The Indian Economic report claims that the Indian domestic pharmaceutical market was worth $42 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $65 billion by 2024. Yet the domestic pharmaceutical market is the most fragmented industry. A KPMG report says that there are over 8.5 lakh pharmacies and 70,000 distributors in India. 

In an effort to streamline this segment, IIT graduates Vivek Jaiswal, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Amit Kumar came up with Saveo in 2019. Saveo is a a managed marketplace for the primary and secondary marketplace. It is a B2B e-commerce platform and marketplace for pharmacies. The aim behind Saveo is to bring uniformity in the margin, service along with helping pharmacies digitize. 

The platform hosts the widest catalogue of medicines in categories like, generics, surgical, OTC, speciality, allopathy, and ayurvedic. They claim to have a virtual inventory full of SKUs that help them timely slot delivery, record live tracking and have a digitalised paying model. 

They plan to build the current chaotic segment into a more transparent and better-priced ecosystem that will empower and enable small distributors and micro-entrepreneurs. Annually around 86% of medicines are given without prescription. They want to tackle this as well. 

In March 2020, Saveo raised Rs 2 crore from India Quotient, First Cheque and Better Capital. In January 2021, they raised $4 million from Matrix Partners India, RTP Global, Incubate Fund, India Quotient along with Kunal Shah of CRED, VS Sudhakar and Vipul of Bigbasket. 

The round also saw participation from Rajesh Yabaji of BlackBuck, Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra of Ofbusiness, Amit, Naveen and RK Misra of Yulu, Revant Bhate of Mosaic Wellness, Sumit Ghorawat of ShopKirana, Raoul Bajaj of Trafigura and more.

In 2021, Saveo acqui-hired ShuttrStores, a retail startup. The founders of ShuttrStores, Kshitij Yadav and Kamlesh Meena will join Saveo’s Technology Team. Saveo’s model has gained immense popularity and demand in and around Bengaluru. They serve over 2000 pharmacies in Bengaluru and over 3000 pharmacies in Karnataka. They plan to serve additional 1 lakh pharmacies across India. Will Saveo be able to add uniformity to India’s $42 billion domestic pharmaceutical segment?