a 25-year-old consultant in Mumbai, is buying the same product in a different way. She opens Policybazaar on her phone, keys in her age and city, and scrolls through a stacked comparison of health plans. If she’s stuck, a call rep in Gurugram can nudge her over the line.
The two platforms, trying to sell insurance to a country that doesn’t buy enough, have staked opposite bets.
Turtlemint believes that insurance is still sold, not bought, so scale comes from digitising trust. In late January, the company filed an updated DRHP with the markets regulator, Sebi, for a Rs 2,000-crore IPO, comprising a fresh issue of Rs 660 crore and an offer-for-sale of nearly 30 million shares.
Its co-founder, Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, an ex-ICICI Lombard executive,
Policybazaar, on the other hand, has been betting for 18 years that insurance can be bought like shopping on Amazon.
The company’s B2C model has sold almost 47 million policies as of 2025, and has even turned profitable in the process. After a tepid debut in November 2021, the 15-year-old fintech’s stock bottomed out in 2022 and has since surged 67% as of February.
“In hindsight, Policybazaar’s IPO came with a simpler pitch to retail investors.
