Startup Deep Dive : Saveo — grew revenue 100x, then sold the business it built

In September 2022, the founders of Bengaluru’s Saveo told trade publication CXOToday they were on track to hit $150 million in annualised revenue by April 2023. That deadline came and went. For the fiscal year ending March 2024, Saveo’s actual revenue from operations was Rs 196 crore ($20.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0) — roughly a seventh of the promise, as per its own regulatory filings reported by Entrackr.

Eighteen months after that filing, in March 2026, Saveo did something more telling than miss a target: it sold the pharmacy-distribution business it had spent six years and roughly $20 million building to a rival healthcare platform, CureBay. This is the story of what Saveo actually built, why the number never showed up, and what the founders chose to do once they accepted it wouldn’t.

Quick facts

What Saveo actually sells

Saveo was built as a managed B2B marketplace for India’s independent pharmacies — the neighbourhood chemist shops that still account for the overwhelming majority of medicine retail in the country. A pharmacy owner who once had to juggle dozens of local distributor relationships, each carrying a narrow slice of inventory, could instead order allopathic medicines, generics, surgical supplies, over-the-counter products, speciality drugs and ayurvedic lines through one app. Saveo procured from manufacturers and distributors, ran the inventory through its own hubs, and delivered to the pharmacy’s door. As per a September 2022 interview its founders gave to CXOToday, the network by that point covered 10,000 pharmacies across four South Indian states, spanning more than 40 district centres and over 100 towns and villages, with a stated fill rate above 95%.

The origin

The founding insight, as the founders described it to CXOToday, was blunt: India likes to call itself the pharmacy of the world, but the pharmacies on the ground were struggling to fulfil even 60% of the prescriptions brought to them. The four co-founders — Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Vivek Jaiswal, all IIT graduates — traced that gap to the plumbing of the trade itself: roughly 8.5 lakh retail pharmacies were being served through some 70,000 independent distributors, stacked in layers that added cost, encouraged hoarding of scarce SKUs, and left no single supplier able to offer a pharmacy the full range of medicines it needed in one order. Saveo’s answer was to become that single supplier, at least for the pharmacies willing to route their procurement through an app. It started small and local: by January 2020, the company was serving just over 70 pharmacies in Bengaluru, per Matrix Partners India’s account of the seed round. Growth from there was fast — by the January 2021 seed round it had reached more than 3,000 pharmacies across Karnataka, and it kept a live catalogue of over 40,000 SKUs, according to Inc42’s coverage of that round.

The struggle years

Saveo’s first outside capital was modest and telling of the model’s capital intensity: Rs 2 crore in March 2020 from India Quotient and First Cheque, according to Inc42’s funding record. The business that followed was never going to be capital-light — it bought and held physical medicine inventory, ran delivery hubs, and operated on the wafer-thin margins typical of pharmaceutical trading. That structural reality showed up early and stayed. By FY23 (year to March 2024’s preceding year), Saveo was spending Rs 1.27 to earn every rupee of revenue and posted a net loss of Rs 46 crore on Rs 168 crore of revenue, as reported by Entrackr from the company’s filings. In January 2021, Saveo acquired the smaller retail-tech startup ShuttrStores in an acqui-hire, bringing its two founders onto Saveo’s team, a sign the company was still assembling its model rather than scaling a finished one, per Crunchbase’s acquisition record and BW Disrupt’s contemporaneous report.

The most consequential stumble was a forecast, not a failure of execution. Speaking to CXOToday in September 2022, the founders projected Saveo would cross $35 million in annualised revenue “soon” and reach $150 million in annualised revenue by April 2023, alongside a target of EBITDA breakeven by the second quarter of FY24. None of those milestones were met on schedule. When Saveo’s FY24 numbers were finally reported by Entrackr in February 2025, revenue from operations stood at Rs 196 crore — about $20.4 million at the FX rate used in this piece — only a fraction of the figure the company had guided to nearly two years earlier. The company’s own unit economics for FY24 still showed a Return on Capital Employed of −225% and an EBITDA margin of −15.69%, per Entrackr’s review of the filings, with just Rs 10 crore of cash and bank balance against that year’s Rs 38.5 crore loss.

