Medipreço raises BRL 5.5 million to scale the company advantage of medicines

Investment round was led by Valutia, a venture capital fund focused on entrepreneurs in the Northeast

Medipreço, a startup that developed a corporate benefit that offers discounts on medicines, has just raised BRL 5.5 million to scale the model. Valutia, an early stage venture capital fund focused on entrepreneurs in the Northeast, led the round.

The round included the participation of OSinova Participações, the corporate venture capital arm of the Odilon Santos Group, and a group of investors specialized in health and well-being.

“We are seeing that companies that seek Medipreço are increasingly concerned with the health and well-being of their employees, seeking alternatives to bring high-impact benefits, aligning data intelligence with strategic support for better decision making”, he says. Alexandre Maximo, the founder of the startup.

To have access to the benefit, the company pays. The cost ranges from R$1.99 to R$9.99 per life and depends on the amount of services that the company wants to have from Medipreço, which may include access to the discount platform and physical structure in the office to facilitate the shopping withdrawal.

Healthtech plugs its system into pharmaceutical distributors and negotiates prices directly with these agents, who use their own logistics to supply pharmacies that are within the discount program. In practice, this means that Medipreço guarantees the replacement of stock at a differentiated price for drugstores, which are able to pass on this discount directly to the consumer at the time of purchase. The average direct discount in the cart is around 62%.

Based on the purchasing behavior of employees, Medipreço prepares a report crossing the substances and active principles of medicines with diseases, which is delivered to the managers of the partner companies. “We call it the epidemiological profile of the company”, explains Máximo.

Healthtech was founded in 2018 by Máximo, Bruno Souza de Oliveira, Ademir Gouveia and Wilson Brito. It started with a subscription pharmacy marketplace design, but soon entrepreneurs discarded the idea and pivoted to the corporate benefit model, which began to be negotiated in early 2020.

One of the main benchmarks for the startup is the American Pillpack. The company was bought by Amazon in 2018 for $753 million — at the time, Walmart tried to enter the dispute, but Bezos’s giant check won. Pillpack’s model is similar, offering discounts on medicines, but the presentation is different: patients send prescriptions to the platform and the company takes care of delivering the medicines, separating the pills into packages by day and time and also instructions for ingestion.

Currently, 35 companies use Medipreço’s product, including Danone, Creditas, Leroy Merlin and Hypera Farma. The eligible base already totals 200,000 lives, an increase from the 20,000 registered at the end of last year. With the money from the contribution, the idea is to expand the operation by investing in technology and marketing.

Despite not having any offers on the horizon, Maximo does not rule out an M&A and says he has already been approached by strategic investors. The founder envisages a new round in the first quarter of next year to take the operation to another level and, according to him, “to have complete dominance of the corporate pharmacy benefit market”.

Source: Value Pipeline