Founders Everywhere: Ruchir Kanakia
Ruchir Kanakia is the founder & CEO of OneAssure, a customer-first distribution platform that brings a consultative, service-led approach to health and life insurance.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
OneAssure addresses a gap in India’s insurance landscape, where health and life insurance remain 95–99% intermediary-driven and customers often struggle to navigate complex policies. The company combines technology with hands-on consultative support to build trust and make insurance simple and accessible. OneAssure provides tailored advice, helps customers with policy purchases, renewals, porting, and streamlines claims to ensure a smooth experience. By guiding customers through informed decisions and breaking down complex insurance needs into understandable steps, they empower individuals and businesses to confidently manage their health coverage while promoting transparency, empathy, and long-term trust in the insurance ecosystem.
Founder and CEO Ruchir Kanakia grew up in a Gujarati business family, where he developed an early understanding of entrepreneurship. He earned a degree in Electronics Engineering and secured a hardware patent during his studies. After college, he spent many years working at tech-driven companies, focusing on product innovation and customer-centric solutions. He’s a hands-on founder and has personally advised over 3,000 customers and sold policies to about 600, proving the importance of combining technology with human touch in building trust in insurance.
What led you to create OneAssure?
I originally didn’t set out to build OneAssure. My initial goal was to solve insurance distribution through technology, inspired by India’s UPI payments revolution. I began by building a SaaS platform for insurers to manage their agent-driven distribution, which taught me a lot about the industry and the challenges of consultative products like health insurance. Through hands-on work with insurers and customers, I realized that software alone wasn’t enough, real impact required directly helping customers navigate complex policies. That insight led to OneAssure, a platform designed to help customers navigate health insurance more effectively.
What’s OneAssure’s North Star?
The way I think about it is: how many people do we successfully help claim each year? In an industry where trust is low and everyone is focused on distribution, true trust is built only when you fight for the customer at the moment that matters most, which is during a claim. At the end of the day insurance is a contract, and our goal is to make sure it’s honored, so that’s the metric that matters most.
How does OneAssure inspire “customer love”?
One of the best indicators of customer love is our 15% referral rate, without any prompting. People trust us enough to proactively connect their friends and family. For example, we spent months fighting for a customer with an undiagnosed congenital heart condition to get their $10,000 claim honored and policy reinstated. We never gave up. If a customer is genuine, we fight every possible legal and procedural avenue to ensure they receive the support and coverage they deserve.
Tell us about some recent milestones that OneAssure crushed.
We’ve grown 300–350% year-over-year for the past two years.
We’re projected to close this year with approximately $1.2M in revenue, up from $100k in 2023.
We’ve scaled from 15 to 30 people, maintaining lean operations with a small, high-performing team.
How has your background influenced you as a founder?
Growing up in a Gujarati business family, business talk was dinner-table conversation, so understanding operations, cash flow, and P&L came naturally. I decided to get an engineering degree because I’ve always been interested in technology and innovation. I gravitated toward tech-focused companies and I was fortunate that many of my former bosses and mentors gave me the freedom to experiment and grow. Not only did they support me when I left to start my own venture, many of them became my first investors. That experience profoundly influences how I run OneAssure today. I try to create an environment where my team can experiment, grow, and learn, just as I was allowed to do in my early career.
Any favorite books?
“Delivering Happiness” by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh strongly shaped my customer-first philosophy. “To Sell Is Human” by Daniel H. Pink and “Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler are also favorites.
Fun Fact:
I used to play competitive hockey and was the captain of the team. It’s where I learned teamwork and developed leadership skills. I also had to wake up at 5am almost every day, which built my discipline.
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