Warburg Pincus, a leading global growth investor, in partnership with seasoned executive Abhishek Bhatia, today announced a USD350 million equity commitment to establish Oona Insurance (“Oona”), a digital general insurance platform in Southeast Asia. This investment represents the largest funding round in the region to seed a digital insurance platform.
Through a buy-and-build strategy, Oona aims to become the pre-eminent digital general insurance platform in Southeast Asia. The platform is seeded with two significant acquisitions – PT Asuransi Bina Dana Arta Tbk (“ABDA”) in Indonesia and Mapfre Insular Insurance Corporation (“MIIC”) in the Philippines, both of which have a long-standing track record and reputation in their respective markets for providing quality products and superior customer service. These assets bring Oona an initial product portfolio, strong distribution relationships, a robust infrastructure, and an immediate foothold in the region upon which to build its business. The companies will be rebranded as Oona in due course.
Operating in a large and fast-growing sector, Oona plans to deploy a unique value creation strategy to scale up into Southeast Asia’s leading digital general insurance platform with operations across multiple major markets in the region.
With the acquisition of ABDA and MIIC, Oona carries a wide range of products, including motor, property, and group health insurance, which are designed to be fit-for-market and well-suited to meet local customer demands. In addition, Oona plans to introduce new products such as travel, health as well as products that are emerging on the back of increasing adoption of internet, e-commerce, and digital payments.
Oona will invest meaningfully to build a new tech stack with a focus on leveraging market leading technology to significantly enhance customer experience, with the aim to be the number one choice for partners and customers alike based on its customer service, technology, and strong brand.
Abhishek Bhatia, Group CEO of Oona, said, “General insurance is a significantly underpenetrated industry in the region and a sector that’s ripe for digital disruption. Legacy systems and mindset amongst incumbents provide a real opportunity to create a truly customer-focused organization with a strong tech and brand spine. I am very excited to partner with Warburg Pincus to build Oona into a truly world-class company. With the support of Warburg Pincus, Oona will continue to explore opportunities to deepen the depth and breadth of its presence in key markets in Southeast Asia. All the assets and operations will be consolidated under a coherent operating model and a common brand and tech stack, positioning us well to capture the rapidly growing opportunities for digital general insurance in the region.”
Saurabh Agarwal, Managing Director at Warburg Pincus, said, “With consistently rising incomes and accelerating digital adoption, we believe Oona is well positioned to capture the tremendous growth opportunity for digital insurance across Southeast Asia. We are excited about our partnership with Abhishek and Oona’s talented management team and look forward to leveraging our deep expertise in the insurance sector to support Oona’s growth aspirations. With our steadfast commitment, we are confident that Oona will evolve into a truly differentiated platform that will consolidate the market and create the most compelling insurance products to reach the massively underserved market in the region.”
This investment is consistent with Warburg Pincus’ approach of investing capital and resources behind best-in-class entrepreneurs to create de novo platforms to capture the high-growth opportunities in the region. Some of the most prominent examples include ESR, the largest real asset fund manager in Asia; PDG, a leading developer and operator of data centers in Asia Pacific; and Asia Self Storage, the largest self-storage company in Asia. Warburg Pincus is also one of the most active investors in the insurance sector globally. Over the past 30+ years, Warburg Pincus has invested over $3 billion of equity capital in over 25 insurance companies globally that operate across all parts of the insurance value chain.