• March 2020: Rs 2 crore first institutional cheque from India Quotient and First Cheque — a sign of how early and small the company still was (Inc42).
• January 2021: acqui-hired ShuttrStores, absorbing its two founders, rather than out-competing it (Crunchbase; BW Disrupt).
• FY23: net loss of Rs 46 crore on Rs 168 crore revenue, spending Rs 1.27 for every rupee earned (Entrackr).
• September 2022: publicly guided to $150 million ARR by April 2023 and EBITDA breakeven by Q2 FY24 — both missed by the time FY24 filings came in at Rs 196 crore revenue and a Rs 38.5 crore loss (CXOToday; Entrackr).

The turning point

The turning point did not arrive as a dramatic collapse. It arrived as a sale. On 18 March 2026, Odisha-based healthcare platform CureBay announced it had acquired Saveo’s entire pharma distribution business — the marketplace, the physical hubs in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, the procurement relationships and the tech-enabled ordering system serving more than 10,000 retail pharmacies across Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The financial terms were not disclosed, according to reporting by Entrackr, YourStory and BioSpectrum India, all of which covered the deal the same week. CureBay itself was flush with capital it could use to absorb the business, having raised $21 million in a Series B round in May 2025 at a valuation of roughly $75 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments, per Entrackr’s coverage of that acquisition.

The numbers either side of the deal are the clearest measure of what changed. Before the sale, Saveo’s distribution arm was the company: the vast majority of its Rs 196 crore FY24 revenue, its Rs 38.5 crore FY24 loss, and its thin Rs 10 crore cash buffer all sat inside that business. After the sale, what remained under the Saveo umbrella was Silvercross, a much smaller private-label pharma brand the founders had been building on the side — one that Entrackr reported was running at an annualised revenue rate of about Rs 100 crore with an EBITDA margin of −3% as of March 2026, a figure that is company-stated rather than an audited full-year result. The founding team itself split along the fault line of the deal: co-founder Amit Kumar moved to CureBay to lead its pharmacy technology, while co-founders Vivek Jaiswal and Shivansh Shrivastava stayed on to build Silvercross under Saveo’s existing investor base, according to Entrackr’s report on the transaction.

The money behind it

Saveo’s funding history is a straight line of small, closely spaced rounds rather than one or two headline mega-rounds — consistent with a low-margin trading business that needed working capital more than it needed a war chest. Third-party trackers disagree on the precise cumulative total: Tracxn puts it at $20 million across eight rounds from 65 investors, while CB Insights-linked data (via the Clay dossier) puts it at $21.96 million; this piece uses the range both report.

• March 2020 – Rs 2 crore (roughly $270,000) from India Quotient and First Cheque (Inc42).
• January 2021 – $4 million seed round co-led by Matrix Partners India and RTP Global, with Incubate Fund and India Quotient participating, alongside angel investors including Kunal Shah (CRED), Rajesh Yabaji (BlackBuck), Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra (OfBusiness), and the co-founders of BigBasket (Inc42; YourStory; Matrix Partners India/Z47).
• January 2022 – $4.5 million round, reported as a Series A (Outlook Business).
• September 2022 – $4.5 million (about Rs 36 crore), led by Matrix Partners, Gunosy Capital and 4Point0 Health Ventures, with LC Nueva, Jetty Ventures, Ocgrow Ventures, Capier Investments, RTP Global, India Quotient and Incubate Fund also participating (Medical Dialogues; Business Standard).
• October 2024 – $5 million round, with Gunosy Capital among the participants (Tracxn, via CB Insights data).
• March 2025 – an additional Series A round, amount not disclosed in public reporting (Tracxn).

What each lead backer changed: Matrix Partners India, the recurring anchor across three rounds, brought a playbook from other Indian B2B marketplaces it had backed; RTP Global’s participation from the seed stage gave Saveo an international growth investor typically associated with later-stage conviction; and the roster of operator-angels — from CRED’s Kunal Shah to BlackBuck’s Rajesh Yabaji to BigBasket’s co-founders — signalled that people who had run capital-intensive, logistics-heavy Indian marketplaces themselves were willing to bet on Saveo’s model working the same way theirs had.

How Saveo makes money

The core distribution business, before its sale, made money the way any pharmaceutical trading business does: buy medicines at a wholesale rate, mark them up, and sell them on to retail pharmacies, pocketing the spread. In its September 2022 interview with CXOToday, the company said it was running at roughly $22 million in annualised revenue on a reported 15% take rate, with contribution margin already positive at that stage and a target (not achieved on schedule) of reaching EBITDA breakeven the following year. The FY24 filings, reported by Entrackr, show exactly how thin that margin was in practice.

