How AI and Parametric Insurance Are Protecting India’s Gig Workers and Small Businesses from Climate Risk

An Exclusive interview wtih Mr. Ankur Indrakush (Founder & Managing Director), Mr. Anupam Shrey (Co-Founder), and Mr. Suman Roychoudhary (Co-Founder) – Plutas AI

In this interview with the founder of Plutas AI, a Hyderabad-based climate-tech startup. We explore how artificial intelligence and parametric insurance are revolutionizing climate risk protection for India’s gig workers and small enterprises. The conversation reveals innovative strategies driving financial resilience and rapid recovery.

What specific gaps or real-world challenges did you observe in India’s insurance landscape that inspired the creation of Plutas.ai?

India’s insurance landscape has long faced three deep-rooted challenges—low penetration, delayed payouts, and limited trust. Traditional insurance models are built around manual indemnity, where losses must first be verified through physical surveys and documentation.

For climate-exposed communities—farmers, gig workers, and small businesses—this system simply doesn’t deliver. Waiting weeks for claim approval after a flood or heatwave can mean the difference between recovery and financial collapse.

At Plutas.ai, we recognized that the gap wasn’t just financial—it was technological. The industry lacked an infrastructure capable of automating trust through objective, verifiable data. This insight led to the creation of Plutas Insure, our parametric insurance platform that leverages AI-driven risk modeling and real-time APIs.

Plutas Insure transforms climate protection into a fast, data-verified, and transparent process—payouts are triggered automatically based on predefined parameters, such as rainfall or temperature thresholds. By aligning the speed of relief with the speed of the event, we are redefining insurance for India’s climate-vulnerable economy.

India faces recurring floods, heatwaves, and droughts, yet insurance penetration remains among the lowest globally. In your view, what structural or behavioral barriers prevent wider adoption of climate insurance?

The core challenge lies in the traditional insurance model—it is indemnity-based. You buy a policy, suffer a loss, prove it through a manual survey, and then wait for a payout. This approach is inherently slow, surveyor-dependent, and ill-suited for small-ticket or high-frequency climate events affecting millions simultaneously.

Behaviorally, there is also a trust deficit. Many in rural and informal sectors perceive insurers as distant and bureaucratic, expecting delays or claim denials. This perception has limited willingness to purchase insurance, even when risks are high and recurring.

Parametric insurance addresses this paradigm by linking payouts directly to verified, real-time data—eliminating subjectivity and human dependency. The process becomes fast, fair, and transparent, ensuring that financial relief reaches people the moment a climate event triggers predefined conditions. This approach can democratize protection for every farmer, gig worker, and small business owner in India.

Can you share how your AI models use real-time climate and satellite data to determine triggers and validate claims faster than traditional insurance processes?

Plutas.ai fundamentally reimagines insurance workflows by removing human bottlenecks and automating processes from underwriting to claims settlement.

Our AI models leverage over 30 years of historical climate data from trusted sources like ERA5 and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), combined with real-time satellite feeds. This enables hyperlocal, data-driven underwriting tailored to specific PIN codes across India.

The workflow unfolds in three stages:

1. Risk Modeling: AI analyzes decades of historical climate patterns to predict probabilities and pricing of climate events for each location.
2. Continuous Monitoring: Once a policy is active, our platform tracks pre-agreed parameters in real-time, such as rainfall or temperature thresholds.
3. Automatic Payouts: When a trigger is verified—for instance, 150mm of rainfall within 48 hours—the system validates policies instantly and initiates payouts via API integration, bypassing the need for physical surveys.

To make the journey seamless, our AI-powered Policy Advisor Agent guides users through coverage options, risk understanding, and policy purchase. Customers can secure financial protection in minutes, with verified claims settled within hours rather than weeks.

Parametric insurance is often considered complex for consumers to understand. How does Plutas.ai simplify this model while ensuring credibility and accuracy?

Complexity is hidden in the back-end; simplicity governs the front-end. We focus on two principles: transparency and embedding.

• Transparency: Every policy clearly communicates the objective trigger—“If local temperature exceeds 42°C for 72 hours, you receive X payout.” Clear, concise, and understandable.
• Embedding: Our API-first approach integrates insurance into platforms users already trust—delivery apps, microfinance systems, or digital wallets. Coverage becomes almost invisible, automatically protecting users without extra effort.

Credibility comes from leveraging verified, non-tamperable third-party climate data, ensuring payouts are objective and trustworthy.

You’re already collaborating with insurers like Bajaj General Insurance. How do such partnerships accelerate adoption, and what are the key learnings from working within India’s regulatory and financial ecosystem?

Partnerships with leading insurers represent the cornerstone of Plutas.ai’s scaling strategy. As a technology-focused insurtech, Plutas.ai specializes in building intelligent systems and data infrastructure, while established insurers provide the regulatory framework, underwriting capacity, and capital foundation essential for market deployment.

