Sequoia Capital backed 1mg, an online pharmacy with a wide range of prescription and OTC medicines announced on Monday that it has acquired Medd, which is a marketplace for booking diagnostic and imaging tests. The inside details about the detail are yet undisclosed!
With this acquisition, 1mg will be offering a service for booking imaging tests such as X-rays, CT Scans and MRIs. Diagnostics is an industry of potential of about $5-8 billion in India making up for 25% of the total pharmacy business. 1mg, which currently offers these services across 23 cities, is hoping to cover over 30 more cities this year with diagnostics and grow the total contribution of diagnostics in its revenues from 15 to 25%. The company claims to offer consumers 40-60% savings on lab tests by using the 1mg platform.
“Diagnostics is a huge opportunity within ecommerce since there are more than 100,000 diagnostics labs with very few scale players. Consumer experience is also not satisfactory with issues like requirements of advance bookings, lack of transparency in pricing across labs,” said Prashant Tandon, CEO of 1mg.
He got into the business of e-diagnostic last August but so far has been limited to offering blood tests in tie-ups with about 15 different chains including Thyrocare, PathCare and US-based Quest Laboratories.
Medd was co-founded in 2015 by IIT-B graduated Arpit Kothari and Anurag Mundhada and Carnegie Mellon graduate Era Dwivedi. Medd is currently operating across Mumbai, Indore, Bhopal, Nagpur, Bengaluru and Jaipur.
Additionally, 1mg has brought on board Ankur Gigras, former marketing head for gastroenterology of Abbott. Gigras, who holds an MBA from Stanford GSB and BTech from IIT-Madras will be responsible for overseeing the diagnostics business and additionally drive innovative patient-centric models with pharma and insurance.