PharmEasy confirms large fund raise led by Bessemer, Orios, Trifecta, JM Financials and MEMG
PharmEasy has raised funding led by Bessmer Venture Partners, MEMG (Manipal Group), Orios Venture Partners, JM Financials and Trifecta Capital. While the team is yet to confirm the total amount raised, Dharmil Sheth, Co-founder PharmEasy, confirmed it was a large amount. The size of the deal will soon be confirmed by the company.
Last year, PharmEasy had raised Series B funding of $16 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Orios Venture Partners. With this current fundraise, the team aims to focus on technology and work towards improving the operations, enabled by internally built tech products. PharmEasy has set up a technology team in Mumbai and Bengaluru and intends to scale both.
Speaking to YourStory, Dharmil says,
“We have started our journey towards bringing great amount of optimisation and efficiency in our processes and we want to invest into technology to drive the same. Right from the consumer app/web to order digitisation platform, to order orchestration, to supply chain ERP and POS, to last mile delivery app - all of it is developed in house and we look forward to upgrade all of them with some impactful features.”
The PharmEasy team is present in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and 700 other towns and cities. Dharmil adds the company is looking to go deeper into these geographies and acquire more customers, while ensuring a great experience.
Started in 2015 with a vision to deliver genuine medicines at affordable rates by optimising the supply chain and logistics, PharmEasy now claims to be serving more than one lakh families. The team has grown from a small five member team working out of one of the co-founders' parents' spare office space to a 300 member-strong team spread across seven cities.
The team aims for a seamless Pharmacy experience, especially for the chronic patients, making medicine purchase and consumption proactive instead of transactional. “Also, there is a huge angle of savings which the platform drives where we would be able to provide the best possible savings for customers on health spends; be it medicines, diagnostic tests or doctor consults,” says Dharmil.
He says the company is confident of building a profitable business in the next three to four years with more authentic health services and products delivered at the most affordable rates in the fastest possible manner. “We will be changing the way healthcare stakeholders interact with each other by creating a truly seamless digital ecosystem,” says Dharmil.
While there are regulatory grey areas associated with online pharmacies, for PharmEasy the processing is managed by an offline partner vendor – which is a registered premises obtained license from the state food and drug administration. The store is compliant as per the Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1940.
The pharma industry is currently pegged at $15 billion, and some of the issues that the sector faces include low fill-rates, delivery delays, and expired and spurious medicines. Despite the regulatory challenges, the pharma space is growing significantly. The main other players in the space include Matrix Partners-backed Myra, Sequoia-backed Practo and 1mg.