• The liki24.it website was launched in Italy as the first step to bringing all the services of Liki24 to the market.
• On the liki24.it website, you can find high-quality medicines at the best price and quickly arrange delivery.
• The service receives information from many pharmacies, which allows real-time updating of the product range and prices on the site. 
• Currently, the site allows you to place an order and arrange delivery by mail throughout the country. Later, after the end of the test period, it will also be possible to arrange fast courier delivery of goods in all big cities of Italy.

Ukrainians will also be able to use the liki24.it online service soon – order medicines for relatives living in Italy or those who moved to this country due to the war. Using the liki24.it website, you will be able to order the necessary medicines from Ukraine with the delivery to the specified address in Italy.

Currently, the standard delivery cost is €4.49. If the order price is more than €25, medicines and related products will be delivered free of charge.

AIN.Capital journalist asked Liki24 how and why the company chose Italy. Taras Potichnyi, Vice President of Expansion at Liki24, said that the startup primarily focused on the countries of Western Europe, so they chose Italy. The team analyzed many macroeconomic and microeconomic indicators, including those connected with medicine and electronic medicine.

Also, the choice largely depended on the country’s legislation allowing medical e-commerce. Another critical factor was the existence of an e-medicine field at all — for example, the availability of e-prescriptions. Not all European countries have them.

According to Potichny, given the combination of many factors, the list of 5-6 countries emereged. Later, they formed a shortlist (2-3 countries). Italy was the first on the final list.

“We are growing very fast, even faster than expected. We are expanding our geography and are not going to stop there. The pharmaceutical market, especially in Europe, is very conservative and has long opposed any new technologies. Nevertheless, the possibility to quickly get high-quality and inexpensive medicines is always relevant, and modern IT technologies allow automating all processes. Today, we are entering the Italian market, which we consider very promising,” comments Taras Potichnyi, Vice President of Expansion at Liki24.com.

Investment details

• Liki24.com is a platform for searching, comparing prices, and quick or scheduled delivery of drugs, which operates in Ukraine, Romania, and Poland.
• The company was founded in 2017 by Anton Avrinski, together with his colleagues. Since then, Liki24.com has received nearly $6 million from leading venture capital funds in Ukraine – Horizon Capital, Flyer One Ventures, TA Ventures, and several business angels. 
• SID Venture Partners invested in the company, given the experienced team and being confident in its future expansion into global markets.
• The pharmaceutical market is worth up to $20 billion in Ukraine, Poland, Ukraine, and Romania alone, and up to $300 billion per year in Europe as a whole.

“Liki24.com is a project that has already proved its ability to develop in Ukraine and has reached a leading position in the local market. Amid recent events, now they have even more motivation to achieve success in Europe. We believe in their prospects as well as in technological and marketing expertise,”

commented Dmitry Vartanyan, General Managing Partner at SID Venture Partners.

• datuum.ai is an AI-driven no-code data integration platform that reduces time and cost for data projects. Using the product saves businesses up to 80% of the time spent on data-related processes, which is much more efficient than doing it manually.
• Startup clients are large and medium-sized businesses, service companies, consulting agencies, BPO projects.
• The startup, which was founded in February 2021, has two executives: Dmytro Zhuk, 46 (co-founder and ex-CTO of Sigma Software), and Leonid Nekhimchuk, 44 (ex-CTO of VisiQuate Inc.). The two have over 20 years of experience building SaaS projects and data engineering.
• SID Venture Partners invested in datuum.ai considering the experienced team and the growth of the market for no-code platforms, which reached $12.5 billion in 2020 and may grow to $190 billion in 2030. Datuum.ai also revolutionizes the data management market, which is worth $85 billion per year.

“The idea and concept of datuum.ai have long been shaped by Sigma Software. We’re glad to find the people who share our vision of its further development and support the team in improving data processing for businesses from all over the world,”

commented Dmitry Vartanyan, Managing General Partner at SID Venture Partners, on the agreement

About the fund

SID Venture Partners is a venture capital fund launched by the end of 2021. It is a €15 million fund that invests in early-stage technology startups. Management is carried out by 13 representatives of the Ukrainian IT industry.

