We help make insurance easier for everyone: Zinnia India's Pawan Choudhary

In only a few years, Zinnia India has grown to deliver software products that automate manual insurance processes

By Harichandan Arakali Forbes India Staff

Published: Feb 25, 2025 12:34:23 PM IST

Updated: Feb 27, 2025 03:52:48 PM IST

Pawan Choudhary, CTO, Zinnia India. Image: Amit Verma

Zinnia is a technology provider in the insurance sector in the US. Its India operations started as a third-party administrator to US-based customers in 2018. This was an operations centre in Gurugram and there was “very little engineering”, the company’s India CTO Pawan Choudhary tells Forbes India.

However, it quickly became apparent the company could tap India’s software talent for so much more, and the very next year, opened its first India tech centre in Pune. Today the company has eight offices in India, including a new centre in Bengaluru. It’s also grown via acquisitions, which has expanded its Indian workforce as well.

For example, in April 2024, Zinnia acquired Ebix, also in the life and annuity space, which added some 200 staff in Noida alone, in addition to a centre in Hyderabad.

Zinnia’s India-based engineers cover “100 percent of all product builds” for the company, Choudhary says, responsible not only for support but “all the net new product development”. The company offers some 27 products under three broad categories—aimed at carriers, distributors and the digitalisation needs of some of the oldest very large insurers.

And of Zinnia’s 2,900 employees worldwide, 1,600 are now based in India, he says. And close to two-thirds of those in India are in technology roles, he adds—from engineers to product and project managers. Increasingly, Zinnia is focussed on offering the same underlying platform to its customers, but configured to their needs.

A project that’s close to Choudhary’s heart is around a “digital event processing” solution. This addresses the very manual nature of insurance in the US, which is necessitated by each state having its regulations for the sector, and further each insurer adding its own KYC requirements and so on.

Zinnia’s developers in Noida built a “rules engine” that automates all of this for the operations team, Choudhary says. Further, it is configurable like Lego pieces for different customers. This has reduced the time it takes to onboard a given insurance product, and start selling the corresponding insurance policies, from six to eight weeks to 48 hours, he says.

Customers such as a large insurer in the US, have called out the benefits of this automation “largely built out of and supported from India”, he says.

“We’re going from cost arbitrage, what we’re seeing in the industry is that young people are hungry for problems, where not everything is known. They welcome working on an abstract problem and going through multiple iterations to build the right solution,” he says.

One other noteworthy aspect of Zinnia’s operations is that even though the company has been in India only from 2018, it already has staff in Tier II locations. This is in part because the company has grown via acquisitions.

Today Zinnia has employees in Nagpur, where some 120 staff have recently moved into a brand new building, and in Coimbatore, where again the company has invested in fully re-doing and upgrading the interiors of an existing office. A team in Nagpur specialises in a “smart CRM” (customer resource management) solution for the insurance sector, and one in Coimbatore is working on third-party underwriting, Choudhary says.

Zinnia itself has undergone many changes and grown via acquisitions. It started life as SE2 in 2005, emerging from an insurer called Security Benefit, which, in turn, is owned by an investment company called Eldridge Industries.

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SE2 was focussed on streamlining carrier solutions, and then expanded into fund management through the acquisition of UV Cloud in 2020, and hybrid distribution with Breathe Life in 2022, a SaaS insurance platform. That year SE2 rebranded as Zinnia. It has continued to make acquisitions, including PolicyGenius in 2023, and Ebix in 2024.

Zinnia also raised $300 million in strategic financing from a private equity firm Vista Credit Partners in 2024, which will help it to accelerate its expansion, including in India.

Today about 56 percent of Zinnia is in India, by number of employees, and Choudhary says there is a mandate right from the top for that share to go to 75 percent. “We’ll continue to expand,” he adds.