Apotekamo, an online pharmaceutical marketplace targeting the Central and Eastern European markets, has successfully closed its first financing round of 5 million SEK. Exceeding the initial offering of 3 million SEK, due to overwhelming interest, this funding round will amply cover the companies financial needs for the first year, with the proceeds primarily allocated towards marketing and operations.
The investors consist of amongst others members of ANGELGATE such as Christian Dereser (Vealo Ventures, CheckMyBus), Richard Rebernik (Early Stage Investor) and Stefan Ulrich Fleissner (Bendo Capital)., AllaNova AB, Clas Ellius (MEDS investor), Sam Nurmi (Dooer), Tord Lendau (previously Vitrolife board), Willem De Geer (DogBuddy founder), Mohammed Homman (Vironova Founder and CEO) and Johan Encoson (Active Invest).
“The current situation is very offline in the target markets. Generally, there is low knowledge of driving online traffic. Apotekamo provides local pharmacies a niche marketplace where we can drive traffic and provide a broad variety of high-quality products from many pharmacies.” – Arli Mujkic
Apotekamo had over 20,000 visitors in its first seven days of launching its first pharmacy on the marketplace, Apoteka Valerijana (established 1903) – indicating that the customer base will grow as the coverage and product quantity increases.
The business model is of a traditional marketplace like Amazon, where a commission fee is charged for each purchase, with no startup costs in order to make it frictionless to get started. Apotekamo is in discussions with several more prominent pharmacies to integrate into the platform.
A CEO has also been recruited, which will be announced shortly. He has decades of experience within IT and e-commerce working in senior positions for multi-billion-dollar companies.
“We had this venture planned and started talking to pharmacies before the current Covid-19 crisis but the urgency and interest grew even more because of it. We also expect both e-commerce as a whole, but in particularly pharmaceutical products, to grow fast in the coming years.” – Måns Pontén Söderlind