Can you talk briefly about your journey since BITS?

After BITS, I worked as a software engineer for Texas Instruments in Bangalore for two years, followed by working for various other software companies in the US over the next several years. In 1997, I moved to the United States as a Software Engineer with my wife, looking for a better future for our family. After a visit from my parents in 2000, I was inspired to change careers and start Insubuy. 

What exactly inspired you to establish Insubuy?

When my parents visited my family in the US in 2000 my father fell gravely ill, and the travel insurance he had purchased in India wasn’t providing any meaningful assistance or service for him. Though I was able to send my parents back home for proper treatment, I realized this may not be possible for everyone, and I saw an important need for travel insurance designed to serve visitors to the United States.

I made the decision to leave my lucrative software career to help others avoid the suffering my family had endured, and create a company that could provide US-based travel insurance solutions that are better suited for USA visitors. I view this as more than just a business, but truly a mission to serve the community.

Can you discuss some of the challenges you've faced in growing Insubuy?

Ours was the definition of a startup company. We began our business in our apartment in Virginia, building our website and all of our technology ourselves, while also handling every other aspect of travel insurance sales, running a business, and hiring and managing employees. As such, in the industry we were developing, there was no blueprint or roadmap in place on how to do this. We developed and built our own online marketplace, our own intranet to manage business flow and our own custom applications. Doing all of this in-house has been more challenging, but it allowed us to tailor our technology to our exact business needs, and stay at the forefront of industry trends.