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Along with budding startups, ecosystem biggies are also placing their bets on Hyperlocal Delivery. Recently, Flipkart (f Qck) and Ola (Ola Store) launched their hyperlocal grocery startup.
Now the founders of Gigstart (a startup connecting artists to their clients) have launched a hyperlocal delivery startup for health and medical needs, named Pluss.
Talking of the reason behind starting Pluss, Atit Jain, said, “The healthcare industry in India is largely unorganised, despite the fact that it is worth billions of dollars. The small chemist accounts for about 95% of the pharmacy market while only 5% of it is controlled by branded players like Apollo and Big Chemist. The opportunity to have a branded network that could aggregate all these chemists arose right here.”
Atit Jain, Madhulika Pandey and Tarun Lawadia co-founded Pluss in 2015. Before this, In 2013 Atit Jain and Madhulika Pandey had also co-founded another enterprise – ‘Gigstart’, which is an online portal to facilitate finding and booking artists for private and public events. The startup raised $210k in seed funding from a group of investors in December 2014.
Company’s investors include Snapdeal’s co-founders Rohit Bansal & Kunal Bahl, Indian Dream Capital and Rajesh Sawhney of GSF, Narendra Singh Rawat, TA Venture Holding Limited, Roshan Abbas, and Anand Chandrasekaran.
What is Pluss?
Gurgaon-based Pluss is an on-demand medicine delivery service which let’s users place orders through calls, whatsapp or the Pluss website.
Pluss has four main product categories – Baby Care, Pet care, Personal Wellness and Daily Essentials. All these categories are further divided into subcategories and have hundreds of products in total. Moreover, new products are added to the catalog on a daily basis. Currently, it is offering services in Delhi/NCR region.
Company has devised a quick and handy method for ordering medicines:
- Click a photo of your prescription.
- Select individual medicines to be ordered.
- Order is delivered within 60 minutes.
This product first company has developed its own operations team that ensures that delivery of medicines and products to customers is accurate and does not exceed the delivery time. To put company services at par with the competition, it owns a fleet of delivery executives, proudly named – ‘Pluss Men’, who are responsible for fulfilling orders.
Commenting on the fundraising, Atit said, “We currently have decent amount of funds to operate with, but we are looking for funds to scale. We are carrying forward our investors from Gigstart, which includes Rohit and Kunal of Snapdeal, among some others. As for now, we are in advanced talks with multiple investors.”
Company plans to expand to more than five cities by the end of 2015. Also, they will soon be adding Medical Tests and Surgical Equipment in product categories.
Health products market is expected to grow at CAGR of 15% and touch $158.2 Bn in 2017.
In domestic market, Pluss competes with 1mg, Pharmeasy, MyMedisyn, Medist and Mera Medicare. Among which 1mg (formerly HealthkartPlus) had recenlty raised $6Mn from Deep Kalra, Founder of MakeMyTrip and its existing investors.
Commenting on the competition, Atit said, “The biggest differentiating factor between us and our competitors would be the time we take to deliver our orders. The ease of selection of individual medicines from a full prescription is also something which is different from what our competitors are doing.”
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