Champ in The Making

PHARMEASY’S DEAL TO BUY THYROCARE IS THE FIRST-EVER ACQUISITION OF A LISTED COMPANY BY AN INDIAN UNICORN. HERE IS THE STORY BEHIND THE MIRACLE

- P.B. JAYAKUMAR & JOE C. MATHEW

The rags-to-riches story of Arokiaswamy Velumani, the founder of diagnostics chain Thyrocare, is well-known and a motivation for aspiring entrepreneurs. He was born in a poor family in a village on the outskirts of Coimbatore. His mother funded his education from whatever little she earned from her two buffalos. He graduated in science and after years of struggle got a job at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai. He worked there for 15 years before starting his own business, painfully building up a diagnostics chain with a one lakh square feet central laboratory in Navi Mumbai. He lived in a small portion of the lab and recruited mostly freshers whom he wanted to help considering his own early struggles. The 62-year-old hogged headlines recently when he sold his pan-India diagnostics chain, Thyrocare, to PharmEasy, a six-year-old e-pharmacy, for ₹4,546 crore.

The deal put PharmEasy’s media face, founder and chief executive officer Siddharth Shah — a 32-year-old computer engineer and IIM-Ahmedabad graduate who comes from a rich family in Mumbai and is fond of cars — into the limelight as a new-age business celebrity. It is, after all, going to be the first-ever acquisition of a listed company by a startup. PharmEasy, which became India’s largest e-pharmacy after the acquisition of its rival, Medlife, has been the first Indian e-pharmacy start-up to enter the unicorn club. The Thyrocare deal, backed by many leading private equity entities, has doubled its valuation to over ₹30,000 crore ($4 billion).