[Funding alert] Bengaluru B2B healthtech startup Saveo raises $4M led by Matrix Partners India, RTP Global, others

Saveo Healthtech, a B2B ecommerce platform for pharmacies, raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by Matrix Partners India and RTP Global, with participation from Incubate Fund and India Quotient.

Other angel investors, including Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED); Rajesh Yabaji (Founder, BlackBuck); Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra (Co-founders, Ofbusiness); Amit, Naveen, and RK Misra (Co-founders, Yulu); VS Sudhakar and Vipul (Co-founders, Bigbasket); Revant Bhate (Co-founder, Mosaic Wellness); Sumit Ghorawat (Co-founder, ShopKirana); and Raoul Bajaj (CEO, Trafigura India), among others, also pooled in as well.

The Bengaluru startup will use the funds to penetrate deeper into existing geographies, expand to new territories, and upscale its full-stack tech platform.

Speaking on the investment, Vivek Jaiswal, Co-founder, Saveo, said, “With this round, we aim to go deeper into the Indian healthcare industry, channelise our energy towards the key insights we have (gained), and spend more on technology for building the future of healthcare delivery.”

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Founded in August 2019 by IIT graduates — Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava, and Vivek Jaiswal — Saveo is a B2B marketplace for Indian pharmacies, providing a single procurement point for all medicines — generics, surgical, OTC, speciality, allopathy, and ayurvedic — bringing uniformity in margin and service, and helping Indian pharmacies digitise their businesses.

As per a KPMG report, the Indian pharmaceutical industry is highly fragmented with 8.5 lakh pharmacies and 70,000 distributors. About 86 percent of medicines are dispensed with no accurate prescription validation mechanism, making it the most opaque industry.

Saveo aims to streamline this supply chain by building the most transparent ecosystem and educate and empower these micro-entrepreneurs and distributors with technology and sustainability.

Commenting on the funding, Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director, Matrix India, said,

“We believe Saveo’s value proposition of the widest possible catalogue, 95 percent fill rates, better pricing, and transparency has enabled it to quickly gain momentum in the pharmacy market in and around Bengaluru. We are excited about their scale-up plans and are privileged to be on this journey with the Saveo team.”

At present, Saveo is serving over 2,000 pharmacies across Bengaluru and more than 3,000 pharmacies across Karnataka. It is looking to capture over 1,00,000 pharmacies across India in the next 18 months, spread across 100+ cities in India.

Kirill Kozhevnikov, Partner of RTP Global, said,

“We invest in talented founders who are leveraging cutting-edge tech to solve big problems, and Saveo is no exception. The founding team, all of whom are IIT graduates, have extensive entrepreneurial experience and have already effectively scaled to secure a strong position in their home market of Bengaluru. We are backing the Saveo team and supporting them to build the largest Indian B2B pharmacy marketplace.”

In March 2020, the Bengaluru-based startup had raised Rs 2 crore led by early-stage venture capital firm India Quotient and First Cheque, with participation from Better Capital.