Saveo bets on dark stores to streamline India's B2B pharma supply chain

Saveo is a procurement marketplace between pharmaceutical companies and retailers for surgical, homoeopathic and allopathic medicines, plus store digitisation.

That vertically integrating — converting quality suppliers into dark stores under a full-stack managed marketplace — is how B2B pharma supply chains get streamlined.

$4.5M venture round (September 2022) valuing it at $50M; $4M previous round from Matrix Partners India and RTP Global in January 2021.

Founded in 2019 by IIT alumni Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Vivek Jaiswal, competing with Pharmarack and Biddano in India's B2B pharma space.

The January 2021 $4M round from Matrix Partners India and RTP Global was followed by the September 2022 $4.5M round co-led by Matrix Partners, Gunosy Capital and 4point0 Health Ventures, with participation from LC Nueva, Jetty Ventures, Ocgrow Ventures, Capier Investments and others. Post-allotment, Matrix held 11.81% and RTP Global 10.42%.

Pharmacy procurement in India runs on fragmented offline supply; a managed marketplace with dark stores takes over the quality and logistics bottleneck.

The round — its second in 19 months — funds geography expansion, new hubs and a full-stack technology platform.

Growth is expensive by design: revenue roughly quadrupled in FY21 while losses grew 14x, consistent with vertical integration ahead of margin.

In fragmented supply chains, controlling the last mile — converting suppliers into dark stores — is the moat a marketplace can actually own.

As of September 28, 2022, Saveo was valued at $50M with more than 12,000 active outlets, working toward the dark-store model with backing from Matrix Partners, Gunosy Capital, 4point0 Health Ventures and existing investors including RTP Global, India Quotient and Incubate Fund.