CareOnGo, app based pharmacy aggregator in India, has raised $300,000 in its seed fund round from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy. Farooq is the co-founder of the early stage fund, Orios Venture Partners. CareOnGo co-brands with stand alone pharmacies for hyper-local delivery of drugs and helps the pharmacies improve their supply chain.
The startup allows users to buy medicines from their neighborhood approved pharmacies. Earlier, the platform has been offering service in preventive care segment.
Raj Mishra of Indea Capital and Vineet Ganesh of Imperial India Investment have also participated in the fund round. CareOnGo has been established by Aditya Kandoi, Ritu Singh and Yogesh Agarwal aiming to disrupt the pharmaceutical sales & supply chain. The ultimate objective is to bring the fragmented micro-pharmacies under a single umbrella brand, reports Business Standard.
The micro-pharmacies have been forced to face tough competition from the pharmacy chains. CareOnGo helps those pharmacies with solutions for inventory management, procurement of counterfeit free medicines from super-stockiest under network, reports Economic Times quoting Aditya Kandoi, co-founer of the portal. The startup has claimed to grow at exponential rate since its inception and spread across many cities of India. The recent funding will allow the startup to increase the number of stores to over 150. The expansion will take place in the metro cities of Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Hyderabad. Expansion will be made also in Mumbai, Chennai and 11 other potential cities, reports Your Story. India represents a huge market for retail pharmacy. Retail pharmacies in India have been expected to cross $11.5 billion revenue in 2015 with a year-on-year growth rate of 20%. Various players are vying with each other to grab the larger pie of the retail pharmacy market. 1mgAyush.com, Healthkart, BigChemist, Healthgenie, Healthadda, mChemist and Deemark are some of the few names competing with CareOnGo. CareOnGo realizes commissions for lead generation. The app also charges 7-8% commission on the transaction value for sourcing which is shared in between the platform and retailer. Farooq Oomerbhoy, however, considers the business platform as an efficient and transparent model for the pharmaceutical sales. Many cases on illegal online sales of medicine have also been reported with the booming of online medicine market. CareOnGo maintains extreme cautiousness while partnering with medical stores. They promise for in time delivery of the authentic medicine.
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