Ailaaj raised money as a telehealth app, and now gives consultations away to sell medicine

Ailaaj raised $1.6 million in 2021 to become a full stack digital health platform, with doctors, medicines and lab tests under one app. Its website now reads like a pharmacy. It reports 1.2 million orders delivered, more than 12,000 products in stock, and a free five minute consultation with a verified doctor, after which the prescription lands in the customer's cart. The consultation brings the customer in. The medicine is what the company sells.

What the discount tells you

The site offers prescription upload, delivery in one to three working days across Pakistan, and free delivery on orders above Rs1,500. A feature called Auto Refill and Save takes 10 to 15 percent off recurring orders on 30, 60 or 90 day cycles. The sample prices on the page sit at the top of that range. Advant 8mg falls from Rs476 to Rs405, Aldomet 250mg from Rs1,538 to Rs1,307, and Apiban 5mg from Rs1,200 to Rs1,020. Each is a cut of about 15 percent.

Take the Rs1,200 item on a 30 day cycle. The discount is Rs180 a refill, or Rs2,160 over twelve refills. A customer who stays on one monthly medicine for a year saves that much and has a reason not to compare prices elsewhere each month. For Ailaaj the gain is a predictable repeat order. A discount of this depth is aimed at people on long term medication, and a free consultation keeps the prescription, and the refill, inside the app. That is the magazine's reading. The site does not say what the pharmacy earns on these products, so how much of the discount comes from Ailaaj's margin and how much from suppliers is unknown.

The delivery rule adds a second lever. After the discount, the Rs1,020 Apiban pack sits Rs480 short of the Rs1,500 free delivery line, so a customer on that medicine needs a second item in the basket to avoid a delivery fee. The page does not state the fee. That is where the rest of the catalogue earns its place: vitamins, skin care and daily essentials fill the gap between a single prescription and free delivery.

The free consultation has a cost of its own, since it uses five minutes of a verified doctor's time. The page does not say who pays for it or how doctors are paid. That cost is only recovered if the prescription is filled through Ailaaj, which is why the consultation and the refill programme work as one design.

The shelf is mostly medicine. The site's category counts add up to about 8,400 items, and medications account for 4,820 of them, or about 57 percent. Vitamins and supplements, skin care, hair care, home health care, daily essentials and mother and baby products share the rest.

Two small apps and a pharmacy family

The company came from two startups that the Fazal Din Group incubated. Fazal Din opened a small pharmacy in Lahore in 1947 and grew it into the Pharma Plus chain. AugmentCare, a Lahore telehealth app founded in 2017 by Hyder Mumtaz and Ahmed Shuja, raised $1 million that October. It then had about 30,000 registered patients and 125 doctors in Lahore and Karachi. Sehat.com.pk, an online pharmacy, had been running since 2014.

In September 2021 the two merged as Ailaaj, with a $1.6 million seed round led by JS Group. Fazal Din Group, Leonine Tech Ventures and private equity investors from East Asia took part. The money was for marketing, technology and hiring.

The announcement described services spanning diagnosis, medicine delivery, corporate health and wellness and ongoing care, with plans to expand through social commerce into baby and beauty products. JS Group's Salaal Hasan said the investment rested on ecommerce being positive at the PC2 level and on strong unit economics in telemedicine for businesses. PC2 is a contribution margin measure whose definition varies from company to company, and the announcement gave no figures behind it.

The pitch leaned on a thin health system. The announcement put Pakistan's population at 221 million, with one doctor for every 1,300 people and government health spending at 1.2 percent of GDP. It named Marham, Sehat Kahani and Dawaai as peers that had raised $1 million, $1.5 million and $8.5 million respectively.

Seven businesses under one name

The company's corporate page lists seven units. Ailaaj Hospital Pharmacy names PAF Hospital, Fauji Foundation, Shalamar Hospital, Nishtar Hospital, Jinnah Hospital and WAPDA hospitals among its notable clients. Ailaaj One is software for independent pharmacies, with more than 1,000 onboarded across Pakistan. Ailaaj Trade Solutions lists Martin Dow, Getz Pharma, AGP and CCL Pharma as notable clients. The other four are the online store, a clinic management system, a radiology management system and CorpCare, an employer health product.

The page's own figures allow some arithmetic. The clinic system reports more than 125,000 patients managed and more than a million prescriptions generated, about eight prescriptions for each patient. CorpCare reports more than Rs300 million processed a year across more than 20,000 enrolled members, or about Rs15,000 a member, roughly Rs1,250 a month. It also claims savings of about 9 percent through the Ailaaj network, without saying against what. These numbers are the company's own, carry no dates and cannot be checked from outside.

The company has moved from a consumer app toward the back office of pharmacies, hospitals and employers. Those customers pay for software, service fees or product, and none of the pages says which line earns the most. Institutions with budgets pay for the hospital and pharmacy software, while CorpCare depends on employers renewing each year. The page reports no renewal rate.

What is not published

Ailaaj does not publish revenue or losses. Its corporate page lists a Leadership link but no names, and lists no investors. The two operating entities named in the site's footer are Apothecare and Augmentcare Technologies, both private companies.

The last funding the company has announced is still the $1.6 million seed round of September 2021, which leaves the 1.2 million orders and the seven units without a published revenue figure to match.