digitize pharma industry
SwipeRx, a platform for pharma professionals, said Tuesday it has secured a $27 million Series B round led by Indonesia’s MDI Ventures, with participation from the Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, Susquehanna International Group and existing backers.
Pharmacies in Southeast Asia were largely fragmented, mom-and-pop shops operating in silos when the company — originally known as mClinica — was incorporated in Singapore in 2014. The region had seen “lots of innovation for patients through a proliferation of telemedicine apps and even innovations for doctors, but the pharmacy and its workforce were largely unaddressed,” SwipeRx CEO Farouk Meralli said.
Moka.care raises $16 million for its corporate mental health service
Today, he claims, SwipeRx has transformed and digitized the pharmacy industry and become a one-stop platform for pharmacists to perform all their daily tasks, from education to purchasing to inventory financing in Southeast Asia.
On the education front, he says the outfit provides online accredited education, drug information, job listings, discussion boards and everything else its community of pharmacists needs to advance professionally and better serve patients.
Toward that end, the SwipeRx app allows users to keep up to date with the latest healthcare news and drug information and access free educational continuing professional development (CPD) modules, which are mandatory in many Southeast Asian countries. (Meralli insists that SwipeRx is now the largest regional provider of online accredited education for pharmacy professionals, in fact.)
The app also helps pharmacists search for new job opportunities or to post job offers. Like LinkedIn, the app also invites users who aren’t necessarily on the cusp of changing jobs to expand their network by connecting to their pharmacy peers. Meralli told TechCrunch it is easiest to think of SwipeRx as a LinkedIn meets Amazon for pharmacies.
Of its purchasing power, Meralli said that by forming singular purchasing network — one with scale — the company has been able to negotiate better prices, as well as launch B2B commerce in the same app. SwipeRX’s community-driven commerce model enables small pharmacies in particular to benefit from the power of that broad network by accessing the best prices and better ensuring that medicines are available to them and their patients, he said.
digitize pharma industry
