Today we are excited to announce that Version One is leading a $4.5M Pre-Series A round in Rio Health, a quick-commerce platform for medicines and healthcare essentials in India. Existing investors Xeed Ventures, Good Capital and Amplify also participated.

Rio delivers prescription medicines, over-the-counter products and healthcare essentials across Delhi NCR in 20 to 30 minutes. From three dark stores, the company already processes more than 30,000 orders a month, nearly 80% of them from repeat customers. The new capital will take Rio to more than 15 dark stores over the next year.

A category I have been circling for 20 years

This one is personal. I am the son of two pharmacists. I grew up around the counter, watching my parents do the unglamorous work that makes a pharmacy trustworthy: reading a doctor’s scrawl correctly, catching an interaction, knowing which regular needed what before they asked, keeping the shelf stocked with the one product that would be needed on a Sunday night. Pharmacy is a retail business on the surface and a trust business underneath.

After my first start-up was acquired by Amazon, one of the ideas I spent real time on was an online pharmacy in Germany. I never built it. The timing was not right, and the pieces (regulation, logistics, customer habits) were not there yet. But the conviction stuck with me: that the way people get medicine would eventually be rebuilt for the internet.

So when I met Ankur and Amit, I recognised what I was looking at.

Medicines are the most obvious quick-commerce category, and the hardest one

Nobody plans to buy medicine three days in advance. You need it when the fever spikes at 11pm or when the doctor hands you a prescription on the way out of the clinic. That makes pharmacy one of the purest use cases for quick commerce: urgent, unplanned and recurring.

But speed alone does not win here. A grocery dark store can get by on 3,000 SKUs; a pharmacy needs 20,000, and the one you need right now is rarely in the top 500. Every order needs a licensed pharmacist to check it, and the customer has zero tolerance for substitutions. If you cannot deliver the exact medicine on the prescription, you have not delivered anything. Until now, customers in India have had to choose between the fast option and the one that actually has what they need.

Rio gives them both. Each dark store serves a roughly three-kilometre radius and carries 20,000+ SKUs, with long-tail medicines sourced through a distributor network. Customers order the way they would talk to their local chemist: by speaking or typing in Hindi, English or Hinglish, or by uploading a photo of the prescription. Rio’s AI builds the order, a licensed pharmacist verifies it, and the medicines arrive in 20 to 30 minutes.

Founders who sweat every detail

What won us over with Ankur Agrawal and Amit Ahuja is not the pitch. It is how maniacally focused they are on the hundred small things that decide whether a medicine actually shows up at the door in 25 minutes, correct and complete.

Spend an hour with them and you will not hear about TAM. You will hear about which SKUs a store in one Noida neighbourhood needs that a store four kilometres away does not. Why three kilometres is the right delivery radius, and not four. How the prescription-photo flow handles a doctor’s handwriting, and where the pharmacist steps in. Why a customer should be able to say a medicine’s name out loud in Hinglish rather than hunt for it in a search box.

The same discipline shows in how they have built the company. Rather than blitz-scaling on day one, they spent the first phase getting three stores to work properly: repeat usage, healthy order values, tight store-level operations. The result is 30,000+ orders a month at INR 600-700 per order, with nearly 80% from repeat customers, all from three stores. In a category where the graveyard is full of companies that expanded before the unit economics were real, that patience is rare. Now they are ready to scale: 15+ dark stores across Delhi NCR in the next 9 to 12 months, targeting INR 150 crore+ in ARR.

In healthcare, trust is earned one correct order at a time. Ankur and Amit understand that better than any founders we have met in this category.

A quick primer on quick commerce in India

For readers in North America, where 10-minute delivery mostly died with the 2021-22 funding cycle, India is a different world. Quick commerce is how a large and growing share of urban India shops. Three horizontal players (Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart) deliver groceries and almost everything else from thousands of dark stores in 10 to 20 minutes. Gross order value crossed roughly INR 64,000 crore (about $7.6B) in FY2025, more than doubling year over year. Dense cities, cheap last-mile labour, low car ownership and a habit of buying small and often make the model work in a way it never did in Toronto or San Francisco.

So why can a vertical player like Rio compete when Blinkit and Zepto are adding medicines to their apps? Because pharmacy is exactly the kind of category where horizontal scale is not an advantage:

• Assortment: a horizontal dark store is optimised for a few thousand fast-moving grocery SKUs. A pharmacy customer needs one specific medicine out of 20,000+. That is a different business from stocking milk and chips.
• Compliance and trust: every pharmacy location in India needs its own licence and a qualified pharmacist, and prescriptions need verification before dispensing. The horizontals have mostly bolted this on through partners. Rio is built around it from day one.
• Local demand forecasting: which medicines a neighbourhood needs is a far more local and predictable problem than groceries, and getting it right is the difference between a 95% fill rate and a 70% one. This is where Rio’s neighbourhood-level planning compounds.
• Frequency and intent: medicines are high-intent, recurring purchases with order values well above typical quick-commerce baskets. A customer who trusts Rio with a parent’s monthly prescriptions does not switch for a coupon.

We have seen this pattern before: horizontal marketplaces win the broad categories, and focused vertical players win the ones where the product is complicated, regulated or high-stakes. Medicines are all three.

Welcome to the Version One family

India’s pharmacy market is one of the largest in the world and still overwhelmingly served by the corner chemist. Rio is bringing the speed Indian consumers now expect from quick commerce to the category where getting the details right matters most. We could not be more excited to back Ankur, Amit and the Rio team.

Congratulations to the whole Rio Health team. Welcome to the Version One family.