[Funding alert] PharmEasy enters unicorn club at $1.5B valuation with fund-raise of $350M led by Prosus Ventures, TPG Growth

API Holdings, the holding company of online pharmacy startup Pharmeasy, has raised $350 million in a Series E round led by Prosus Ventures and TPG growth at a reported valuation of $1.5 billion, making Pharmeasy the seventh startup from India to enter the unicorn club this year.

A statement from API Holdings said the new capital raised was a combination of primary and secondary funding, which also saw participation of existing investors including Temasek, CDPQ, LGT Lightrock, Eight Roads & Think Investments.

The other six startups that entered the unicorn club this year are Digit Insurance, Innovaccer, Infra.Market, Five Star Finance, Meesho, and CRED.

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The second week of April actually saw the birth of three unicorns – Meesho, CRED, and now PharmEasy.

API Holdings Co-founder and CEO Siddharth Shah said, “I am particularly proud that we have been able to not only provide consumers with much faster and easier access to the healthcare products and services they need, but that we have been able to do so by empowering and digitising 60,000 small pharmacy stores that provide such an essential service to the Indian public.”

According to API Holdings, as a digital healthcare platform it connects over  60,000 brick and mortar pharmacies and 4,000 doctors in 16,000 zip codes across India. It digitises the entire supply chain to provide easy access for pharmacies to procure the products.

Plans for the future

PharmEasy also provide SaaS solutions for pharmacies to use in procurement combined with delivery and logistics support, and credit solutions to buy over 200,000 medicines from over 3,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers.

API Holdings will utilise this fresh round of funding to deepen its relationships and penetration of existing geographical markets to reach over 100,000 pharmacies in the next 12 months. It will also expand the range of services to be offered on the platform.

The pharmaceutical supply chain in India has approximately 1,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, 55,000 distributors and sub-distributors, and 800,000 pharmacy stores. This makes it a highly fragmented market and PharmEasy aims to digitise the segment.

Ashutosh Sharma, Head of India Investments, Prosus Ventures, said, “The team at API Holdings has shown great discipline building effective solutions across the pharmaceutical supply chain and we have great confidence in their ability to further scale their platforms for the benefit of all.”