Pharmeasy raises $2.5 million of venture debt to fund expansion

Pharmeasy, the Mumbai-based pharmacy aggregator, has raised $2.5 million (INR16 crore) venture debt from Trifecta Capital to help partner retailers increase inventories and keep up with rising demand. Dhaval Shah, founder of Pharmeasy, said that “The startup intends to extend the funds raised from Trifecta to chemists registered as its ‘partner retailers’ so that they can cater to more patients using the startup’s app”.

The startup had last month raised INR111 crore in a Series-B funding round. However, it decided to raise more capital via venture debt than bank debt or equity as the latter is an expensive option considering Pharmeasy is an asset light business. Healthcare is an emerging but hot industry for the startups. Be it technology companies coming out with their own tools for body signal measurements, or the operations startups solving supply chain issues in the healthcare industry, it is becoming a go-to market for the startup ecosystem expected to solve the problems in a country which is pathetically low in the global health index.

Trifecta is also positioning itself as a healthcare funding specialist in the country. It has a target corpus of INR500 crore which the firm plans to invest in the same space.