1mg, India’s leading consumer health platform, announced a 100 Cr Series B investment led by Maverick Capital Ventures, the venture capital fund affiliate of Maverick Capital. Looking the deal size and work-force 1mg seems a clear leader in the digital health market in India.
Founded by Prashant Tondon, Gaurav Agarwal, Vikas Chauhan and Started as HealthKartPlus, 1mg grew to become the “Wikipedia” of medicine information, highlighting saving potential of ~70-80% on medicine costs by considering alternate brands for the same generic salt and creating transparency for the consumer in an otherwise very opaque and hard to understand market.
To know more about this startup, we request 1mg team for an exlusive interview regarding their recent success and future strategies. Here is what they said,
In terms of an Indian market, do you think this kind of idea could be adaptable?
Absolutely, that is inevitable because the consumer behavior is rapidly changing in India. Healthcare is a very opaque and bureaucratic Industry that has seen little innovation for a long time on the consumer front – however with Mobile and Internet, this is rapidly changing and globally, the consumer is taking center stage. Despite its size and growth rate, the health care sector till date has seen very little innovation and is ripe for disruption by digital innovators.
E Pharmacy & E-Diagnostics will significantly improve consumer convenience and access. This will especially help chronic patients with nuclear families, and also patients who are not in a condition to go out to find a pharmacy or diagnostic centre. Moreover, offline pharmacies can only keep limited inventory, resulting in a consumer having to ask multiple stores to get his or her medicine. Online pharmacies also have the technology infrastructure to provide value-added information to consumers, such as drug interactions, side effects, medicine reminders, and information on cheaper substitutes. Most importantly all the transactions can be effectively tracked reducing the problems of drug abuse, self-medication, and counterfeit medicines.
You have many challenges here not only from customer side but offline pharmacy market.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the E Pharmacy model. An online marketplace pharmacy model will enable existing pharmacies to start online operations and serve a broader set of customers, or a network of pharmacies integrating to one platform and accessing a broader customer base while also ensuring that the inventory is consolidated. This would reduce working capital requirements, remove wastage from system and increase margins, making the pharmacy model sustainable and higher value add. We believe all pharmacies should adopt technologies and make use of the platforms available – in order to provide a better value to the consumers. In the end, the consumers deserve better service and efficient modes of fulfillment. Using technology, pharmacies can not only achieve consumer satisfaction but also drive a much higher efficiency in processes.
Why you guys are off from marketing activities? What is your marketing planning after this funding round?
It is just the different approach . Yes, we don’t do typical ATL/BTL activities. Our focus is to engage our users by giving them good quality health content. We do lot of targeted digital marketing campaigns. Our users trust us for their healthcare needs. We will focus on creating more value for our users using digital platform and technologies.
You mentioned that your app has 5M+ downloads. Could you tell us the ratio of regions or cities your users belong?
Yes, 1mg has over 5 M+ organic app downloads and 25 M monthly page views coming from 2M unique consumers who use its services every month, making it the #1 mobile health service. The company provides innovative healthcare content and tools and also operates India’s largest e-pharmacy and e-diagnostic network spread over many of India’s largest cities.
1mg maximum users came from cities like New Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad,Chennai, Lucknow, Indore, Chandigarh, Jaipur etc.