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2015 flood leads duo to launch express drug delivery app
The Chennai floods of 2015 was an eye opener for Aravindh Rajendran and his friend of 15 years Arunbabu Tamilselvan, both residents of Sivakasi who studied engineering. Having realised the difficulties the public faced to access prescription medicines, including routine lab tests, they started AroundU, an online pharmacy App.
Chennai
In addition to delivering medicines, it has an express delivery option for emergency cases where the order will be fulfilled within an hour.
Planned in November 2016, they launched the App in April 2017. “During the floods, we decided to stay back and help people who were affected. We were involved in arranging food for the victims. It was then we realised that people were equally in need of medicines as they were in need of food,” Aravindh told Dt Next.
Stating that many big brands were already in the market by the time they came in, he added, “The online market was offering huge discounts and it was affecting the business of traditional pharmacies. We decided to facilitate these pharmacies with an online platform and at the same time provide the convenience of immediate delivery to customers. We started operating with three pharmacies in Chennai and now we have established a tie-up with more than 70 pharmacies in the city and with a chain of various pharmacies across Tamil Nadu.”
Explaining the process of their business, he said, “Once the order is received through the App or via call, the information is forwarded to the pharmacy (nearest to the customer’s location) which has the medicine available. In case emergency delivery is requested by the customer, we use our own team to deliver the medicines in case the pharmacy partner cannot do it.”
While an emergency delivery is made within 20 minutes after the order placement, the scheduled orders are processed the same day. It will be routed to a nearby pharmacy and after validating the prescription and notifying the bill amount, the partner pharmacy delivers it at the customer’s doorstep. “Though our primary focus is on Medicines, we have also catered to few other services like Lab test appointments and Blood sample collections at the doorstep.
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