SoftBank Looks To Back India’s Biggest Digital Pharmacy Chain

SoftBank Group is in talks to back API Holdings, parent company to PharmEasy, the biggest digital drugstore chain in India, Bloomberg reported on Friday (July 9), citing sources.

SoftBank’s anticipated investment is estimated to be between $150 million and $200 million and would add to API’s latest funding round. PharmEasy’s parent company is seeking a minimum valuation of $5.6 billion, the sources told Bloomberg.

Discussions between SoftBank and API are ongoing and no final decision has been made to go forward with the funding, per the sources.

The funding round will include other investors that are still in the works as the company makes plans to go after a public listing within the next year or so, one source told the news outlet. 

API closed a $500 million Series F funding round at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO Siddharth Shah, per Bloomberg. 

Headquartered in Mumbai and founded in 2015, PharmEasy has fulfilled over 15 million orders for medications and other healthcare-related products and has served 5 million-plus customers, according to the company website.

PharmEasy recently acquired a $610 million majority stake in Thyrocare Technologies, an Indian chain of diagnostic and preventive care laboratories.

So far this year, companies in the digital healthcare space raised over $14.7 billion, more funding than all of last year. The Silicon Valley digital healthcare seed company Rock Health, for example, said that the first two quarters of 2021 have been the biggest for digital healthcare startups in the U.S. Close to 60 percent of the funding came from 372 investments of at least $100 million.

The sector for digital healthcare saw a surge during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now a​​ mainstream market. In June alone, funding for startups hit $3.1 billion, almost three times more over June of last year, which brought in $1.1 billion. The number of people in the U.S. that tapped telehealth options tripled to 60 percent by March 2020.