As of today, SID Venture Partners already has 12 investments. Except for Liki24.com and datuum.ai, the list includes Awesomic, Elai.io, Mindist, Spokk, V-Art, Finmap, Near, The Credit Thing, The Orderly Protocol, and The Breakfast. Most of the portfolio has been invested since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Liki24.com has had international ambitions since its very foundation. According to the founder and CEO, Anton Avrinskyi, the team has initially set a goal to build a global business operating in many markets and allowing millions of people to purchase medicines cheaper.

The first country was Poland in July 2020

The team also thought about the United Kingdom, but finally, they decided on the Polish market based on the following:

• far less cost of launch;
• it’s a neighbor of Ukraine;
• Poland is the fastest-growing nation in Europe.

In the Forbes interview in July 2021, Avrinskyi said that the Polish market is different from the Ukrainian; it’s less consolidated, more regulated, and conservative. However, there are also positive changes. In 2020, Poland implemented a united electronic prescription system simplifying drug delivery and logistics.

At the moment, Liki24 has its delivery service in Warsaw. Postal delivery is also available countrywide. Recently, the Polish logistics company InPost has installed 70 parcel lockers with fridges in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, and Lodz. As a result, users can quickly and safely get their medicines that require a particular temperature during transport and storage.

The next goal was Romania

New markets to expand were selected in three steps; the market analysis has been performed together with one of Liki24.com investors — Genesis Investments. After all, they chose a country with a relatively small drug market characterized by low competition, so in July 2021, the company arose in Bucharest.

Nowadays, Liki24.com has its own courier services in Bucharest and Constanța, providing delivery to all cities. The company is working on extending the local geography of the service availability to launch the 30-minutes express delivery, which is very popular in Ukraine.

Liki24.com is promoted in Romania via contextual ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and through influencers. However, word-of-mouth marketing is still the best.

The service is user-friendly and helps people solve a row of problems: granting access to high-quality goods, saving time and money, becoming popular from user to user, and the last is the best promotion. Several local media paid attention to Liki24.com in their releases.

According to the company representatives, after six months of its operation in the market, its turnover increased more than ten times in Romania.

In the past year, Liki24 also launched the courier service in Budapest, the capital of Hungary

The company reps said that currently, the team works on legal issues without disclosing any figures.

Drug delivery is one of the most regulated and legislation-sensible industries in Europe. For example, a law effective January 1, 2021, significantly changed the meds delivery format in Hungary. That’s why our legal team now works there hard to find an optimal solution within the current legislation.

In 2021, Liki24.com had over 300,000 users in Poland, Hungary, and Romania

The numbers speak for the demand. Another good news for us is that the repeat purchase rate hit 70%: users test our service, like it, and purchase meds and healthy goods again at our platform, the company reps said.

The main trend Liki24 can confirm for all three countries is increasing online purchases of drugs and wellness goods, home delivery, and online booking.

Currently, the company is focused on scaling and developing the platform in operating markets. Further foreign expansion is not ended, but still, there are many things to be researched in different countries, not only within Europe.

According to the CEO of Liki24.com, the choice of new markets for scaling was made in three stages, and one of the investors of the startup, Genesis Investments, was also involved in the analysis process.

As a result, the company chose Romania, a country with a small pharmaceutical market and low competition. If everything works out, the company plans to launch the service in two or three countries, one of which may be outside of Europe, Avrinsky said.

About Liki24

Liki24 was launched in Ukraine in 2017. According to Forbes, over 600,000 Ukrainians have already used its medication delivery services. During its existence, the startup managed to raise $6 million in investments, including funding from Genesis Investments, TA Ventures, and Horizon Capital. The company’s turnover grew to $20 million in 2020.

In July 2020, on its 3rd birthday, Liki24 was launched in Poland. The service is now available in Warsaw, Krakow, and Gdansk.

In May, the startup, in cooperation with Terralab, launched Lab24, a test-taking service. It offers any tests, including PCR and COVID-19 antibody tests, at home or an office.

