How Rohit Mukul Is Making Medicines Affordable Across India
In a country where medicine prices can vary wildly between pharmacies, often with little transparency for the patient, Rohit Mukul saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight: what if medicines were simply sold at the price they were meant to be sold at?
A Simple Mission
Rohit Mukul founded Zeelab Pharmacy with a clear, almost deceptively simple goal: quality medicines at their real price. In a market where pricing often lacks transparency and markups are built into the system, Zeelab set out to offer WHO-approved medicines without the inflated costs that many Indian consumers had come to accept as normal.
The idea wasn’t to reinvent healthcare, but to fix one of its most basic, persistent problems, making sure people could trust both the quality and the price of the medicines they depended on.
Scaling Affordable Care
Since its founding in 2020 in New Delhi, Zeelab has grown into one of India’s largest affordable pharmacy networks. The company now operates over 225 stores and processes more than 1,500 daily online orders, directly sourcing medicines from manufacturers and delivering them through its own stores, website, and app.
By cutting out unnecessary intermediaries, Zeelab has been able to keep costs down while maintaining the quality standards patients expect, a balance that is often difficult to strike in the pharmaceutical retail space, but one that has become central to the brand’s identity.
Backed To Grow Further
Zeelab Pharmacy’s approach has caught the attention of investors as well as patients. The company raised $2.4 million in a funding round led by OTP Ventures, capital that is being used to expand its retail network and launch 60-minute delivery services across both metro and non-metro cities, extending affordable, reliable access to medicine well beyond India’s major urban centers.
Rohit’s work has also earned him personal recognition, including a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list and LSE’s Startup of the Year award in 2024. These milestones reflect more than individual achievement, they point to a genuine gap in Indian healthcare that Zeelab has managed to address at scale.
A Problem Worth Solving
What makes Rohit Mukul’s journey with Zeelab Pharmacy compelling isn’t a flashy pivot or a trend-driven idea. It’s the decision to take on an unglamorous, deeply practical problem, the price and quality of everyday medicine, and build a company capable of solving it at a national scale.
In doing so, Zeelab has quietly become part of how thousands of Indians access healthcare every day, proving that some of the most meaningful entrepreneurial journeys begin not with a bold vision of disruption, but with a simple question: why should this cost more than it should?
