Saveo Raises Seed Round From Matrix India, RTP Global To Expand B2B Pharma Marketplace

Bengaluru-based Saveo Healthtech, a B2B ecommerce marketplace for pharmacies, has raised $4 Mn as part of its seed funding round from Matrix Partners India and RTP Global.

The round also saw participation from Incubate Fund and India Quotient, as well as angel investors such as Cred founder Kunal Shah, Bigbasket cofounders V.S. Sudhakar & Vipul Parekh, Blackbuck founder Rajesh Yabaji, Of Business cofounders Asish Mohapatra & Ruchi Kalra, Yulu cofounders Amit Gupta, Naveen Dachuri & RK Misra, Mosaic Wellness cofounder Revant Bhate, Shopkirana cofounder Sumit Ghorawat, and Trafigura India CEO Raoul Bajaj among others.

The company said it would utilise the fresh funding to penetrate deeper into existing geographies, expand to new territories along with scaling up its full-stack tech platform. From 70+ pharmacies as customers in Bengaluru in January 2020, Saveo has now grown to 3000+ pharmacies across the state of Karnataka. Founded by IIT alumni Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Vivek Jaiswal, Saveo claims to have 40K+ live SKUs selling, having been founded in August 2019. The startup had earlier raised INR 2 Cr in March 2020 from India Quotient and First Cheque with participation from Better Capital and angel investors.

Delving into Saveo ‘s growth story in the past 18 months, Matrix India MD Rajat Agarwal said, “The $25 billion pharmacy supply chain in India is highly fragmented, has high margins and its constituents are quite amenable to adopting technology – which makes it ripe for disruption. We believe that Saveo’s value proposition of the widest possible catalogue, 95%+ fill rates, better pricing and transparency has enabled it to quickly gain momentum in the pharmacy market in and around Bangalore.”

The startup provides pharmacies a single procurement point for all medicines in all categories, which solves issues of inventory, demand-mapping and more. Distribution to pharmacies is primarily through the traditional route with no accurate prescription validation mechanism or management of the supply chain. Saveo is looking to eliminate the opacity in the pharma supply chain with technology replacing feet-on-the-street or the salesmen from pharma companies.

The B2B healthcare supply chain sector has seen plenty of investor interest in the past two years as pharmacies join the digital transformation wave. Saveo competes with the likes of Pune-based Pharmarack, which raised $3 Mn in a Series A funding round from IvyCap Ventures in September 2019. Its suite allows pharma supply chain companies to track order management, procurement, returns, collections, market insights, and inventory management for pharmaceutical retailers and distributors.

Similarly, B2B healthtech startup Akna Medical raised $7 Mn (INR 54 Cr) from LGT Lightstone Aspada in April last year to expand category-specific procurement solutions to major healthcare organisations across categories such as surgical equipment and pharmaceutical products.

Nao Murakami, founder & general partner of Incubate Fund India, added that the startup has shown a deep industry understanding of supply chain operations and strong capability “Saveo team is the best in class for both of these two criteria so it was very quick for us to decide an investment. We strongly believe that Saveo will make a huge positive impact on the pharmaceutical industry in India,” he added.