Swish Club Rebrands To SwishX, Pivots To AI For Pharma

After about three years of operating as an IT asset management platform and raising $4.5 Mn, Swish Club has rebranded itself as SwishX. Alongside, the startup has also pivoted to become an agentic AI platform for pharmaceutical and medtech companies. 

In its new avatar, SwishX will offer agentic AI tools to help pharma companies streamline operations across key business areas, including sales, marketing, distribution, and business growth. 

Speaking with Inc42, SwishX cofounder and CEO Dushyant Sapra said that the startup now offers four solutions on its platform. 

While Tender IQ’s AI agents can crawl government portals to help enterprises find tenders that match their product catalogue, Contract IQ automates processes involved in contracts with private hospitals. Marketing IQ helps pharma marketing teams interact effectively with a doctor, while Channel IQ offers AI tools for scaling sales through distributors and standalone pharmacies. 

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup is targeting $5 Mn in contracted ARR and 100+ enterprise clients by end of current FY27. The company also plans to expand into other emerging markets like Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe in the coming years. 

The market distribution structure in these countries is very similar to India and some of SwishX’s pharmaceutical clients have already opened doors to these markets by leveraging the platform for their offshore operations, Sapre said. 

On why the startup chose the pharmaceutical industry for its second innings, Sapre said that most companies in the sector still operate on spreadsheets and old software systems. What also brought forth the white space were many of Swish Club’s pharma clients, who sought tailored offerings. 

As a result, the company zeroed in on building specific industry solutions for the medtech sector.

“In generic drugs, the differentiation is not on the product but the go-to-market (GTM). If we are able to build solutions which will accelerate and enhance the effectiveness of GTM, customers would want to work with us… That’s the reason why we selected pharmaceuticals. It has a huge export base that allows us to work with the drug makers and enter other emerging markets,” he added. 

Pivoting To An Asset-Light Model

Founded in 2023 by Sapre, Suraj Kumar, and Jai Anand, Swish Club used to offer an all-in-one platform to enable enterprises to rent laptops and lease smartphones. However, the startup’s earlier avatar was sunsetted at the end of last year. 

Talking about the pivot, Sapre explained that device leasing is an extremely capital-intensive business that requires constant funding to keep up with inventory. He added that the only differentiation possible in the space was the rate of interest, not product or engineering. 

“It’s incredibly hard to scale it beyond India. And it doesn’t play into the ambition that we want to be a player who can service 10,000 customers across the world. That has always been our mainstay vision, which is why we then changed our model,” he said. 

The startup had to undergo employee churn during the transition period, letting go of sales teams and ramping up engineering teams to build the AI product from scratch. 

Meanwhile, Sapre claims that SwishX has started earning revenue from the get go, with $1 Mn in ARR currently and plans to raise a bigger round moving forward. Going forward, it also plans to cater to the entire lifecycle of generic medicines, from discovery to development, and finally autonomous multi-market commercial execution.

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