The raised funds will be spent on business expansion and entering the European market. First of all, Liki24 intends to conquer Poland, where the service has already launched in July.

“This round will help us to expand our team, implement our successful model on the Polish market and finance further international expansion at a time when safe and fast delivery of medicines is critical to the well-being of society,” commented Anton Avrinsky, CEO and founder of Liki24.

“Our investment in Liki24 matches the focus on visionary founders with a clear business expansion strategy who are looking to partner with Horizon Capital to reach new heights,” comments Elena Kosharnaya, founder and CEO of Horizon Capital.

What is Liki24

Liki24.com is a platform that brings together offers from thousands of pharmacies and makes it easier for customers to get their medicine. Liki24.com has its software that integrates with pharmacy ERP systems, instantly analyzes prices and product availability, and develops optimal routes for couriers. These features allow delivering a set of medicines to consumers quickly at the most advantageous prices.

The service was launched in Ukraine in late 2017, and in less than 3 years since its inception, the company has connected over 5,000 pharmacies and fulfilled over 500,000 orders. European startup media Sifted named Liki24 as one of the few European startups that help to mitigate the negative impact of coronavirus, and BBC included the platform among the companies that help patients during the quarantine.

Liki24 is included in the list of Healthtech startups. The company, in cooperation with Ukrposhta, has launched free deliveries of medicines during the quarantine. The free delivery service is available all over Ukraine, except for Kyiv. For the capital, where pharmacies are more accessible, the startup offered a special tariff of UAH 35. You can arrange delivery by phone or on the website of Liki24.

To recap, Liki24 has several models of monetization. In addition to delivery fees, a small portion of the revenue comes from pharmacy surcharges for sales volume. Besides, the startup develops the B2B direction and cooperates with insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers, giving them access to their software. Among the clients are the largest Ukrainian insurance companies: Providna, Alfa Insurance, PZU, Kraina, and others.

In July 2019, the founder and CEO of Liki24 told AIN.UA that the total turnover of orders processed via the website was $2 million a year.

“We have more than 30,000 individual customers, we cooperate with 7 insurance companies, 3,500+ pharmacies, the traffic is almost 400,000 unique users per month, and last week we had more than 50,000 completed orders. And this is only as far as B2C is concerned,” he said.

AIN.UA talked with the co-founder of Liki24.com Anton Avrinsky about the service, its growth in the past one and a half years and how the team managed to accomplish such an ‘investment leap’.

We wrote about Liki24.com one and a half years ago. How has the service evolved since then?

The business model remains the same. We did not do any pivots. However, we have undergone a substantial expansion. We began as a service to help people order cheaper medicines — our delivery service collects orders from various pharmacies and delivers them to your door. In addition, it allowed people to save up to 40% on a single order even after paying for delivery.

Today we are a five-way marketplace. We have five areas of focus: end consumers (b2c), pharmacies and stores, insurance companies, doctors and pharmaceutical companies (b2b).

Explain each one briefly.

In b2c, that is, services for end users, we now have a new feature called “Customer pickup”. This is how it works: a customer selects products they need on our website. Then we offer them a choice: buy products at low prices with delivery, or show them the nearest pharmacies that have all the products they are looking for, so they can go there and pick up everything and get a discount.

For instance, the customer can opt to get their discounted order delivered to the door for 550 UAH, or they get the necessary products in a next-door pharmacy for 600 UAH, or they can get the products from a pharmacy that is two blocks away for the total of 500 UAH.

We also give them a discount. So, on top of showing pharmacies that have all the necessary products, we also help save money: if a customer visits a pharmacy alone, they would have to pay 800 UAH for the products they need, but we allow them to pick up the products only for 600 UAH. This is how our customer pickup option works.

Was it difficult to kick it off?

It was not easy. We had to set up integration with each and every of 3.5k pharmacies connected to the service in order to monitor their product prices and availability in real time. It takes a lot of work.

How do you work with insurance companies?

We help them save time and money. How does health insurance work? You pay for your insurance policy and when you get sick the insurance company covers your visit to the doctor. In addition, it covers the cost of medicines prescribed by your medical provider.