This collaborative model enables rapid innovation by allowing Plutas.ai to concentrate on the “how”—technology and data intelligence—while partners like Bajaj General Insurance provide the “what”—product architecture and regulatory compliance.

Bajaj General Insurance has emerged as a particularly strategic partner, driven by its forward-looking mission to democratize financial protection and its commitment to innovation in parametric insurance solutions.

Together, Plutas.ai and Bajaj General Insurance have co-developed the ClimateSafe platform, an integrated technology ecosystem comprising five core modules: Climate Data Ingestion (seamlessly integrating IMD and ERA5 feeds), Dynamic Risk & Pricing Engine (for real-time, hyperlocal risk assessment), Claims Monitoring (automating event detection and validation), Policy Maintenance (enabling seamless policy administration), and Insights & Underwriting Panel (empowering insurers with actionable climate intelligence).

This collaborative development approach has proven transformative—product cycles that traditionally span nine months have been compressed to just a few weeks, dramatically reducing time-to-market.

The success of initiatives like ClimateSafe exemplifies how established financial institutions are actively championing insurtech innovation when technology meaningfully reduces claims exposure and operational complexity.

A key learning from operating within India’s regulatory and financial ecosystem is that incumbents and innovators possess complementary strengths; by aligning incentives and pooling expertise, both entities can drive transformation at scale.

This model not only accelerates product development but also builds consumer confidence, as products are backed by trusted, regulated financial institutions while powered by cutting-edge technology. This synergy has proven critical for scaling climate insurance adoption across India’s underserved segments.

What policy or regulatory changes could further enable the growth of parametric insurance products in India?

India has been progressive, with mechanisms like regulatory sandboxes allowing controlled experimentation. To scale parametric insurance, the focus should be on enhancing data accuracy and granularity.

Hyperlocal, standardized, and verified climate data allows insurers to develop fairer risk models, reduce basis risk, and build consumer trust. When every rainfall or temperature measurement is precise, payouts are fair, objective, and transparent.

Strong data infrastructure also accelerates product innovation, enabling coverage for farmers, gig workers, and small businesses who historically lacked meaningful protection.

How is Plutas.ai tailoring products for gig workers and small businesses, sectors often left out of conventional insurance frameworks?

Traditional insurance models are fundamentally misaligned with the realities of gig workers and micro-enterprises. Conventional frameworks demand stability—fixed income documentation, permanent addresses, and extensive paperwork—prerequisites that neither gig workers nor MSMEs can reliably provide.

Plutas.ai reimagines protection by shifting focus from static asset-based coverage to dynamic, event-triggered protection tailored to how these populations actually experience risk.

The transformative innovation lies in delivering real-time underwriting, real-time policy issuance, and real-time payouts—capabilities previously unavailable in traditional insurance.

When a gig worker accesses our HeatSafe or Rainfall Index products, underwriting and policy activation occur instantly through our AI-powered system, eliminating weeks of documentation review. Payouts are triggered automatically when climate data confirms the pre-agreed event, reaching workers within hours rather than months.

For gig workers, this approach enables delivery platforms (such as Zepto, Uber, or Swiggy) to integrate our API and provide Daily HeatSafe income protection to their workforce, with automatic payouts triggered if extreme temperatures or flash floods halt operations.

Critically, workers are not dependent on their employer for coverage—they can independently purchase affordable micro-protection directly, ensuring personal financial resilience regardless of platform-level support.

For small businesses and MSMEs, Plutas.ai offers localized Rainfall Index products that protect against stock loss and business interruption caused by rapid, excessive rainfall.

Because these products are simple to understand, affordable to purchase, and instantly deployed via API integration, they provide an accessible safety mechanism against major financial shocks—something historically unavailable to informal sector enterprises.

This real-time model fundamentally democratizes access to climate protection for India’s most vulnerable economic participants.

As climate risks intensify, what does the future of insurance look like in India? And where do you see Plutas ai contributing to this transition over the next five years?

The future of insurance in India is entirely digital, embedded, and focused on prevention. Insurance will cease to be a separate product you seek out and will become an invisible layer of protection embedded in every financial transaction—whether you’re taking a micro-loan, buying fertilizer, or simply going to work.

Over the next five years, Plutas.ai aims to be the foundational infrastructure enabling this shift. Our Vision 2030 is to protect over 100 million climate-exposed individuals.

We will expand our platform to cover more perils, including Air Quality (AQI) and cyclone risks, and integrate with 500+ distribution partners, ensuring that every vulnerable citizen in India has access to a fast, dignified, and trustworthy safety net against the escalating climate crisis.

Plutas AI’s vision demonstrates how technology can bridge protection gaps, empowering vulnerable communities to thrive amid climate uncertainty.

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