Before I started working on Covalenty, I spent years building procurement and supply-chain systems for healthcare distributors in Sao Paulo. My vantage point was always the distributor side: making sure orders got filled, inventory data stayed current, and the logistics ran on time. I understood how distributors thought about their buyers.
What I did not fully understand until later was how the buyers thought about distributors.
That changed when a friend who runs a small independent pharmacy in Santana asked me a simple question: "Do you know if there's a faster way to find out who has metformin 850mg in stock at a decent price this week?" She had already called three distributors that morning. None had given her a straight answer. One put her on hold for 12 minutes. Another said they'd "check and call back," which meant tomorrow at the earliest.
The Same Problem, Every Week
I started asking around. I spoke with pharmacy owners in Sao Paulo, in Santo Andre, in Campinas. The story was the same everywhere. Procurement for an independent pharmacy in Brazil involves a weekly or sometimes daily ritual: pick up the phone, call your rep at Distribuidor A, get a price, ask about stock, hang up, call Distribuidor B, repeat. Most owners work with three to five distributors. Each call takes 10 to 20 minutes including hold times. And the information you get is informal: prices quoted verbally, sometimes honored, sometimes not. Stock levels given as a rough sense rather than a real number.
Large chain pharmacies do not do this. They have dedicated buyers, centralized purchasing platforms, and negotiated agreements that auto-replenish stock. A chain with 50 locations has a procurement department. A single-location independent pharmacy has the owner, often juggling purchasing with dispensing and staff management simultaneously.
This is not a small operational annoyance. It is a structural pricing disadvantage. When you are calling one distributor at a time and negotiating informally, you rarely know whether the price you are accepting is the best available. You accept it because you need the stock and the alternative is another 20-minute call.
What the Data Problem Actually Is
The pharmaceutical distribution market in Brazil has over 120 licensed distributors at the national and regional level. ANVISA maintains registration records for them all. But there is no central index of who has what in stock right now, at what price, with what delivery terms. That information lives inside each distributor's internal system. The only way to access it, historically, has been a phone call to a sales rep.
This matters because pharmaceutical prices in Brazil are not uniform. CMED (Camara de Regulacao do Mercado de Medicamentos) sets maximum allowed prices for regulated medications. But distributors price below that ceiling, and the spread can be meaningful, especially for generic and similar medications where the ceiling is lower and margins are tighter. Two distributors selling the same 500mg amoxicillin box may quote prices that differ by 8 to 12 percent, depending on their current inventory, their supplier terms, and how eager they are for an order this week.
A large chain buyer captures that variation systematically through their purchasing platform. An independent pharmacy owner captures it only if they happen to call the right distributor in the right week and have the time and patience to compare multiple quotes before committing.
Why We Did Not Just Build a Price Comparison Website
The obvious answer to this problem is a price comparison site. But we spent several months talking to pharmacy owners and to distributors before writing a line of code, and what we learned was that price comparison alone does not solve the problem.
Distributors will not publish live pricing on a public site. Their prices are negotiated, they change with inventory levels, and their sales teams build relationships precisely because those relationships give them pricing flexibility. A distributor who publishes a price publicly has to honor it for everyone, which collapses their ability to offer different terms to buyers of different sizes.
So the marketplace model had to be two-sided from the start. Distributors participate because they get access to buyers they would not otherwise reach. Pharmacies participate because they see real prices from real distributors without making phone calls. The platform is the intermediary that makes both sides willing to share information that neither would share publicly.
The Compliance Layer Is Not Optional
Brazil has specific rules about pharmaceutical procurement. A pharmacy cannot simply buy medication from any party that offers a good price. The supplier must hold a valid AFE (Autorizacao de Funcionamento de Empresa) from ANVISA. The pharmacy must maintain procurement records for inspection. ANVISA can and does audit supply chains.
Any platform operating in this space has to be built with compliance as a first-class requirement, not as an afterthought. Every distributor on Covalenty must provide their ANVISA registration. Every transaction creates a record. This is not an extra feature: it is a prerequisite for the platform to be legally usable for pharmacy procurement at all.
This is also one reason we are not racing to list every possible distributor. We would rather have a smaller network of verified, compliant distributors than a large unverified directory. The compliance work takes real effort, and we are doing it properly.
What We Are Building and What We Are Not
Covalenty is a procurement marketplace, not a pharmaceutical company. We do not hold inventory, we do not dispense medication, and we are not a distributor. Our platform connects pharmacies with distributors, makes prices visible, and facilitates the ordering workflow. The actual supply chain relationship is between the pharmacy and the distributor.
We are also early. We launched in late 2025 with a pilot group of pharmacies in Sao Paulo and a small initial set of distributor partners. The platform works. Pharmacies are using it to place real orders. But we are not claiming to have solved pharmaceutical procurement in Brazil. We have built something that works for a specific slice of the problem, and we are expanding carefully.
That boundary matters to us: we are not saying that phone-based procurement is bad or that the distributor relationships pharmacies have built over years are worthless. Those relationships carry real value, including credit terms, priority during stock shortages, and the kind of goodwill that gets your order bumped up the queue when everyone is trying to source the same medication. What we are saying is that the price-discovery phase of procurement should not require 40 minutes of hold music. That part can be done better, and we are building the tool to do it.
Where This Goes from Here
We are a small team in Sao Paulo. Lucas Ferreira Santos leads our technical work. Camila Nunes Pires runs operations and brings years of direct experience working with independent pharmacies on compliance and procurement. I spend most of my time talking to pharmacies and distributors and making sure the product we are building solves the right problems.
The near-term work is expanding the distributor network, improving search so that pharmacies can find what they need quickly even with partial information (brand name, generic name, ANVISA registration number), and building out the order tracking tools that make the post-purchase experience clean.
The longer-term work is harder to define. We see this as a structural problem in how pharmaceutical supply chains in Brazil share information. The market has the distributors and the pharmacies. What it lacks is a neutral layer that makes pricing and availability visible. We are trying to build that layer, one verified relationship at a time.
If you run an independent pharmacy and want to try the platform, the free tier has no monthly order cap limitation for comparison: you can search and compare without committing. Start there and see if the prices you find match or improve on what you are getting today.
