In March 2016, Everstone Capital invested USD60.2m in Ascent Health and Wellness Solution, an Indian offline medicine distribution company.
In partnership with Everstone, Ascent made 12 acquisitions over the following three years and scaled its revenues by more than 10x since the time of investment. Everstone helped Ascent build an e-pharmacy business through the acquisition of PharmEasy and later launched Retail IO, a software tool that serves as a marketplace for retailers to order pharmaceutical products from over 4,000 distributors in India.
In June 2020, Ascent and PharmEasy merged to create API Holdings. As of October 2020, Ascent is the second biggest offline pharmaceutical distribution company in India, while Retail IO and PharmEasy are the country’s largest online B2B and B2C marketplaces, respectively.