Generico To Enter Disease Management Space With $11 Mn Funding From Lightbox

Pharmacy chain Generico has secured an $11 Mn of funding from Lightbox Ventures, today, as a part of their series A funding. The Mumbai-based startup Generico runs specialised pharmacy retail chain of generic medicines, which are more affordable than brand-name medicines. Generico focusses primarily on medicine retail and currently has 41 brick-and-mortar stores across Mumbai.

Mumbai-based Generico was founded by Siddharth Gadia and Girish Agarwal in 2017. In December 2018, the healthcare company had last raised $3 Mn as part of a Series A round from Tomorrow Capital and Whiteboard Capital, and angel investor Gagan Goyal. This brings the total Series A funding to $14 Mn.

The pharmacy chain plans to utilise this funding to strengthen its supply chain, technology and healthcare prepositions. It will also be expanding to 150 stores in Mumbai and other cities such as Pune. Further, it also diversifying into disease management to have a deeper impact on the lives of consumers with chronic diseases.

“For chronic patients just popping pills is not going to solve problems, there needs to be an intervention in their disease journey to be able to take control of their conditions. We’ll be coming out with a very impactful and disease management solution,” Agarwal told Inc42.

Generico also plans to venture into epharmacies in the future. “We believe that there is a set of customers, who prefer convenience. Yes, the pharmacy is going to be an omnichannel place. We’ll definitely have an online portal as well,” he added

This is Lightbox Ventures’ first investment in the healthcare sector. Lightbox cofounder Sandeep Murthy told Inc42 that it wants to focus on startups getting rid of the problem, rather than those who have the biggest traction. “Most of the models [in healthcare] have always focused on selling more whether online or through discounts. Here, our desire is to find businesses that treats the entire problem differently, and that’s what Generico is doing” he added.

Murthy added, “They [Generico] have the vision to get away from this idea of just selling pills to people, but to actually help people manage their health more effectively.”

The development comes a day after Lightbox announced the first close of its third fund at $209 Mn. The fund had witnessed the participation of 28 investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s initial target was $200 Mn.

Murthy clarified that Lightbox will not be specifically focussing on healthcare startups through its fund, but will be using the fund startups across segments.

Till now, Lightbox Ventures, founded in 2014 by Siddharth Talwar and Sandeep Murthy, has invested in over 16 startups. These startups included food delivery startup Faasos, automobile marketplace Droom, online travel aggregator Cleartrip, furniture rental startup Furlenco, mobile adtech startup InMobi, and GPS navigation company MapMyIndia, among others.