Cureka, A 9-Yr-Old Startup, Eyes Rs 40 Cr Revenue After Organizational Overhaul

India has seen rapid growth of e-commerce players. There are many home-grown brands that have created waves. D2C brands are not only forcing established brands to rethink their strategies, these brands have also bridged gap in many areas. Cureka is one such e-commerce player, which has come up with many pioneer brands in the preventive healthcare space.

Founded by dermatologist Dr Hema Sathish, Cureka has been established way back in 2014 with a vision to enable patients a healthy life through preventive healthcare products. In a conversation with the Bizz Buzz, Dr Hema Sathish said that from a two-person led company, it has now grown to a team of more than 50 people. The company has two private labels named Health Etc, The Good Hygiene Company, which are witnessing rising adoption. The e-commerce firm is also expecting its revenue to grow more than four times in the coming year on the back of its new strategy and aggressive execution

Can you provide a brief overview about your journey in launching Cureka? Please throw some light on the motivation behind launching this health & wellness platform.

Actually, the platform was started out of necessity because my patients come from Bangalore, from Nepal, and many other nations. During initial days, when we had a one doctor clinic, we faced difficulty in send medicines to those patients who wanted medicines. Later, when we shifted to the big hospital, which is a multi-specialty one of 200 beds, the problem was not resolved.

That’s when we started our e-commerce platform. It was the year 2014 when we started. Many people started buying a lot of products and sometimes, they'll call and ask us can you arrange for this? Can you arrange for that? Then, we figured out, that there was a need for preventive health care as we received calls from very remote villages in north-east region. Thus, we started adding more and more products and those days there was nobody doing healthcare as such. Slowly, we added preventive healthcare as a category on the back of rising demand. During Covid pandemic, users looked for more number of products, which we added for helping people out.

So, you started Cureka when the e-commerce as a sector was just opening up. Have you got the first mover advantage?

Yes, we were early movers in the e-commerce space but we have not got the advantage. Because at the end of the day, we were not business people initially. We were more of doctors. So, we were doing it for our patients and people known to us and for people who wanted help. However, things have now changed. Now, we have a professional team who does all the work.

There are many medtech firms, doing e-commerce in India now. How is Cureka different from those platforms? Can you throw some light into this aspect?

We are not a pharmacy. We do not sell drugs at all. We are only in the preventive healthcare space. There is nobody doing only preventive health care, where we are only into preventive health care. The minute you say preventive health care, people start thinking that you shouldn't get a disease. That's a very wrong way of looking at it. Because what happens in preventive health care is see if you have a condition, you should avoid from getting other complications in the future. So, preventive healthcare is a very important aspect of human’s life.

How has been the growth so far? How many healthcare products are now available on your platform?

At the beginning, we were two people-led company. There was one person to pack and put and there was one more person who would add content and data. So, I used to look at what my patients require and then I would write some content for uploading it in the website. We sourced the product from the company directly from the beginning. So, people started relying on us much more (because of our strict quality assurance). We have always maintained very high standards of our products. From a two person company, now it has grown to a 55 people company. The number of products earlier used to be around 800 to 900 when we started. Then we grew up to about 2,000 to 3,000 pre-Covid and now, we have more than 13,000 to 14,000 SKUs (stock keeping units).

As far as revenue is concerned, it's around Rs 10 crore now. But we are aiming really high now. We now have two private labels also under this. We started Health Etc for ingestible health care products. We saw a lot of gaps in healthcare where people have been asked to take a medication for long when they are not really unwell. The best example would be perimenopause. Women go through a lot of problems (during this period) and then what happens is that she is asked to take a lot of medicine. So, people start popping in pills when they are not actually sick. We wanted that to be wiped off totally. So, we have made gummies as part of preventive healthcare portfolio. We also have another brand- The Good Hygiene Company, which is focussed on skincare. We make skincare products under this brand, which are absolutely biodegradable and plant-based. These are organic ingredients added in those. We are trying to help more people who have sensitive skin.

Are you completely into sourcing these products from third parties or are you involved in manufacturing these products yourself?

We don’t do the manufacturing. But what we do is we make the formulations ourselves. Like be it the gummies, or other products, we put the formulas together. We did research for making these formulations. Now, we are doing research on the efficacy of these products with several hospitals.

Have you raised capital so far? Are you planning to raise capital in the near future?

No, we have not raised external capital so far. We should grow more and then, plan something. Next year may be a possibility of considering any fund raise when we show good growth. As far as revenue growth is concerned, we are planning for a revenue of about Rs 40 crore in the forthcoming year. We are looking at very rapid growth because we have revamped the whole organization about a few months ago. We have changed our plan to grow faster and bigger. So, we kind of re-hauling the whole organization. So, next year, we are set to grow very rapidly.