Ditto Insurance Founder Story — Shrehith Karkera, Bhanu Gurram & Pawan Rai | India's Advisory-First Insurance Platform | Zerodha-Backed | Profitable | UpForge

Three Friends Who Skipped Placements and Simplified Money

The decision to skip campus placements at IIM Ahmedabad is not taken lightly. The placement season at India's most prestigious management school is a carefully orchestrated event with offers from McKinsey, Goldman, BCG, and every consumer goods company that understands how strong the talent coming out of Ahmedabad is. Shrehith Karkera, Bhanu Harish Gurram, and Pawan Kumar Rai looked at the placement season in 2018 and decided, collectively, that it was not for them.

"The corporate nine-to-five grind wasn't for either of us," Shrehith said later. The IIMAvericks fellowship — IIM Ahmedabad's entrepreneurship support programme — gave the founding team a monthly stipend that made the leap possible. They launched Finception in 2018, writing long-form explainers about financial markets for a generation of Indians who wanted to understand the stock market but found every available resource either too technical or too patronising. Shrehith taught part-time at coaching institutes to keep the lights on while the newsletter found its audience.

In 2019, the format pivoted to Finshots — one story per day, three minutes to read, delivered every morning, free of charge, with no jargon. A video explaining Jet Airways' collapse went viral. Nithin Kamath of Zerodha watched it, called the founders in, and Rainmatter invested ₹4 crore. By 2020, Finshots had 500,000 subscribers — every one of them acquired without spending a rupee on advertising. The audience was the product. And the product — trust, built one clear explanation at a time — was about to be put to its hardest test yet.

The ₹70,000 Hospital Bill, the AMA and the Birth of Ditto

Bhanu Harish Gurram's hospitalisation was not a business insight — it was a personal crisis. He spent 15 days in hospital. The bill was ₹70,000. He had insurance, which paid it. But the realisation of what that meant hit him with the force that only proximity to financial ruin can deliver: "If I didn't have the insurance back then, we would have been bankrupt and packed our bags and moved back."

His co-founders had been watching the same dynamic play out across their 500,000 Finshots readers. An AMA — Ask Me Anything — they posted on personal finance attracted 600 responses out of 2,000 who saw it. The overwhelming theme: insurance. People were confused about what they needed, scared of what they were being sold, and unable to find anyone who would help them understand without trying to sell them something at the same time.

After eight months of research into insurance regulation, broker licencing, and product design, the team launched Ditto Insurance in February 2021. The model was a deliberate inversion of everything the insurance industry was doing. No spam calls. No upselling. No comparison theatre that reduced a life insurance policy to a price point. Instead: book a free consultation with a trained advisor. Be listened to. Receive a recommendation based on your actual situation. Buy only what you need. Zerodha and Rainmatter acquired a majority stake in the company. Max Life Insurance came on board as the first insurer partner. Lokesh Gurram — IIT Delhi, ex-Samsung South Korea — joined as the fourth co-founder to build the technology platform.

Nithin Kamath, Zerodha's co-founder and one of India's most trusted voices in personal finance, described Ditto as "almost an experiment to see if an advisor-first platform works." By 2021, the experiment had its first results. By FY2024, the revenue was ₹52.3 crore and the company was profitable.

The UPSC Offer, 1,055 Employees and India's Most Trusted Policy

The Ditto Insurance story is easiest to misread as a fintech story. It is not. It is a trust story. The company's competitive advantage — the thing that Nithin Kamath means when he says Ditto has "an insane amount of love from customers, tons of referrals" — is not the technology, the product range, or the price. It is the conversation. The advisor who picks up the call without a script. The recommendation that comes without a commission motive. The follow-up that happens because the advisor genuinely wants to know if the policy worked out.

The April 2024 UPSC announcement illustrated the culture precisely. Ditto publicly invited candidates who had cleared the UPSC interview but hadn't made the final merit list to join its advisory team. The logic was stated plainly: these are people who have demonstrated the discipline to study for years, the research skills to master complex subjects, and the communication ability to explain them under pressure. Everything an insurance advisor needs. The offer went viral — and it attracted exactly the kind of advisor Ditto wanted to hire.

By August 2025, Ditto had 1,055 employees — a 90% year-on-year increase in headcount. The Finshots newsletter continues to deliver 500,000 readers per day who trust its editorial voice more than any advertiser's. Each of those readers is a potential Ditto customer who arrives already educated, already trusting, and already past the moment of confusion that makes insurance sales so difficult for everyone else. Three IIM Ahmedabad batchmates who skipped their placement season in 2018 have built something genuinely rare: a profitable financial services business where the customers refer their friends.