Online pharmacy start-up PharmEasy has raised $216 million, or Rs 1,804 crore, in a round that was led by investors including Ranjan Pai’s Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG), as per a report by Entrackr.
The report says that the start-up raised funds at a 90 per cent valuation cut of $710 million. The start-up was last valued at Rs 5.6 billion in 2021, as per Moneycontrol.
A special resolution was passed by API Holdings Pvt. Ltd. (owner of PharmEasy) to allot 18.6 crore cumulative convertible preference shares. It was issued at a price of Rs 96.8 each. Pai's family office led the round with Rs 800 crore. Prosus, Temasek, and 360 One Portfolios invested Rs 231 crore, Rs 184 crore, and Rs 200 crore, as reported by Moneycontrol. Other investors who participated in the round include CDPQ Private Equity, WSSS Investments, Evolution Debt Capital, and Goldman Sachs.
To repay the debt taken from Goldman Sachs, since August last year, PharmEasy has been trying to raise funds of around Rs 3,500 crore, as per the Entrackr report. In June last year, the company breached the Goldman Sachs loan covenant after it failed to raise the required liquidity. The company was supposed to raise around $120 million, linked to its burn velocity rate, as per a report by the Economic Times.
In August 2022, PharmEasy borrowed Rs 2,280 crore from Goldman Sachs. The money was taken to pay off an earlier debt that the firm had from Kotak Mahindra Bank in order to buy Thyrocare. While the company hoped that it could repay the money with the amount raised via IPO, its IPO plan was pushed.
However, this is not the first time the firm has seen a reduction in its valuation. Last year, Janus Henderson, an investor in the company, reduced its valuation by 50 percent. It was followed by investor Neuberger Berman, who reduced the company's valuation by almost 22 percent to $4.4 billion (as of February 2023).
