Keeping India’s neighbourhood chemists in business, and bringing their medicines to every doorstep.

Roni Paul grew up inside the medicine business. His father and uncle run a pharmacy, a drug-distribution operation and a diagnostic centre, so from childhood he watched how a chemist buys, stocks, prices and sells, and where the money leaks.

He went abroad to study medicine at Astana Medical University and kept noticing the same thing: what fails patients is rarely the medicine. It is everything around it, the access, the wait, the systems people fight through before care reaches them.

Around 2019 he left medical school to build companies instead. His first, a hospitality business, launched into Covid and closed when the second wave took the industry apart. He moved to Bengaluru, joined a healthcare startup as Chief Operating Officer, working with hospitals, and then founded a media agency that he still runs.

Along the way he saw the frustrating dance every Indian family knows too well: app after app showing “out of stock”, chemists who had the medicine but would not deliver, a forty-minute drive across Bengaluru for a single strip of tablets. The medicine was never far away. It was sitting on a shelf around the corner, at a chemist who had no way to take an order online, show what was in stock, or send it the short distance home.

The gap wasn’t kilometres. It was software.

The big platforms had solved delivery, but only for their own warehouses, not for the chemist who knows your name and your prescription. The answer was not one more faceless pharmacy app. It was giving the corner shop the same technology the giants have, and connecting it to the families living a few streets away.

MedMate is his third company, and the one he has been preparing for his whole life. The first months were spent listening: sitting with Bengaluru’s chemists, including the President of the Bangalore District Chemists & Druggists Association, to hear the ground reality before building.

We measure success in something simpler than orders: a family that never has to ration a medicine, a Sunday not lost to a pharmacy crawl, and the corner chemist, still standing, still trusted, now open to the whole neighbourhood.