• Cost of medicines procured: Rs 184 crore in FY24, or 78% of Saveo’s total expenditure of Rs 235 crore — the single largest line by far (Entrackr).
• Employee benefit expenses: Rs 28 crore in FY24 (Entrackr).
• Finance costs: Rs 7 crore in FY24, reflecting the working-capital debt needed to hold medicine inventory (Entrackr).
• Other overheads: Rs 16.23 crore in FY24 (Entrackr).

The part people tend to get wrong about a business like this is assuming that scale alone fixes the economics. Saveo’s revenue grew roughly 100-fold between FY20 (Rs 1.9 crore) and FY24 (Rs 196 crore), based on Entrackr’s reporting, yet the loss did not shrink in proportion — because in pure medicine trading, the cost of goods scales almost one-for-one with revenue. That is precisely why the founders spent part of the same period building Silvercross, a private-label pharma brand: an owned brand can carry a materially higher margin than reselling someone else’s SKU, which is also why Silvercross, not the distribution business, is what the founders chose to keep after the CureBay sale.

The numbers

Saveo Healthtech Private Limited discloses financials annually as part of its statutory filings; the figures below, in Rs crore, are as reported by Entrackr and corroborated by financial-data aggregator TheCompanyCheck.

Two things stand out in that run of numbers. Revenue nearly quadrupled between FY21 and FY23 and kept climbing into FY24 — a real, filed growth story. But losses barely moved in the two years for which both figures are public, and the cash cushion behind them was thin: Rs 10 crore in cash and bank balance at the end of FY24 against a Rs 38.5 crore loss that year, per Entrackr’s account of the filings. That gap between growth and durability is the clearest numeric explanation for why the distribution business changed hands two years later.

Where the money comes from

Saveo’s footprint, at the scale it reached before the CureBay sale, was concentrated in four South Indian states rather than spread nationally.

• Reach: over 10,000 retail pharmacies across Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, as of the March 2026 acquisition announcement (Entrackr; YourStory; BioSpectrum India).
• Depth: more than 40 district centres and over 100 towns and villages served, alongside faster same-day delivery in cities, as described in the company’s September 2022 interview with CXOToday.
• Infrastructure: distribution hubs specifically in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which is what CureBay’s acquisition was built around, per Entrackr’s deal coverage.
• Product mix: allopathic medicines, generics, surgical supplies, OTC products, speciality drugs and ayurvedic medicines sold through a single procurement point, per Inc42’s original seed-round coverage.

The surprise is less about geography than about what the company chose to keep. The distribution business was the larger, better-known and more capital-intensive of Saveo’s two lines, and it is the one that was sold. Silvercross, the smaller private-label brand, is what stayed — and its own audited filings tell a more modest story than the headline ARR figure attached to it in March 2026. Silver Cross Medisciences Private Limited, the registered entity behind the brand, reported Rs 18.15 crore in revenue for FY25 (year to March 2025), up 90% year-on-year, according to financial-data aggregator TheCompanyCheck’s review of its filings — a real but far smaller number than the roughly Rs 100 crore annualised run-rate the company was citing about a year later, a reminder that a filed full-year result and a point-in-time run-rate answer different questions.

The risks

• Thin, structurally low margins in trading medicines. With cost of goods at 78% of total FY24 expenditure, Saveo’s distribution arm had almost no room to absorb a bad debt cycle, a pricing war, or a slow quarter without the loss widening again — the mechanism visible in its own FY23-FY24 filings (Entrackr).
• Thin cash buffer against ongoing losses. Rs 10 crore of cash and bank balance against a Rs 38.5 crore FY24 loss and a −225% ROCE meant the distribution business had limited runway to absorb further underperformance without fresh capital or, as happened, a sale (Entrackr).
• Concentration risk after the CureBay sale. With the larger, revenue-generating distribution business divested, Saveo’s remaining entity depends on Silvercross, a brand that is barely three years old and reported Rs 18.15 crore in audited FY25 revenue — a fraction of the scale the combined company once had (TheCompanyCheck; Entrackr).
• Well-capitalised competition. Rival B2B pharma marketplace Medikabazaar has raised a reported $164 million against Saveo’s roughly $20 million, and horizontal e-commerce players have also moved into pharma distribution, per comparative funding data compiled by CB Insights.

