PillO Wants to Deliver Your Medicines Faster Than Your Pizza

India’s quick-commerce revolution has transformed how people order groceries, cabs, and snacks — but urgent medicine delivery has lagged behind. Kaushal Shah, founder of pharmacy tech platform eVitalRx, saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight. In early 2025, he launched PillO — a platform promising 60-minute delivery of critical medicines, wherever you are — at home, at a railway station, even stuck in traffic.

Shah isn’t new to this world. Before PillO, he spent years inside India’s fragmented pharmacy ecosystem, helping digitize over 7,000 retail pharmacies through eVitalRx. That inside view — not just of tech, but how medicines physically move across Indian cities and small towns — gave him an unfair advantage when it came time to reimagine healthcare delivery for the on-demand era.

Unlike traditional e-pharmacies that rely on slow-moving warehouses, PillO taps into a dense hyperlocal network. The model feels refreshingly simple: partner with neighborhood pharmacies, build real-time logistics tech, and get life-saving medicines to consumers before a minor issue becomes a major emergency. Early adopters are noticing — like Haris, who shared on social media how PillO delivered urgent meds straight to his train coach at Bengaluru Railway Station within 36 minutes. Or Santosh, who managed to get critical medicines delivered mid-transit. These aren’t PR stunts — they’re genuine signals of unmet demand.

The timing couldn't be sharper. India’s ₹4 lakh crore pharmacy market is formalizing fast, while post-COVID behavior has shifted permanently. Blinkit and Zepto have trained Indian users to expect groceries in 10 minutes. Healthcare — especially urgent medicines — is the next logical leap. PillO’s bet is that "meds in minutes" will become a non-negotiable layer in how we live, move, and manage health.

But this isn’t just another fast-delivery story. Kaushal Shah’s advantage is upstream: the tech stack. For five years, his team built eVitalRx — a full-stack ERP used by pharmacists for 8–10 hours a day. It tracks real-time inventory, enables compliance workflows, and powers AI-based QA systems. Without this infrastructure, he believes no “partner pharmacy” model can scale with reliability. “Others built apps. We built plumbing,” he says.

As PillO scales to 15 cities over the next 18 months, the roadmap is expanding. From adding lab tests and partnering with insurance firms to enable cashless OPD experiences, the company is building toward a future where healthcare is as accessible — and reliable — as ordering a pizza.

I caught up with Kaushal Shah over breakfast at an eChai Social in Ahmedabad to learn what PillO is building. I asked a few questions. He answered them all, openly.

Medicines aren't pizzas. How do you balance the urgency of 60-minute delivery with the critical need for medical safety and regulatory compliance? Where is the real operational bottleneck today?

That is precisely the point. We almost never encounter a real scenario in life where we must have medicines in less than 15 minutes but at the same time we also don’t want to suffer long without it (in case of acute issues) or miss a dose (in case of chronic medicines). So we decided to pick a sweet spot of 60 minutes, where we also are not rushing our delivery partners that can jeopardize their lives. Also it gives enough time for pharmacists to run checks and balances on their end, to understand and verify prescriptions, cross-question patients if needed and make sure they are dispensing the right medicines. We deliver 90% of orders in 45 minutes anyways.

In terms of operational bottleneck, it's hiring and building our own delivery fleet in different cities of India. Other than that, we can scale quickly by adding a new city to our offering every month, which is faster than even the Q-Commerce giants.

Today, early users are sharing amazing stories. As you scale across cities and handle thousands of orders daily, how will you maintain the same quality and reliability of experience? What could break?

I think the answer is similar to the previous question: it's the delivery fleet that we need to keep building and keep delivering the best experience in the space where almost all of us have had horrible experience (at buying medicines when we need them) in the most important aspect of our lives: our health.

To answer how do we maintain the quality and reliability of experience from the pharmacy and dispensing side, we are adding new checks and balances every few weeks. I will share a couple of examples:

We have seen other startups attempt faster pharmacy deliveries before. Some succeeded briefly, many struggled. When you look at those previous attempts, what are your biggest takeaways or lessons?

Unfortunately, most of those startups think (and still do) that “partnering” with local pharmacies will work without putting in any work. What most of them do is make a low-touch app, onboard local pharmacies and start sharing the orders. There are three problems:

The app they need to make to engage with pharmacists has to be a deeper engagement with much broader information. That app is an ERP/Billing software that pharmacy uses for 8–10 hours a day and also has real-time stock information as well as billing mechanism for each of billing, accounting of those orders and payment reconciliation.

No other startup has invested their time and efforts to build this. This is what eVitalRx did for the last 4 years and it is due to this product and network, PillO is easier to build and is more likely to succeed than anything else out there.

Unless someone is willing to build this kind of software and better than eVitalRx for years, this is unlikely to work out.

The other option, which has become now the “conventional” option is to: “we will just open dark stores like Blinkit.” Well to them, I have one question only: “Then how will you beat Blinkit or Apollo for that matter?” I think it's a ridiculous and absurd approach — and if it was that easy, Blinkit and Zepto would be doing pharma Q-Commerce for the last 2 years now. But they haven’t!

There is a lot of quick-commerce buzz lately. Why do you believe PillO is not just another fast-delivery story? Why you and why now?

Agreed — and that’s why discussions like this are important to differentiate the nuances. PillO has been in the making for the last 5 years essentially. We launched PillO 3 months ago but foundations are being built for the last 5 years, before pretty much any of us knew the term “Quick Commerce”. Don’t believe me? Come to my house in Ahmedabad and right outside you will see a poster of eVital from 5 years ago promising the same thing that PillO does now.

Only thing we were missing is the very ERP system we have now. Meaning, we were just as naive as other medicine delivery apps are naive now.

Why me? Anyone can do this, they just have to commit to build the best ERP, POS and CRM software the pharma space has ever seen in India along with a centralized and standardized product catalogue — which one very senior manager from Udaan called “insanity.” Other than that, my experience of visiting, selling and talking to 1000+ pharmacists in India helps a lot.

Why now? I think one thing that has changed about consumers in India after Q-Commerce arrival is that people have started paying for convenience and we hope that if people are paying delivery convenience for pizza, they might do the same about their health. Also, I think small business owners — i.e., pharmacists and pharmacy owners — have also accepted the shifting business nature and have welcomed technology and collaboration.

What is the way forward for PillO? Beyond 60-minute deliveries, what is the bigger roadmap you are building toward?

First, we will be scaling to the top 15 cities of India in the next 18 months. Beyond that, we are also adding lab tests through our partnerships with other players and also collaborating with insurance providers to provide a cashless experience to patients for their OPD claims etc.

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Several other players have recently entered the quick-delivery medicine space. PhonePe’s Pincode has started piloting 10-minute medicine deliveries in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune by working with local pharmacies. Zepto has launched Zepto Pharmacy as a pilot across parts of Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Flipkart is reportedly preparing to expand its ‘Minutes’ service to include medicines, also through local partnerships. These moves signal growing interest in adding healthcare products to the quick commerce mix.

The real test for PillO won’t be 60-minute deliveries — it’ll be scaling trust across cities, partners, and patients. If it works, Kaushal Shah’s legacy may not just be another healthtech play, but the foundation of India's true health-on-demand infrastructure. And this time, the infrastructure might arrive faster than the medicine.