Delhi-based mobile pharmacy chain CareOnGo raises pre-Series A funding
By Himansu
Delhi-based mobile pharmacy chain CareOnGo, on Wednesday, announced
raising an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A funding. The round was
led by Farooq Oomerbhoy of FAO Ventures, followed by Anupam Mittal and
Anand Mittal of People Group; Ravi Garikipati, Head of Flipkart’s Ads
Business; Vibhu Garg, Co-Founder of Unicommerce, along with Singapore
Angel Network and Konglo Ventures, among others. The founders of CareOnGo
Founded in August 2015, by IIT-IIM alumni Aditya Kandoi, Ritu Singh
and Yogesh Agarwal, CareOnGo claims to be India’s first mobile chain of
co-branded pharmacy stores. Through its co-branded network of pharmacies
across eight cities, the firm helps pharmacies procure, manage and sell
through technology.
CareOnGo, with its B2B ERP and analytics solution, also enables bulk
procurement for these co-branded pharmacies, provides an analytics
platform, ‘Pharmalytics,’ giving sales and inventory insights, while
enabling automatic customer profiling by capturing localised data of
supply and demand.
The company claims to have grown by 200 percent since inception.
CareOnGo’s customer app is adding 25,000 chronic patients every month
onto the platform. The funding announcement comes exactly two months
after the company raised its seed round of $300,000.
Yogesh mentioned that the funds raised will be invested in research
and further development of technology offerings, with special focus on
analytics product. The company plans to further expand its B2B offerings
deeper into the pharmacies by providing seamless analytics, advance
Point-of-sale (PoS) solutions and aggregating micro-pharmacies in India
under a single umbrella of co-branding.
On the Android Play Store, CareOnGo has reached 50,000 downloads,
while planning to quickly ramp up its co-branded stores to over 150
across metro cities of Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad. In the
coming year, the firm also plans to expand its footprint to Mumbai,
Chennai and 11 other cities.
Farooq, who had also invested in the seed round, said that CareOnGo
has helped its partner pharmacies to grow their topline by 20-30
percent. He believes that the company aims to disrupt the pharmaceutical
sales chain by bringing about a seamless integration for the
micro-pharmacies, from procurement to sale of medicines, with an added
layer of deep analytics. The other side The team at CareOnGo
The retail pharmacy and wellness segment seems to be a huge, untapped
market. Various players are already functioning in this space of
preventive and wellness cure, including names like 1mgAyush.com,
Healthkart, BigChemist, Healthgenie, Healthadda, mChemist and Deemark.
This April, CareOnGo’s competitor- digital healthcare platform 1mg
raised Rs 100 crore in Series B funding led by Maverick Capital
Ventures. The past couple of months have seen more online pharmacy and e-pharmacy startups getting funded. Some of them include NetMeds, which raised $50 million from OrbiMed, mChemist, started by the ex-president of Ranbaxy, Medd, DeliMedi, and MediDali.
Further, data from IMS states that the retail pharmacy pie is
expected to cross $11.5 billion by the end of 2015, growing at a rate of
20 percent year-on-year.
However, the online pharmacies are believed to be facing strong
resistance from All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists
(AIOCD), which called for a nationwide strike last year, calling the
sale of medicines online was illegal. Additionally, prescription
verification is tricky. In several cases, people produce fake
prescriptions, which, unfortunately, aren’t difficult to create. Website: www.careongo.com
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