Instinct Innovations Pvt. Ltd—which offers RedBook, a software solution for retail pharmacy businesses—has raised $250,000 (Rs 1.6 crore) in a seed round of funding led by venture capital firm Vida Ventures and angel investor Aniruddha Malpani.
The firm will use the funds to scale up its offering, it said in a statement.
RedBook offers pharmacies a slew of services such as integration with distributors, online ordering facilities, auto sync for offline use, timely information on stock expiry and micro-level insights on consumers. It also acts as the base for a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) engine that offers insights on drug consumption patterns to pharmaceutical firms. These insights help the pharma companies in marketing their products through pharmacies, tracking sales in real time as well as engaging directly with patients.
“Re-wiring the pharma supply chain with RedBook is only the first step in achieving our long-term vision. We aim to create a healthcare ecosystem that is seamlessly integrated via technology. The emphasis is on using machine learning and AI-driven cognitive intelligence to make the supply chain more efficient,” said Ankit Solanki, co-founder and CEO of Instinct Innovations.
According to the company, over 500 pharmacies across Mumbai use the product currently. RedBook claims that the product is being piloted by drug-makers to eliminate manual processes for data collection and analysis.
Instinct Innovations was founded by Ankit Solanki, Priyanka Gosai and Himanshu Singhi in 2015. Solanki and Singhi are former employees of Fractal Analytics while Gosai previously worked with Scope International.
Instinct Innovations has two other products such as Targetron, a content-based advertising tool and Repoto, a business intelligence tool for end customers.
“RedBook is using technology to solve problems that plague pharmacists and drug-makers, such as proliferation of fake drugs, lack of compliance with FDA rules and sale of expired drugs,” Malpani said.
Malpani is an active angel investor having made several investments in startups including language tutoring platform Multibhashi, women-safety connected jewellery maker Leaf Wearables, last-minute ticket booking platform InstaBounce, online grocery startup RainCan and Preventive healthcare startup AllizHealth.
Vida Ventures is a sector-agnostic early-stage venture capital firm based in Mumbai. Its portfolio companies include restaurant-booking platform Tablehero, renewable energy firm UGE, Wi-Fi analytics start-up i2e1, home maintenance services start-up Gapoon and co-living space provider Stay Abode.
