Hyderabad based HRV Pharma, India’s ‘first virtual pharmaceutical company’, started off as a B2B match maker between Indian API manufacturers and their global customers by aggregating demand and sourcing volumes to create value for both supplier and the customer.

Soon, the company began helping manufacturers develop products that are of high value with limited competition and hence, price erosion. Today, HRV gets R&D firms do the development for the company which in turn files regulatory approval applications on its own in the world’s largest pharma market, the US.

Hari Kiran Chereddi, founder, MD & CEO, HRV Pharma says that over the last one year, the company filed 11 Drug Master Files (DMFs) for the US market and two Certificate of Suitability (CEPs) for the European market with respective drug regulators, double the industry average (which is about three to five US DMFs per year).

Recently, the company announced a partnership with a manufacturer in Hyderabad for new chemical entity manufacturing. “This partnership is for NCE (new chemical entity) molecules—whose patents are going off in 2026 and 2027—which is where our focus is. Chereddi says.

Wide network

In an exclusive interview with Fortune India, Chereddi informed that HRV has more than 400 customers and partners across the spectrum—small, medium, and large today. It works closely with about 50 partners to get the products made.

“We leave out the top 1 to 10 companies on both sides and work with companies ranked roughly between 15 and 50. That is where the compounding effect happens very quickly. We are now in the process of formalizing agreements that clearly define which products they will manufacture. Two or three years ago, this was seen as a conceptual idea. Five years later, they are now looking at the numbers and asking how this happened”, says Chereddi.

Past growth

HRV has been growing 75% year on year and is expected to end 2025-26 with an annual sales of Rs 700 crore, and achieve Rs 1,000 crore turnover mile stone in FY26–27. The company says the growth is essentially driven by demand and the way its 50-60 product portfolio is built. “What was a portfolio discussion one year ago is now becoming a reality. All that work is now translating into execution. Of course, it takes time to develop a product, move it through customer sampling, and complete the cycle. What we are seeing now are the results of what we put in place earlier”, Chereddi said.

The company focuses on niche APIs like proton pump inhibitors, CNS (central nervous system) products and orphan drugs. “Many people have tried to execute it over the years. What differentiates us is that we have been able to do this without a single in-house R&D facility and without a single manufacturing facility. Despite that, today we are fully blockchain-compliant in terms of data and process integrity, and all of this has already been put into action”, he explains.

Chereddi says that he has never raised any external funding for the company. “The company was incorporated in 2016, and I started spending serious time on it from 2018 onwards. And as of March 2025, we have seen 417 Crores of revenue, profit making and no debt or funding raised”, he said.”In fact, on the 13th of December, I was speaking at an IIM about our company. They had invited me to give a lecture to students on how you can build and scale a company without raising even one dollar of external capital”.