Zibika.com

Zibika.com is an Indian origin insurance search engine operating from India and founded by Vivek Doraiswami in 2007.
The company was incorporated in October 2007 and was among India's first online insurance comparison sites by providing policy information for many insurance plans in 2008 as well as providing information on bank loans, credit cards and mutual funds.
Zibika operates as a licensed eBroker with the IRDA and sells life, health, travel, home and motor insurance. The Indian environment for online insurance is primarily based on lead generation and call centre based sales. Consumers fill up forms on insurance comparison sites who in turn sell the contact information to insurance companies as leads. This model became a nightmare for consumers and it was reviewed by regulatory authorities in India and new guidelines were issued in November 2011 in order to control and curb harassment from telemarketers. Zibika on the other hand does not have any personalised fields on their search forms, and their model seems to only support direct online ecommerce.
Versions and history
Zibika was launched as a social media-based personal finance aggregation site in 2008 but that did not work out well from a revenue perspective and it was aiming to transition into a broking site for insurance in 2009.
It was in talks with Rediff.com for investments but the deal fell through due to undisclosed circumstances. Some Zibika team members from the 2009 team left and started their own venture after securing funding from Rediff. They were part of the Zibika team when Rediff was considering it for funding.
It was reported online that as per a statement issued by the company's CEO, Zibika decided to go offline in 2010 owing to financial issues with the possibility of the site making a comeback later.
Competition
While Zibika has been active for a while, the Indian market has a mix of several online insurance web sites like policybazaar.com, Insurancepandit.com, easyinsuranceindia.com, policytiger.com, easypolicy.com and several other players. Almost all of these sites are call centre based web sites selling insurance through telecallers on leads generated online.
Investments
The company was initially funded with a small amount of seed funding from a California-based investor who also advises young firms in Silicon Valley as reported by the LA Times in May 2009 .
Current status
The site was made live again in 2012, operating as a subsidiary of Safeway Insurance Brokers. As on date, Zibika does not engage in lead generation activities and online quotes for insurance from this site does not ask for any personal contact information. On the general insurance side, Zibika presently provides online plans in health, travel and motor from HDFC Ergo, Bajaj Allianz, Royal Sundaram, Reliance General, TATA AIG, IFFCO Tokio, Max Bupa, Star Health and Apollo Munich. On the life insurance side, Zibika only focusses on term insurance plans and has integrated with several leading life insurers in India: HDFC Life, ICICI Prudential, Bharti Axa, Aviva, IndiaFirst Life.

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