The teenager who convinced Tata to invest in his startup
Published On: Saturday, May 9, 2020 | By: Team KnowMyStock
Eighteen-year-old Arjun Deshpande has been eagerly waiting for his class 12 results while the Covid19 lockdown continues in Mumbai. He loves football and reading. But he is not a regular teenager. He is the founder of a start-up that employs 55 people and has managed to catch the attention of Tata Group patriarch Ratan Tata. The industrialist has now invested in his pharmaceutical business venture Generic Aadhaar to provide affordable medicines to the masses. After several weeks of brainstorming, Generic Aadhaar was born in 2019. It works on a simple business model where Arjun Deshpande and his team procure generic drugs directly from manufacturers that are WHO-GMP certified and provide them to the retailers, thereby cutting out the middlemen and delivering medicines to masses at a much lower cost. The medicines sold at Generic Aadhaar are sold at 20-30 percent lesser than the market rate, claims the teenager.
Earlier this year, Deshpande, hoping to get a response from Tata on his start-up model, wrote him an email. To his surprise, Tata already knew about the venture through his campaigns and he was called to his Mumbai office for a meeting. “During our meeting he said he wanted affordable and quality medicines to reach every Indian,” says the start-up founder. It took Deshpande four months and three meetings to seal a deal with Tata for his business.
The Tata Group chairman emeritus has now invested an undisclosed amount in the company and has suggested the start-up to focus on delivering cancer drugs at a reduced cost. “As happy as I am to support this venture, it has been a minority token investment. I have not purchased 50 percent stake in the company,” Tata tweeted Yesterday( 8th May 2020).
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