With over more than 42% of medicines floating in the Indian market being fake, the counterfeit drug market is growing at an alarming rate. The problems of authenticity and availability have been the weakness in the drug supply chain.
CareOnGo, with an aim of creating an online platform of trusted chain of pharmacies offering medical solutions to consumers throughout India, is looking to solve and address these issues and bring more transparency in the market through technology.
Being the first e-distributor for retail partners with complete focus to expand their business, CareOnGo is first of its kind with a prime focus on growing the local entrepreneurs – with a vision of solving end consumer’s problem. They help local retailers procure products from manufacturers and stockists on the basis of predictive analytics by studying the purchase patterns and supply drivers. Unlike our competitors who are dealing in only online pharmacy space, we are building a technology-based ecosystem, which ensures quality and consistency with a turnaround and delivery time unmatched by any other player in the market today.
From 0% To 95% MOM Growth
We started CarenOnGo with an aim of creating an online platform of trusted chain of pharmacies offering medical solutions to consumers throughout India. The platform empowers users to buy medicines online, find substitutes, order generics and keep digital health records. At the same time, it also helps local pharmacies to procure, manage and sell through technology.
Idea behind CareOnGo is to solve consumer’s problem of authenticity (currently this market has more than 30% counterfeits & spurious medicines), and unavailability (more than 40% of the orders are either partly fulfilled or not fulfilled at all) of medicines by assisting the local pharmacies with Procurement, Management & Sale of medicines through Technology in a consumer focused transparent manner.
The company’s headquarters are in Delhi . We started our operations in September 2015 and are currently operational across Delhi-NCR – Noida, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.
Initially bootstrapped with a small capital of 40 lakhs we were able to gain good traction very soon mainly due to our prompt customer service . Recently we have raised 300,000 USD in a seed round of funding from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund – Orios Venture Partners. Raj Mishra of Indea Capital and Vineet Ganesh of Imperial India Investment also participated in the round.
Opposed to our expectations of growing slowly, we got the tremendous response from the consumers due to a gap in the existing market. We have been growing 95% month-on-month with increasing number of repeat customers. There has been a huge gap in the market and consumers are looking for a single solution for all their problems.
People Who Created –
CareOnGo has been founded by Aditya Kandoi, Ritu Singh, and Yogesh Agarwal.
| Cofounder Name | Education | Professional |
| Yogesh Agarwal | · B.Tech (IIT Varanasi)
· MBA (Lancaster University -UK) |
Having 6 years of Experience
· Chief Business Officer, Grabhouse · Regional Head, Quikr · Senior Consultant, Deloitte |
| Aditya Kandoi | · B.Tech (IIT Varanasi)
· MBA (MDI Gurgaon) |
Having 5 years of Experience
· AVP, Barclays · Manager, American Express · Associate, JP Morgan · Consultant, Deloitte |
| Ritu Singh | · B.Tech (NetajiSubhash Institute of Technology (NSIT))
· MBA (IIM Udaipur) |
Having 5 years of Experience
· Marketing Head, Grabhouse · Manager, Cognizant · Senior Consultant, Deloitte |
We are currently a 21-Member team spread across Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata with workforce cut-across technology, marketing, and business partnerships.
We have been guided by various mentors at various stages. When it comes to entrepreneurship, Farooq Oomerbhoy, a partner at FAO ventures has been guiding us through every stage of business. He was the founding partner of Orios Ventures and investing in stellar companies in technology and consumer sectors. Hari Balasubramaniam, an advisor to IvyCap Ventures, is our advisor and mentor providing strategic inputs and direcJons with his 27 years of entrepreneurial experience.
Partnering with other organizations
We have partnered with many manufacturers like Dabur, Hamdard, Himalaya, Neelkanth, Patanjali, Kairali, Herbalife, Johnson & Johnson, Pigeon, Cipla, GSK with many more, as part of our e-distributor model. We have also tie-up with Jan-Aushadi, a government-led organization manufacturing generics in the Indian market. In addition, we have to build a network of 718 retail pharmacies and growing day-by-day.
What technologies/algorithms are you using? (if any)
We use a proprietary vendor scorecard algorithm to assign orders to various retailers. The scorecard takes many parameters into consideration including retailer inventory, customer reviews, and availability before assigning the order.
We are using Service Oriented Architecture to enable interaction across various platforms. We have a build system which can scale up real-time to provide a seamless experience for our users.
We have built proprietary predictive analytics tool to analyze various trends in the demand-supply cycle to help in predictive inventory management of our partners. This has really helped us in solving the issue of availability to a great extent.
Future plans
We are currently present in 8 cities and planning to expand to 15 more cities by the year-end. We are in line to launch 18 new categories into our consumer-focused app.
Funded/non-funded?
Recently, we have raised 300,000 USD in its seed round of funding from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund – Orios Venture Partners. Raj Mishra of Indea Capital and Vineet Ganesh of Imperial India Investment also participated in the round. The funding will be used to aggressively activate sales, product development, and brand presence.
Message for future Entrepreneurs
Starting a company might look lucrative and cool from the outside but there is much more to it. Do a thorough research of the consumer problems before diving into building a solution. It is very critical to understand your real customers and figure out whether your solution is really solving their problem.
The best advice you ever got
“Your people are your real assets. Keep them happy and you will be happy.”