Quick medicine delivery startup Plazza raises $15 million in funding to expand store network

Quick medicine delivery startup Plazza has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Accel, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing investors All In Capital and Better Capital also participating.

"Medicine isn't a space where you can make a lot of mistakes and fix it on the go as you grow. Reliability has to be built into the DNA of the company," said Priyadarshi, Founder of Plazza and a former Zomato executive.

With the fresh capital, it plans to open around 10 new stores in Bengaluru within the next eight weeks, taking its total count in the city to about 20 by the end of this year.

Over the next three to four years, Plazza is aiming for more than 3,000 stores across the country.

"We are looking at 3,000 stores over the next three to four years, but we're working backwards from there. We'll first build the capability to do this reliably, and then replicate it in different pincodes," he said.

Within a year, the startup expects to expand beyond Bengaluru into other cities as well.

India's pharmacy market is crowded, with neighbourhood chemists on one end and established online pharmacy players on the other. Traditional pharmacies typically rely on walk-in customers within a small catchment area and stock around 5,000 medicines, which the startup says results in prescription fill rates of only 50 to 60%.

Larger online pharmacy players, meanwhile, tend to prioritise having a wide inventory over fast delivery.

Plazza is positioning itself between these two models. Each store stocks between 35,000 and 40,000 stock keeping units, which is significantly more than a typical neighbourhood pharmacy, while still promising delivery within 15 to 30 minutes across a wider catchment area than a walk-in store would normally serve.

"The hard problem is knowing what medicines to keep and how many to keep. Once you solve that, customers know they'll get everything in one place," Priyadarshi said.

To manage this, the startup uses AI to build store-specific inventories based on micro-market demand rather than applying a single stocking strategy across all locations.

Plazza also runs an omnichannel model, with physical stores and online ordering through app or WhatsApp, though Priyadarshi said the startup is designed around deliveries rather than walk-ins.

"We expect our customers to place an order on an app or WhatsApp, and we deliver. We use a large part of the space to store inventory, and that's how we have done our manpower planning, our store design, etc.," he said.