BENGALURU : When Vinayak Thakur’s relative was hospitalised in 2016 in Patna, he ran from pillar to post in search of a specific medicine. He ran from one medical store to another for 4 hours to get a particular medicine that the doctor had prescribed. It is then that he realised how important it is to have the information at which pharmacy a particular medicine is available within the shortest time.
This led to the start of Medbrown Technology Pvt Ltd or BrownPacket as it is popularly called. The application was launched in early 2016. It was started by a group of techies Vinayak Thakur, Abhishek Kumar and Gaurav Kumar. Now, it has over 3,500 customers with about 3,000 in the city and others in Patna and New Delhi.
The application is location based where customers order of medicines and other pharmaceutical products reach the central server. The customer can also upload the prescription given by the doctor to place an order. This information is passed to various pharmacies located near to the customer and who are tied up with BrownPacket. Whichever store has the medicine and can deliver the product the fastest completes the order. The application has the option of a two-hour express delivery or the regular 24 to 48 hours delivery.
Vinayak Thakur says,” The startup was completely self-funded. Till now we have invested around `26 lakhs in this product.
We have two ways of generating money from this product. One is the revenue sharing model where the pharmacy from which the medicine is procured gives us a part of the profit and the other is the subscription-based model where we charge the partner pharmacies a certain fee of `1,000 per month for regular plan and `1,500 per month for premium plan.
One of your objectives while starting this was to involve the local pharmacies into the picture and increase their business and generate employment.A product which includes the involvement of medicines could be used for a lot of wrong reasons as well. Vinayak says that many steps are taken to verify whether a prescription is genuine or not. If bulk order of a certain medicine is taken, then it is checked with the customer as to why such huge quantities are being ordered.
The company plans to tie up with Bitbrothers, an AI-based startup which uses artificial intelligence to check the validity of a prescription. The startup attracts a variety of crowd in the city. About 40% of the customer base of the start-up are elderly people. It’s mostly the young customers who avail the 2-hour delivery process. The areas from where frequent orders come in are Sarjapur, Outer Ring Road, Koramangala, BTM layout. The biggest challenge that BrownPacket faces now is funding. The company plans to expand its reach from B to C to B to B in the near future.