But that requires a specific sequence of actions to take place. Your medical provider calls the insurance company and tells them what medicines you need. After confirming your insurance policy, the insurance company begins looking for the medicines – they check the availability and prices. For that they send emails to pharmacies and the latter reply; then both agree on terms of delivery – in other words, this workflow consists of a myriad of steps. As a result, it takes the insurance company on average 30 minutes to process one claim. Needless to say that large insurance companies have to process somewhere between 500 to 1,000 claims per day.

We created software that reduces the time needed to process one claim from 30 minutes to just 3 minutes. At the same time, the insurance company saves from 5% to 15% on medicines (we are talking about huge amounts of money here, considering that their claims are usually up to 1,000 UAH).

Equipped with Liki24.com an employee of an insurance company is only one click away from checking the doctor’s prescription, eligible products, where to buy them, their prices and whether there is delivery service. Then this employee chooses the best offers, clicks and the order is booked pending delivery or customer pickup.

Are we talking about the internal market of health insurance or travel insurance too? What’s the state of affairs in this area in Ukraine?

So far we are talking only about health insurance in Ukraine. Health insurance for private individuals is a rare phenomenon. There are many companies in Ukraine that provide health insurance for their employees. And it’s a huge market.

For instance, Nova Poshta has all of its 30,000 employees insured. Personnel of Metinvest, DTEK, and Interpipe are also covered. We are talking millions of people who essentially become our clients by virtue of the insurance companies.

Today, our software is used by the largest insurance companies in Ukraine: Providna, Alfa Insurance, PZU, Krayina, and others. We work with 7 companies from the industry’s TOP 10. It is an enormous project for us.

What about your product involving doctors?

We have kicked off a demo project with Into-Sana chain of clinics. We have had them integrated into our system: now, when a doctor prescribes medicines to their patient during an appointment they select medicines right from our database. This solves the problem of when a medicine is pending reregistration and it is not available in pharmacies, but the doctor is not aware of it. As a result, the patient uselessly roams the pharmacies and gets frustrated.

After the doctor has prescribed medicines, the patient receives a message in Viber with a list of medicines and locations where they can be bought at a low price through Liki24.com – and they can do so right from the messenger. This solves two problems at once: first, doctors often write illegible prescriptions by hand, second, you don’t need to run all over the city looking for the medicines – everything has already been found for you, you just need to pick up or order delivery to the door.

We are planning to launch similar functionality for doctors who do home visits.

We have also become an effective promotional platform for pharmaceutical companies. At Liki24.com they can promote their products directly to the end user. In June, Liki24.com traffic reached 400,000 unique users, which is very enticing for pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Does that mean that you simultaneously have 4 sources of monetization? What rates do you have for each area of your business?

Yes. Buyers pay for delivery. Insurance companies pay for our software – we get paid for each claim we process. Pharmacies pay a small percentage from their sales through our service. Pharmaceutical manufacturers pay for promotion of their products on our marketplace.

We cannot disclose the precise rates, but they are very individual and deserve a separate article to be written about them.

What is Liki24’s growth rate?

Cumulative turnover of orders processed via our marketplace has already reached $2 million a year.

We have more than 30,000 individual customers. We partner up with 7 insurance companies, 3,500+ pharmacies, the traffic is almost 400,000 unique users per month, and last week we had fulfilled more than 50,000 orders. And this is only as far as b2c is concerned.

Okay, we have heard enough about the service. Now let’s move on to the round. Is it your first investment? $1 million in investments from scratch is quite an accomplishment for Ukraine.

Actually, there were a few investments that stretched over time, and we decided to combine them in one round. Back in 2018, a business angel invested in us, but we did not immediately receive the full amount and closed that round only now with the participation of large Ukrainian funds: TA Ventures and Genesis Investments.

Intellias founder Mykhailo Puzrakov also invested in us.

How did you manage to entice that many reputable investors?

As a matter of fact, there were more offers, we even had to refuse. First, we didn’t want to spread too much and didn’t want to attract more money than we actually needed.

We were not originally engaged in finding investors. Because we are not building a startup – we are building a business.

