In India’s crowded quick commerce race, you can get groceries, snacks, even pet food in under 10 minutes. But if you need a common prescription drug, the experience is far less predictable, especially if you’re relying on your local chemist.
That gap is what Repill is trying to fill. Leaving a well-cushioned job with a Rs 1.5 crore job in the US, Rajat set out to become the Mohan Bhargav of modern India. “Back in late 2022, if you searched for ‘quick medicine delivery in India,’ you’d barely get any results. That’s when the idea really started to take shape,” Rajat Gupta, founder of Repill, said in a conversation with financialexpress.com.
Repill is not trying to be the next PharmEasy or 1mg. It isn’t hoarding crores worth of medicine in dark stores or racing to out-discount the competition. It’s doing something far simpler—and smarter. It’s trying to Uber-ise India’s pharmacies. Instead of disrupting the mom-and-pop medical store, Repill wants to empower it. The startup has created a backend engine that connects patients to nearby pharmacies, matches orders to inventory in real-time, and promises delivery within an hour. “We promise 60 minutes just to be safe, but most orders are much quicker and lie in the 30 – 40 minutes range,” Gupta said.
But the real magic lies not in the speed, but in the structure. Repill doesn’t own inventory or even the pharmacies. “We’re a tech platform. We don’t stock or dispense medicines ourselves,” Gupta insisted.
This asset-light model, combined with smart matchmaking, is what makes Repill scalable in ways traditional players struggle with. Gupta breaks it down: “Just stocking each [dark] store with Rs 50 lakhs worth of inventory would cost us Rs 10 crores for 20 locations. With our model, we’re able to tap into that inventory through our partners without spending a fraction of that amount.”
It’s a strategy born of pragmatism. Gupta cut his teeth in Silicon Valley before turning his sights to India. What he saw was a healthcare system stuck in analogue mode—paper prescriptions, disconnected clinics, and pharmacies running on WhatsApp orders. “Business starts with finding a real problem and solving it,” he said. The problem was simple: access. “People struggled to access basic healthcare essentials because there wasn’t a streamlined way to connect with nearby pharmacies,” Gupta recalled from the COVID years. Repill launched in January in South Delhi. By April, it had expanded to Noida, onboarded 15 pharmacies, and seen traction from over 2,000 users.
The model is delightfully straightforward. Users upload a prescription or select OTC items, and Repill’s algorithm finds the best match across nearby pharmacies. Orders are validated by a pharmacist, packed by the pharmacy, and delivered by Repill’s gig network. No stockpiling. No warehousing. Just tech as glue.
But in India’s price-sensitive market, convenience alone doesn’t close the deal. “Consumers are heavily driven by discounts,” Gupta admitted. It’s a reality Repill can’t ignore, especially as it squares off against deep-pocketed rivals throwing cash at customer acquisition. Still, the startup isn’t chasing a discount war. Its edge lies in solving for infrastructure rather than circumventing it. While Apollo’s warehouses and Zepto’s dark stores centralise power, Repill decentralises it, handing pharmacies the tools to digitise, compete, and thrive. “Instead of replacing them, we’re empowering them,” Gupta said.
The challenges aren’t trivial. Prescription compliance in India is laughably lax, and Repill has had to build its filters to reject shady orders. But Gupta is playing the long game. “We work only with verified, reputable pharmacies. We’re very focused on minimising the risk of counterfeit medicines,” he added. In this market, trust is currency, and Gupta knows it. His ambition is to grow Repill into a full-stack healthcare aggregator, bundling ambulances, nursing, and hospitals into a single app. “When someone thinks of medicine or healthcare, I want the first name that comes to mind to be Repill.”
For now, the startup is bootstrapping its way forward, backed by angel investor Deepak Sahni of Healthians. But it’s clear Gupta isn’t here for a quick exit. “If you need a particular set of medicines delivered every two weeks or once a month, we’ll make it easy to set that up.“It’s all about adding convenience while keeping the experience personal and reliable,” he concluded.
Chips in ten minutes? That’s easy. But medicine in thirty, and a model that just might fix healthcare’s last mile? That’s a story worth watching.