Today we are opening Covalenty to early access. This is a brief note from the three of us explaining what we are building and why.
My name is Miriam Yokoyama Retz. I co-founded Covalenty with Lucas Ferreira Santos, our CTO, and we are joined by Camila Nunes Pires as Head of Operations. We are based in São Paulo. We started this company in 2025 because we spent enough time watching independent pharmacies in Brazil manage their procurement through phone calls and spreadsheets to believe there was a better way to do it.
The Problem We Are Solving
Independent pharmacies in Brazil buy their stock from pharmaceutical distributors. The market has over 120 licensed distributors, which in theory means abundant competition. In practice, a pharmacy with a busy owner operating without a purchasing team cannot possibly manage relationships with more than a handful of distributors at once. The result is that most independents buy from two or three preferred distributors, call them on the phone when they need to restock, and pay whatever price was quoted in that phone call.
This is a terrible way to run a market. The buyer has essentially no price visibility beyond their own limited distributor set. The distributor has a captive customer who does not know what competitors are offering. The pharmacy owner spends hours each week on calls that should take minutes. And the resulting pricing is not primarily determined by competition but by relationship history and how much time the pharmacy owner has to call around.
Meanwhile, chain pharmacies operate with centralized purchasing teams that have visibility across their entire distributor network and can negotiate framework pricing based on volume. They pay substantially less for identical products, which compounds into a persistent structural cost advantage that makes it harder for independents to compete.
What Covalenty Does
Covalenty is a B2B marketplace connecting independent pharmacies in Brazil with pharmaceutical distributors. Pharmacies search for products, see current prices and availability from multiple verified distributors in one place, and place orders directly through the platform. Distributors list their products and reach pharmacy buyers they would not otherwise have access to through their existing rep networks.
The core value for pharmacies is price comparison: seeing what multiple distributors are currently offering for a product before placing an order, rather than accepting the first quote from the distributor whose rep called most recently. For distributors, the value is access: reaching pharmacy accounts that their sales reps have not developed relationships with.
Both sides operate within ANVISA's regulatory framework. Every distributor on the platform holds a valid AFE from ANVISA. Prices are required to be CMED-compliant for regulated products. Order documentation is generated automatically in a format suitable for pharmacy compliance records.
What We Are Not
We are not a compliance service. Covalenty does not provide legal or regulatory advice to pharmacies or distributors. We verify that distributors on the platform hold ANVISA authorization, but the legal responsibility for verifying supplier authorization remains with each pharmacy, as it does with any procurement channel. We generate documentation that pharmacies can use in their own compliance records, but we are not a substitute for a farmaceutico responsavel or a qualified compliance advisor.
We are also not trying to replace the distributor relationships that pharmacy owners have built. Those relationships have real value, particularly the credit flexibility and supply priority that come from long-term partnerships. Covalenty is a tool for price discovery and order efficiency, not a mandate to stop working with your existing distributors. Your preferred distributor can be on the platform too.
We are not a national marketplace on day one. We are starting in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area where we have distributor coverage and pharmacy relationships that make the platform genuinely useful. Expanding beyond that geography is on the roadmap, but we will not claim to serve pharmacies in markets where we do not yet have the distributor depth to serve them well.
What Early Access Means
Early access means the product is functional but not complete. The catalog is live with several distributor partners. The search and ordering flow works. The documentation generation works. Some features that are on the roadmap, particularly the contextual order history and the demand signal tools, are not yet built.
We are looking for independent pharmacies in São Paulo that want to start comparing distributor prices on a real platform with real pricing from real distributors. We are not looking for a large number of users in this phase; we are looking for a small number of users who will tell us honestly when something does not work. The feedback from that group will shape what we build next.
Why We Think This Is Worth Building
The case for Covalenty is not primarily about technology. It is about a market that has a persistent information asymmetry and no existing mechanism to reduce it. Large pharmacy chains have solved the procurement efficiency problem for themselves, with purchasing teams and systems that give them good price visibility. Independent pharmacies have not, because building that infrastructure for a single pharmacy does not make economic sense and no one has built it for the segment collectively.
A marketplace with enough distributor coverage creates that price visibility as a shared infrastructure that every pharmacy on the platform benefits from without each pharmacy having to build it individually. That is the case for why a marketplace here makes more sense than each pharmacy building their own solution.
We are a small team. We do not have all the answers and we are not going to be able to solve every problem on day one. What we can commit to is building in public, telling you what works and what does not, and treating the pharmacies and distributors who join us early as partners in figuring out the product rather than as users of a finished system.
If you run an independent pharmacy in São Paulo and you are tired of the phone call procurement routine, register and try it. The account is free. You do not owe us anything for looking.
