Recounting the entrepreneurial stories, it is easy to get caught in the narrative of a “million dollar” idea. But just thinking about an Idea is not enough! There are many entrepreneurs who have ideas, but few have the audacity to convert ideas into reality. With lethal combination of experience along with hard work, passion, determination, and willingness to take risk, one can achieve the aspirations of life. This story describes the journey of Medibox that is successful in creating a technology enabled digital B2B business model that enables business entities to discover healthcare products at better rates, transact and get products delivered everywhere in India.
Medibox is a B2B Market Place for OTC, OTX, pharma, healthcare and allied products. It solves the problem of making information about medicines and healthcare products available real-time; enable transactions and provides dashboard analytics to all the three stakeholders in the supply chain such as retailers, distributors and brand owners/marketing companies.
Unveiling the Inception Story
It all started around 2009 in Bangalore, when Bhavik Kumar started working for a pharma company after quitting his banking job. On one of his business trips in 2012, when he was meeting hospital clients in and around Vijayawada, Guntur and a few other remote cities & towns, he encountered the harsh ground realities of the healthcare systems and a lack of awareness on the availability & affordability of medicines. There were scenes of patients dying on the hospital floors and of people who yearned to live for a few more precious last moments and spend those moments with their loved ones; but couldn’t do so because of inaccessibility of certain medicines and healthcare products at that moment.
While examining various scenarios, he realized the need to bring the buyers and sellers on a common platform, so that any patient who reaches out to a particular pharmacy or a hospital gets the right information on the products at any given time and where factors of affordability or availability of suppliers is not a disadvantage or a cause for concern to business entities.
This thought led to the genesis of Medibox with an aim to serve the society, save lives and run a scalable business in the healthcare domain. Bhavik decided to solve this problem by building a B2B platform that would connect the buyers & sellers, create an efficient healthcare supply chain eco-system and ensure that the medicines reach the people who needed them the most.
About the Entrepreneur – Leading the ‘Change’
Bhavik, with his qualifications such as Master’s in commerce, PG in Marketing & Advertising and Diploma in International Business; has successfully commercialized various ventures in India and abroad in supply chain, distribution, marketing and finance. Post his education at MIT Sloan specializing in Supply Chain Management, Value-Chain Management, Innovation, Technology and Leadership; Bhavik founded Medibox and commercialized the venture couple of years ago.
Making World a Better Place to Live in
Medibox is not only passionate about building great products and making a positive impact to the society. Medibox envisions a society where no human is deprived of medicines with accessibility and availability at ease. The mission to make medicines available is thoroughly shared with the potential employees as a part of the hiring process. Medibox ensures that candidate resonates with their vision. In this process, the work culture becomes cordial and each team member is working to achieve a common goal.
Since its commercial inception in August 2016, Medibox has grown by leaps and bounds. The company has listed over 250,000 business entities such as retailers, distributors, etc and a detailed product master nearing 200,000 SKUs. On a daily basis Medibox is activating traders to discover medicines at better rates and hence more and more traders are benefitting in the ecosystem.
Taking Digital Steps
Medibox is a self-served platform for traders and brand owners that either decrease spends on procurement or increase sales. The platform enables real-time visibility and accurate information on pharma, medical devices and allied products for healthcare business through collaborative intelligence.
Medibox’s two-sided platform strategy provides complete supply chain solution to the industry. On one side it helps stakeholders in reducing costs of doing business, thereby positively impacting their bottom line and on the other side it improves business outcomes, increasing their topline. For brand owners and suppliers; Medibox provides E-Marketing module with features of campaigns, promotions, collaborative tools, etc. It provides market penetration, reach, etc. and reduces time-to-market.
Medibox’s module helps distributors to increase their reach (offline/online) by giving them access to the ever growing and enriched connected retailers’ network of Medibox. It also allows them to connect to big enterprise houses like group purchasing organizations, hospitals, etc. This helps them to sell their products (near real time) using order management and delivery features of Medibox.
Medibox has won multiple customer accolades, Industry awards and recognition. Medibox has won IBM GEP regional finals, received ‘Technology Start-up’ award at CPhI India Pharma Awards, Ranked #1 under Startups and innovation category by CeBIT – Digital Transformations Leaders Award, chosen for white paper on at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, selected for Bio Convention at San Diego, Inspreneur Singapore, RISE-Hong Kong, etc.
Future Filled with Success
Progressing forward with positive approach, Medibox has already delivered in 250+ cities/towns across India and is growing at 30%+ month on month. It is streamlining its operations to deliver in almost all pincodes of India and also developing its platform to delivery all kinds of pharma and healthcare products. An experienced team of over 50+ individuals are striving hard to ensure medicines are made available across India.
In the near future, Medibox shall bring ML/AI to map over 500,000 SKUs in India that at associated with over 12,000+ brand owners and around 70,000+ sellers and use Blockchain technology to curb the problem of counterfeit medicines.
Medibox: Transforming B2B Pharma Market Digitally in India
