Startup & Entrepreneurship
E-pharmacy CareOnGo raises $300K from Farooq Oomerbhoy & others
CareOnGo, an online pharmacy store recently raised 300,000 USD in its seed round of funding from Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund – Orios Venture Partners and others. Raj Mishra of Indea Capital and Vineet Ganesh of Imperial India Investment also participated in the round.
Aditya Kandoi, Ritu Singh and Yogesh Agarwal had founded CareOnGo in September 2015 with an aim to disrupt the pharmaceutical sales & supply chain by bringing the fragmented micro-pharmacies in India under a single umbrella brand. CareOnGo empowers its 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).
“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,” Co-founder Yogesh Agarwal said.
So far, the start-up claims to have witnessed a very good response 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.
Talking about the company’s business strategy Farooq Oomerbhoy, said he found the company’s approach unique.
“CareOnGo decided on leveraging the 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 benefiting the ecosystem as a whole,” he added.