BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — Lumiere32
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to Raman Chauhan and Dr. Priti Bhole from Lumiere32, an online B2B marketplace targeted at clinics and suppliers in the dental and medical health industry.
1. What is Lumiere32 and what do you do?
Raman: I’m Raman, I’m the CEO of Lumiere32. Lumiere32 is an online B2B marketplace for the Dental & Medical professionals to meet their professional supplies requirement. Through this platform, we made these supplies accessible to the dental and medical professionals.
Priti: I’m Dr. Priti, I’m from Lumiere32 and I manage operations and engage the suppliers. We are bringing all the dental and medical supplies on a single platform. It’s not only a platform where we’re trying to put the products online, but we’re also bringing services for the suppliers and the clinics.
R: In a nutshell, we are on a simple mission to enable more than 10,000 SMEs across Southeast Asia, and 100,000 clinics to start purchasing their supplies through a single platform and a single invoice. Lumiere32 digitizes their workload for the supplies procurement.
2. What is Lumiere32’s secret sauce?
R: Lumiere32’s secret sauce from what we have seen so far, that the industry is fragmented. It’s fragmented in the way that a single clinic has to reach out to multiple suppliers. Essentially, we’re trying to provide clinics with a platform they can efficiently buy from and additionally Lumiere32 founders have a very strong background in terms of understanding the regulatory requirements. Dr. Priti herself has been in this industry for seven years.
P: Our secret sauce is that we already know the regulations in Singapore, we already have the licenses to carry all the products. That makes it easier to facilitate and manage dental supplies.
R: The biggest pain point we’re trying to solve is not only making it meaningful for clinics, but for suppliers as well. We take care of their analytics, they can see how their products are selling on the website. We take care of their digital marketing. I think that’s how we take a holistic approach and add value for each player in the ecosystem.
P: We not only work with private clinics, we work with government agencies such as government hospitals and institutions. They also place orders with us and can buy from multiple suppliers in a single purchase order.
3. What is next for Lumiere32?
R: Lumiere32 has been in operations for almost 20 months by now. Predominantly we started with dental medical supplies first and we have around 600 dental clinics registered on the platform. We started with only 6 brands and have scaled up to 130 brands within the last 15 to 16 months.
Recently, what we have seen in this industry for the last 3 decades industry runs in a traditional manner. Lumiere32 gives personalised service to some of the clinics where they can request for demos and samples through our platform. We have recently launched Singapore’s first digital wallet for clinics, Pay32, where they can start purchasing supplies through the platform. It is being backed by one of the financial institutes in Singapore. In the next couple of months, we project that we would be able to generate a wallet value of $1.7 million using this programme.
4. What is your greatest challenge?
P: When we started, it was hard for suppliers to trust us. We appeared as a threat to them. The suppliers saw us as competition rather than partners. That was the first challenge we faced, but after 15 months we got the trust from the suppliers that we are working for them and not against them. Now we have 23+ suppliers working with us out of around 50+ dental suppliers in Singapore.
R: I’d just like to add one more point. When you’re working with the dental and medical supplies, you have to make sure you complement their business capabilities as well. We do have licenses from the Health Science Authority as well as GDPMDS license for Lumiere32 where we can control the distribution of the products. Being said that, we need to make sure these products are delivered at the right quality and there are no counterfeit products being channeled to the clinics. We try to minimize efforts from suppliers to take care of quality control as well. With our capabilities which complement their business model, we see ourselves as a go-to partner for any of the distributors or SMEs in the dental and medical device industry.
5. Any call to actions?
P: With NUS Enterprise we would like to collaborate more with government agencies. With the help of NUS Enterprise, we would be planning to hire more interns through NUS as well as tap into the contacts that NUS has for business collaborations for growing this company.
R: For people who want to join us onthis journey, we are looking for software engineers to join our team as well as people who can help us from an operations standpoint. You can drop us a note at connect@lumiere32.sg.
Watch the full video interview with Raman and Priti from Lumiere32 here:
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