Jungle Ventures leads $12 mn bet on Ayurveda doctor firm NirogStreet

The round also saw participation from a clutch of existing backers, Spiral Ventures, ICMG Partners-managed fund, DoorDash’s Gokul Rajaram and Japanese bank SMBC’s co-head for Asia Pacific Rajeev Kannan, with the family office of Anthony Weldon as new investor.

New Delhi-based NirogStreet will deploy the fresh proceeds to strengthen its supply chain, technology and service offerings.

“As a healthcare company we see ourselves organizing in an unorganized sector. By solving the problems of trust and supply-chain, we are enabling everyone in the ecosystem thus building a better healthcare company,” NirogStreet’s founder and chief executive Ram N Kumar told Mint in an interaction.

Founded by Kumar in June 2016, the company provides a platform for Ayurveda doctors. It offers a portfolio of services including integrated doctor-led prescription ecommerce enablement, peer-to-peer learning for Ayurvedic doctors, digital health record management, and smart clinics.

The latest round comes a few months after it raised $5 million in January this year, taking the total funds raised by NirogStreet to $22 million.

“Our goal of improving healthcare globally through technology and ayurvedic solutions is scaling and strengthening,” said Kumar, who had earlier floated startups like PaintingHouse and Marketech.

“We are streamlining the supply chain of Ayurvedic services and medicines to enable the doctors to deliver trusted healthcare and working towards making Ayurveda the first call of treatment,” he added.

NirogStreet falls in line with Jungle’s investment thesis, Anurag Srivastava, Founding Partner at Jungle Ventures, told VCCircle.

“We have always looked for deep-rooted problems, which are global in nature and haven’t been really solved. We’re not a very horizontal ecommerce-focused company. We like to go into vertical problems. NirogStreet falls within that,” he said.

The startup claims to have about 50,000 medical practitioners on the platform, about 50 brands and a little over 7,000 stock keeping units. It has also built an end-to-end supply chain infrastructure for Ayurvedic medicines, where doctors can directly order and fill prescriptions, as NirogStreet manages the fulfilment direct to the customer door.

“NirogStreet is transforming the entire Ayurveda value chain by infusing trust, quality, access and scale to the industry. Ram and his team are building an industry-first Ayurveda ecosystem with their unique community-first, knowledge and commerce approach that transcends from ingredients to consumers,” he added.