Branded pharmacy chain, CareOnGo raises $300K in Seed funding round from consortium of Investors

CareOnGo , India’s first mobile chain of co-branded pharmacy stores, today raised 300,000 USD in its seed round of funding from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund - Orios Venture Partners. Raj Mishra of Indea Capital and Vineet Ganesh of Imperial India Investment also participated in the round.

Established in September 2015 by Aditya Kandoi, Ritu Singh and Yogesh Agarwal, CareOnGo was formed with an aim to disrupt the pharmaceutical sales & supply chain by bringing the fragmented micro-pharmacies in India a single umbrella brand. On the consumer front, CareOnGo empowers the users to buy medicines on their mobile from their neighborhood approved pharmacies while providing additional advantage of finding substitutes, ordering generics, setting medicine reminders and archiving digital health records (prescriptions & invoices).

By building a network of micro-pharmacies, CareOnGo links with the inventory system of these pharmacies and using its strong data algorithms, it is able analyze varied trends and purchase patterns to provide a highly efficient procurement platform for the micro-pharmacies. Thus by partnering with a large base of these pharmacies which account for almost 90% of the Pharmacy market in India, CareOnGo aims to become a centralized source of e-procurement thus addressing the problem of authenticity and on demand inventory procurement for these pharmacies

Since its launch, CareOnGo has been growing at exponential rate and has established its position across many cities in India.  The funding will be deployed primarily towards increasing the number of Co-branded stores to over 150 stores across the metro cities of Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad with expansion to Mumbai, Chennai and 11 more cities.

Commenting on the company’s vision, Mr. Yogesh Agarwal, Co-founder said “Procurement of genuine and authentic material has become a huge problem in the current retail pharma industry.  CareOnGo, not only ensures timely delivery of authentic medicines to its end consumers but also ensures that CareOnGo pharmacy store has the right medicines in stock. We are the only player in the market empowering the local entrepreneurs to not only increase their reach but also streamline their processes and building a brand for these players. “

The online pharmacy platform has witnessed tremendous response so far with a 95% increase in their month on month sales. They have also expanded their operations in terms of retail partners by increasing their footprint from 2 cities to eight cities in just over four months.

Commenting on the company’s business strategy Mr. Farooq Oomerbhoy, said he found the company’s approach unique.

“CareOnGo decided on leveraging an inefficiency in the market and bring about a great level of streamline transparency and efficiency into an already existing and dominating part of the pharmaceutical sales model. CareOnGo not only will help these already existing pharmacies expand their reach via technology but also will further help them create a more accessible and an on-demand platform for procurement of authentic medicines benefitting the ecosystem as a whole.”

CareOnGo is India’s first 24x7 operational mobile pharmacy chain and is also the first to set the reverse supply chain in action so as to cater to consumers who wish to return their unused medicines. Users can also maintain digital health records and get specialized medical diet plans through health experts.