Close to the heels of its $16 million fund-raising, digital Healthcare startup 1mg has appointed Tanmay Saksena as COO. Saksena was previously with Zomato as its Global Business Head, looking at food ordering across India, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Manila. 1mg provides online pharmacy and diagnostics services, and Saksena joins 1mg at a time when it is looking to expand operations in India, from around 12 cities at present, to around 30 cities by the end of next year. The online pharmacy business is also facing significant challenges from offline pharmacies, who have complained to Drugs Controller against online pharmacies, and it might also be a completely different experience to expand from cities with several pharmacies (Delhi has around 50,000, 1mg founder Prashant Tandon told MediaNama), with much fewer. According to Tandon, "each pharmacy cannot hold more than 4-5k medicines and drugs. It's very common to go to 2-3 pharmacies to get everything on your prescription. If you see the market too, the pharmacies are next to each other," and their business involves providing a one stop solution online. 1mg claims over 5 million app downloads and 25 million monthly page views coming from 2 million unique consumers. It has investment from Sequoia India and Omidiyar Network. Prior to joining Zomato, Saksena was in Silicon Valley for almost a decade, including with technology startup Playdom which was acquired by Disney. At Disney, he was VP of Studio Operations at the Disney Interactive Media Group. In the past, he has also worked…
