In October 2021, Acko raised $255 million in a Series D round and became India's 34th unicorn. The company had been licensed to sell insurance only four years earlier.
Varun Dua founded Acko in November 2016 in Bengaluru. The insurer received its IRDAI licence in September 2017 and began operations in 2018. It was built as a direct-to-consumer business from the start, with no agent network, selling motor, health and travel cover through its own channels and through partners such as Amazon India and Ola.
The model bet that people who were already buying something else online would buy insurance at the same moment.
The early backing came from Amazon, Accel, SAIF Partners and Catamaran Ventures, roughly $42 million by 2018. The model bet that people who were already buying something else online would buy insurance at the same moment.
The company also reached into cars beyond cover. Acko Drive launched in Bengaluru in 2019, an online car purchase portal followed in 2020, and in 2022 it added car financing and maintenance. By 2024 Acko Drive operated in 12 cities.
Not everything went smoothly. IRDAI fined the company INR 1 crore for lapses in its outsourcing and commission practices. And the economics stayed hard: FY25 revenue rose 35% to INR 2,837 crore, but the net loss, though down 37%, was still INR 424 crore. A 2026 report said the insurance arm posted a profit of INR 43.6 crore in FY26.
Now Acko is heading to the market. It has hired Kotak, ICICI Securities and Morgan Stanley for an IPO of up to $350 million, targeting a valuation of $2 to $2.5 billion, above the $1.4 billion it fetched in 2021. A confidential filing is planned for the second half of 2026 and a listing in the first half of 2027. Peer Digit's volatile trading since its 2024 listing is the benchmark the public market will use.
For founders, the pattern is worth noticing. Acko's growth has leaned on distribution partners, which gave it scale quickly, but it also means a large part of its fate sits in other companies' hands. Borrowed customers are cheap to get and costly to keep.