Saveo Healthtech gets $4 million funding from Matrix Partners India, RTP Global and others

Saveo Healthtech, a B2B e-commerce marketplace for pharmacies, on Friday said it has raised $4 million (about Rs 29.1 crore) in funding, co-led by Matrix Partners India and RTP Global.

The seed round saw participation from Incubate Fund and India Quotient, a statement said.

Cred founder Kunal Shah, Bigbasket co-founders VS Sudhakar and Vipul Parekh, Blackbuck founder Rajesh Yabaji, OfBusiness co-founders Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra, Yulu co-founders Amit, Naveen and RK Misra and others also participated, it added.

Saveo said it plans to utilise the funding to penetrate deeper into existing geographies, expand to new territories along with upscaling the full-stack tech platform.

Founded in August 2019 by Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Vivek Jaiswal, Saveo provides a single procurement point for medicines (allopathy, generics, surgical, ayurvedic, OTC, specialty), bringing uniformity in service and margin.

Saveo now serves over 3,000 pharmacies across Karnataka.

It has more than 40,000 live SKUs (stock keeping units) selling on the platform.

The Indian pharmaceutical industry is highly fragmented with 8.5 lakh pharmacies in India and 70,000 distributors (as per a KPMG report).

Saveo aims to streamline this supply chain by building the most transparent ecosystem, and educate and empower these 8.5 lakh micro-entrepreneurs and distributors with technology and sustainability.

"With this round, we aim to go deeper into the Indian healthcare industry, channelise our energy towards the key insights we have and spend more on technology for building the future of healthcare delivery,” Saveo co-founder Vivek Jaiswal said.

Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director of Matrix India, 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 per cent-plus fill rates, better pricing and transparency has enabled it to quickly gain momentum in the pharmacy market in and around Bengaluru," he added.

Saveo had earlier raised Rs 2 crore ($2,70,000) in March 2020 led by early-stage venture capital firm India Quotient and First Cheque with participation from Better Capital.

Founders of Sharechat (Farid Ahsan), OkCredit (Harsh Pokharna and Gaurav Kunwar), Generico (Siddharth Gadia and Girish Agarwal), Giva (Ishendra Agarwal) had participated in the previous round.