The takeaway

Saveo’s story is not a cautionary tale about a startup that failed. It is a case study in a founding team recognising, after roughly six years and $20 million, which half of what they had built could actually make money at scale, and which half couldn’t — and then having the discipline to sell the bigger, more prestigious half rather than keep feeding it. The lesson that travels beyond pharma distribution is that revenue growth and business durability are not the same signal: Saveo’s topline climbed from Rs 1.9 crore to Rs 196 crore in four years, an impressive filed number by any measure, while its unit economics stayed stubbornly negative across the same stretch. Founders chasing growth metrics for their own sake would do well to ask, as Saveo’s eventually did, which line of the business the growth is actually coming from.

Frequently asked questions

What does Saveo do?

Saveo built a B2B managed marketplace that let Indian retail pharmacies order allopathic medicines, generics, surgical supplies, OTC products, speciality drugs and ayurvedic medicines from a single app, with Saveo handling procurement and delivery, per Inc42’s original coverage of the company.

Who founded Saveo and when?

Saveo was founded in August 2019 in Bengaluru by four IIT graduates: Amit Kumar, Anurag Savarnya, Shivansh Shrivastava and Vivek Jaiswal, according to Inc42 and Matrix Partners India’s account of the company’s seed round.

How much funding has Saveo raised?

Third-party trackers report a cumulative total of between $20 million (Tracxn) and $21.96 million (CB Insights, via the Clay dossier) across rounds from 2020 to 2025, led at various stages by Matrix Partners India, RTP Global and Gunosy Capital, among others.

Is Saveo profitable?

No. Saveo’s distribution business posted a net loss of Rs 38.5 crore in FY24 on Rs 196 crore of revenue, an improvement from a Rs 46 crore loss in FY23, but still deeply loss-making by ROCE and EBITDA-margin measures, as per Entrackr’s review of the company’s filings.

What happened to Saveo in 2026?

In March 2026, Odisha-based healthcare platform CureBay acquired Saveo’s entire pharma-distribution business, including its network of over 10,000 pharmacies and its Bengaluru and Hyderabad hubs, for an undisclosed sum. Saveo’s founders retained and continue to build Silvercross, a smaller private-label pharma brand, according to reporting by Entrackr, YourStory and BioSpectrum India.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Saveo Raises Seed Round From Matrix India, RTP Global To Expand B2B Pharma Marketplace” — January 2021
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Bengaluru B2B healthtech startup Saveo bags $4M from Matrix Partners” — January 2021
• Matrix Partners India / Z47, “Saveo raises $4M in a round co-led by Matrix Partners India & RTP Global” — January 2021
• Crunchbase, “Saveo acquires ShuttrStores” acquisition record — January 2021
• BW Disrupt, “B2B Pharma Marketplace Saveo Acquires Retail Startup ShuttrStores” — January 2021
• Outlook Business, “Saveo Raises $4.5 Million In Funding Led By Matrix And Others” — 2022
• CXOToday, “Bengaluru based Healthtech Startup Saveo is empowering traditional pharmacies through their technology-led innovation” — September 2022
• Medical Dialogues, “Saveo Healthtech raises over Rs 36 crore in funding round” — September 2022
• Business Standard, “Pharma supply start-up Saveo Healthcare raises $4.5mn in venture round” — September 2022
• Entrackr, “Saveo’s revenue nears Rs 200 Cr in FY24 with improved economics” — February 2025
• TheCompanyCheck, “Saveo Healthtech Private Limited” company financial profile — accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Saveo Healthtech Private Limited” company financial profile — accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “CureBay acquires Saveo’s pharma distribution business” — March 2026
• YourStory, “Healthcare platform CureBay acquires Saveo’s pharma distribution business to deepen rural reach” — March 2026
• BioSpectrum India, “CureBay acquires Saveo’s pharma distribution business” — March 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Silver Cross Medisciences Private Limited” company financial profile — accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Saveo – Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials” — accessed September 2026
• Clay dossier / CB Insights-linked data, “How Much Did Saveo Raise? Funding & Key Investors” — accessed September 2026

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