The Indian online pharmacy and medical store PharmEasy has raised $339 million ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) on the Mumbai market that could value the company at $1 billion.
As CB Insights reported this week, the fundraising includes $204 million from investors such as Neuberger Berman, OrbiMed Advisors and Steadview Capital, along with $135 million in secondary funding from IIFL AMC as well as other investors.
The Mumbai-based company is the largest of its kind in India, and says it connects more than 60,000 pharmacies and 4,000 doctors and has served upwards of 20 million customers.
According to CB Insights, PharmEasy’s B2B marketplace has 90,000 retailer partners and 6,000 consultation clinics offering diagnostic tests and teleconsultations. The chain is active in more than 1,000 cities in India, including Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru.
Read more: Online Healthcare, Meds Delivery Co PharmEasy Considers $1B IPO
News that PharmEasy, owned by API holdings, was considering an IPO first surfaced in August. The company recently purchased a $610 million majority stake in Thyrocare Technologies, an Indian chain of diagnostic and preventive care laboratories.
By the midpoint of 2021, companies in the digital healthcare space had raised more than $14.7 billion, surpassing the funding for the entirety of 2020.
For example, the Silicon Valley digital healthcare seed company Rock Health said that the first two quarters of this year have been the biggest for digital healthcare startups in the U.S. Almost 60% of the funding came from 372 investments of at least $100 million.
The digital healthcare field experienced a surge when COVID struck: 60% of Americans reported using telehealth services by March of 2020, turning a niche sector into a mainstream market. In June alone, funding for these startups reached $3.1 billion, almost three times the amount of money pumped into the sector in June 2020.