It all started when we won a startup competition at IT Arena last year and received a grant to the tune of $10,000. It was incredible as there were 150 entrants.

After that, investors began reaching out to us. Also, there we met Puzrakov, who eventually invested in us.

How did you meet TA Ventures and Genesis? Have they reached out to you?

Last year, UNIT.City held a meetup with investors and we were there as winners of IT Arena. Our direct communication with investors began from there, and we can say that this round also stems from there. Because this is actually a very long process – we were audited, subjected to due diligence process, we negotiated, we drew up contracts… As a result, it stretched from October-November 2018 until the time of closing now.

Back then a few acquaintances introduced me to TA Ventures. I met Viktoria Tigipko and was very impressed with how energetic and vibrant she was with a global vision. We realized that we suited one another.

Then, Viktoria introduced us to Genesis Investments. We were won over by their international technical expertise because we are a high-tech platform, and for us, this facet is very important. In cooperation with them, money is less important, the main thing is the smart component: their marketing, technical and recruiting expertise, which we really need now.

What are your plans for the future? How are you going to develop the service?

We are growing by 10-25% month on month, and our current goal is to accelerate this growth. To do this, we want to strengthen the team with top employees – for this, we need investments in the first place. This is number one.

Secondly, we want to expand geography. Currently, we operate in Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Lviv. In the future, we want to operate all over Ukraine and expand to other countries.

Thirdly, we want to further develop our system. Despite the fact that it was born from a seemingly simple problem – saving on medicines – today our platform is a complex technical product with AI elements that process and compares huge amounts of data. Make no mistake about it, we have about 30 million price and stock items that are updated every 5-10 minutes.

It is a kind of a mini ERP system, Viktoria calls it a CRM system for managing everything from deliveries to sales. We have already had several requests from large logistics companies to sell our platform to them. Therefore, we need to seriously streamline the development of our product in terms of technology.

Now we are actively working on a new UX / UI for our clients.

Are you going to license your system to others?

We will test run it. Currently, we do not want to spread ourselves thin and juggle multiple tasks at once, but we understand that this is potentially a huge market for us. It’s just currently it is not our priority.

“Liki24.com has many essential attributes of a successful startup: a huge market with great potential for disruption, a great team and a technology product that is already of interest to e-commerce and logistics behemoths. TA Ventures team is confident that in the long run, Liki24.com will be able to reproduce their business model in larger overseas markets,” comments Igor Pertsiya, venture partner of TA Ventures.

The funds raised will be used to develop the technological platform, strengthen the team, marketing and geographical footprint of the service.

What is Liki24.com

Liki24.com is a HealthTech platform that connects consumers with pharmacies, doctors, clinics, and insurance companies. The platform sprung up from a simple idea – allow Ukrainians to avoid overpaying for medicines. According to the startup, customers can save up to 20-40% on medicines with this service. An order can be placed with delivery or “Customer pickup”.

“It happens that prices in pharmacies differ by hundreds of hryvnias, and roaming the city in search of a cheaper medicine is not an option. In the past, every time I used to buy medicines for my family, I honestly did not have a clue why I had to spend a huge amount of time searching for medications and visit various pharmacies while I still overpaid up to 50%. So I realized that I want to make a truly convenient service that would save time, and avoid overpaying for medicines,” says Anton Avrinsky, founder of Liki24.com.

The service works with more than 3,500 pharmacies across Ukraine. It keeps data about more than 40,000 products and regularly updates the database of medicines including prices. Currently, over 30,000 users use the platform. Delivery is available in Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Lviv. More than 50,000 orders have been processed since the beginning of 2018.

Health Tech’s Potential

Health Tech is a rapidly growing industry. According to CBInsights, 10% of companies that are valued at more than $1 billion are health tech startups. According to Global Market Insights, the global digital health market is set to reach $504.4 billion by 2025.

“Similar companies have multi-million rounds in the U.S. By investing in Liki24.com, we support one of the first products in this niche, which will expand in the future and provide breakthrough solutions to the world,” explains Vitaliy Laptenok, CEO of Genesis Investments.