How SwishX Is Fixing Messy Back Office Sales Workflows For Pharma Companies With AI

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Swish Club has pivoted from device leasing to SwishX, an agentic AI platform focused on pharma’s sales, distribution, contracts and tendering workflows.
  • SwishX’s pivot underscores the growing opportunity in vertical AI, where specialised platforms build AI around industry-specific workflows and proprietary domain knowledge rather than offering generic enterprise copilots.
  • SwishX has launched four products for pharma workflows, crossed $1 Mn ARR and is targeting $5 Mn in contracted ARR and 100+ enterprise customers by FY27.
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When Swish Club raised $4.5 Mn in early 2024, it looked like yet another startup trying to solve enterprise device procurement and leasing. The company rented laptops, leased smartphones and helped businesses manage IT assets. It was a market with growing demand but limited room for differentiation.

Less than two years later, it was clear to the founders that the business needed a revamp. They shut down the original offering, rebranded the startup as SwishX and started building an agentic AI platform for pharmaceutical and medtech companies. 

In its new avatar, SwishX wants to become the software layer powering commercial operations across the pharmaceutical industry, starting with sales, distribution, hospital contracts and government tenders.

At a time when most AI startups are building horizontal copilots or productivity tools, SwishX is betting on a different thesis: the biggest opportunity in enterprise AI lies in deeply specialised, industry-specific workflows.

That conviction is already translating into business. SwishX claims to have already crossed $1 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR), works with some of India’s largest pharmaceutical companies and expects to reach $5 Mn in contracted ARR and over 100 enterprise customers by the end of FY27.

For founder and CEO Dushyant Sapre, however, the story did not begin with AI.

A SaaS Veteran’s Second Act

An IIT Delhi graduate, Sapre spent nearly two decades overseas building enterprise businesses. From being one of the earliest employees of Google Cloud in India to scaling a Singapore-based enterprise startup to more than $500 Mn in revenue, he has held multiple leadership roles across Asia-Pacific markets. He eventually returned to India in 2023.

Back home, he, along with Suraj Kumar and Jai Anand, cofounded Swish Club in 2024 around a relatively straightforward thesis: enterprises needed a better way to procure, lease and manage devices. But as the business scaled, the founders encountered a structural limitation.

Device leasing is a capital-intensive business, as growth requires constant access to financing, inventory management and debt. More importantly, the founders realised that differentiation in the category often came down to pricing and interest rates rather than technology.

“We wanted to build something that could serve 10,000 customers globally… The device business would always remain largely India-focused and heavily dependent on capital,” Sapre said.

At the same time, an unexpected signal was emerging from the startup’s customer base. A significant portion of Swish Club’s customers came from the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector. These companies increasingly began asking whether the startup could help automate workflows beyond device management. This demand coincided with the rise of generative AI.

Rather than competing head-on with OpenAI, Anthropic or other foundational model providers, the founders concluded that the next wave of enterprise value creation would come from vertical AI.