Medlife to cease operations, merge with PharmEasy this week

Indian online pharmacy and telemedicine startup PharmEasy, on Tuesday, announced its merger with competitor Medlife starting 25 May, 2021. Both companies’ plans of a merger first came to light in August last year, when PharmEasy had submitted a proposal to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for acquiring Medlife. 
 

The deal saw API Holdings, the parent entity of PharmEasy, acquire 100% equity shares of Medlife. Medlife’s promoters have in return got a 19.95% stake in the merged entity, which is expected to be valued at $1 Bn. 
 

PharmEasy cofounder Dhaval Shah wrote on LinkedIn that the merged entity will be India’s largest online healthcare delivery platform, serving over 2 million families every month. 
 

As part of the merger, Medlife will cease operations while its users will be able to use their login credentials to access the PharmEasy portal. Their digitised prescriptions and saved addresses up to a year back will be available on the PharmEasy app. 
 

“We are also looking forward to onboarding Medlife’s retail partners and continuing our journey with them with utmost sincerity. We assure that users’ and retailers’ experience won’t be compromised in any way, and will only get better going forward,” wrote PharmEasy in a blog post. 
 

Founded in 2015 by Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah and Mikhil Innani, PharmEasy offers services such as teleconsultation, medicine delivery and diagnostic test sample collections. 
 

On its social media collateral, the startup claims to be delivering medicines in over 1,000 cities covering more than 22,000 pin codes. 
 

The PharmEasy-Medlife merger comes amid increased activity in the online pharmacy space, which has seen the entry of big ecommerce players such as Amazon, Reliance and Flipkart since last year. 
 

In August last year, Reliance Retail acquired a majority stake in online pharmacy NetMeds. In the same month, Amazon launched its online pharmacy, Amazon Pharmacy in India. In September, Flipkart partnered with online pharmacy 1mg, integrating the latter’s platform into its Android app.