The best ideas aren’t often immediately obvious, as Zeno Health founders Siddharth Gadia and Girish Agarwal discovered during a routine conversation with customers back in 2016. 

When Gadia and Agarwal started on their entrepreneurial journey in the pharmaceutical sector with their venture Workcell Solutions, the initial plan was to make supply chain management for small pharmacies efficient and easier via a software application. “We went back to the pharmacies in December 2016 and asked them if there was any other problem we could solve for them. The pharmacies asked us whether our platform could also show them generics… that was a eureka moment,” Gadia shared in a recent conversation with Lightbox.

From there, the founders have gone on to create the country’s largest omnichannel pharmacy chain for quality and affordable generic medicines. Today, Zeno Health retails medicines out of 177 pharmacies spread across Mumbai and Pune. The generic medicines it sells at its pharmacies are on average 40% cheaper than medicines sold elsewhere. 

Zeno Health is able to offer medicines at attractive prices for customers because its business model has disintermediated the traditional pharmaceutical supply chain by going straight from the manufacturer to the consumer. Apart from delivering value to consumers, this approach also enables the company to command industry-high gross margins.

Read more about the business model here – Truth That’s Easy to Swallow

In his conversation with Lightbox, Gadia spoke about how having found and proved its product-market fit, Zeno Health is now firmly on the path to profitability and poised for its next phase of growth – making quality healthcare affordable and accessible for Bharat.

Watch the video for more.