Why Small Shops Can't Get Insured in India

Millions of small shops in India have no insurance at all. Most insurance companies ask for years of tax records and bank statements before they'll sell a shop a policy.

Most small shop owners don't have those records, or don't want to show them, because they run their business mostly in cash.

So when something bad happens — a fire, a flood, a robbery — they lose everything, and there's no one to help them recover.

Policybazaar connects people to an old-fashioned, phone-call-based selling process — not built for cash-only small shops. Riskcovry and Zopper help businesses plug insurance into their apps, but even they say small, undocumented businesses are hard to serve because there's no good data on them.

That's the exact gap we're trying to fill. It's not empty, untouched ground — but it's ground nobody has clearly won yet.