Pharmacy startup Figtree has closed a seed funding round from AJVC Fund, securing the capital it needs to build a new kind of pharmacy in India, one that is small, neighbourhood-focused, and deeply personal. The investment marks an early institutional bet on a model that deliberately goes against the grain of how organised pharmacy retail has expanded in the country.
The round was led by AJVC Fund under Aviral Bhatnagar. The investment suggests early conviction in Figtree’s core thesis: that India’s pharmacy market has a significant and underserved gap at the neighbourhood level, and that a small-format, community-rooted store can outperform larger retail chains where it matters most to the everyday household.
Figtree began building its operational and technology infrastructure in mid-2025, well before its stores opened. The seed capital has funded that foundation, helping the company go live across five locations in two of India’s largest cities earlier this year.
What the funding is building
Unlike most pharmacy startups that chase scale through delivery apps or large-format stores, Figtree is using its capital to do something more deliberate. Each store is intentionally small and stocked only with the medicines that families in that specific neighbourhood actually need. The goal is not to carry everything, but to reliably carry exactly what the local community requires.
The funding is also going toward building what Figtree describes as a clinical relationship between the pharmacist and each household. In this model, the pharmacist tracks prescriptions, refill schedules, and the health needs of entire families, not just individual customers. The company believes this is what the profession should have always looked like, and its capital is being deployed to make that vision operational at scale.
For a seed-stage company with just five stores, Figtree’s early performance numbers are hard to dismiss. Nine out of ten customers are returning consistently, suggesting the model is building real loyalty rather than one-off visits. A 98 percent prescription fill rate means the company’s hyper-local stocking approach is working, customers are finding what they need, reliably, without being turned away.
The sub-five-minute delivery window further underlines the advantage of proximity. Figtree’s stores are embedded in the neighbourhoods they serve, which makes fast delivery structurally possible in a way that a centralised warehouse-based model simply cannot replicate.
India’s organised pharmacy retail sector has largely followed a familiar playbook: open larger stores in high-visibility commercial zones and compete on assortment and brand recognition. The everyday household, tucked away in a residential lane and needing regular monthly refills, has largely been an afterthought in that strategy.
Figtree’s seed funding is a bet that this gap is large enough, and persistent enough, to build a significant business around. By placing small, precisely stocked stores inside residential neighbourhoods and giving each one a pharmacist who functions more like a family health partner than a counter attendant, the company is trying to build the kind of trust and repeat behaviour that no delivery app or retail chain has yet managed to own in this category.
Whether the seed capital is enough to prove the model at meaningful scale remains to be seen. But with five stores, a committed investor, and early metrics that point in the right direction, Figtree is off to a start that will be worth watching.
