Insurtech BimaPe shuts down, founder to launch new venture Verak

BimaPe, the fintech startup that helped its customers to discover hidden insurance benefits, has announced closure of its business. Rahul Mathur, the 23-year-old founder, took to Twitter on Wednesday to announce the development. The company was launched in November 2020. He also shared his plans to launch a new brand called Verak, which will be open to the public around March 2022.

“We were unable to reach our Market-Product Fit (PMF) metrics set in March 2021. Coming out of Y Combinator, we used three input metrics — Activation, Acquisition and Revenue metrics to measure PMF. Over a 3-month window — we fell short of the targets for each of these three input metrics despite executing ~15 changes (one per week).”

He added, “We spoke with 500+ enthusiastic customers who resonated with the problem which gave us the confidence to start up. However, we’ve realised that many well-wishers and users care more about us (as a team) rather than us (as a company offering a product) — which is nice but not enough to build a real business.”

BimaPe recently raised pre-seed capital led by venture capital firm Lightspeed. Y Combinator, Titan Capital, iSeed and Gemba Capital also participated in the round. The funds raised now will be channelled towards its upcoming offering. Before founding Bimape, Rahul Mathur was working in London. He left his well-cushioned job with an aim to put family’s insurance on autopilot.

Mathur also announced the launch of new insuretech called Verak. The details of the product have not been shared yet but the new company will be under the same legal entity.

“Verak will open to the public around March 2022 – until then, we will allow limited beta access. Thank you for your support, feedback and good wishes over the past few months every small thing counts Folded hands,” said Mathur.

In his blog Mathur also talked about the mistakes he made, “Before writing a single line of code, we created a product vision in Figma which was a prototype of what the BimaPe Wallet product would look like in ~6 months and ~12 months. Sadly, none of us realised that vision is only a goal. The strategy required us to convert that goal into a coherent set of actions (i.e. which feature to launch, when and why?). We didn’t spend time planning the actions and jumped straight in from vision into execution which led to sub-optimal engineering decisions.”

He also said that he mistook a design problem for an engineering problem. “A gradual realisation for us was that the ‘Technical’ risk in our product was not engineering related but rather design related. Since the underlying insurance product(s) are so complicated, design is more important than engineering. And, in fact, this design problem is not something we can solve as an insurance broker — it is a structural issue in the industry.”