How Xmartlabs helped Altro Pharmaceuticals move off a legacy platform that limited how far the business could scale without adding headcount by building Fetch, a cloud platform serving vendors, customers, and its own internal team, at a pace one lean team could not have sustained without Claude Code.
INDUSTRY
Pharmaceutical Distribution
FOUNDED
2006
FOCUS
Multi-Sided B2B Marketplace
ENGAGEMENT
Ongoing, Multi-Year
Context
Founded in 2006, Altro Pharmaceuticals is a business-to-business intermediary in the pharmaceutical space, serving both veterinary and human health markets. Altro Pharmaceuticals negotiates volume-based pricing with its vendors on behalf of its customers, and aggregates purchasing forecasts so vendors can plan with more certainty.
A customer buying in volume gets a better price than it could negotiate alone; the vendor gets a clearer demand picture and less waste. That negotiated middle position is the business.
Problem
Pricing, product data, and client records lived across a patchwork of manual tools and desktop software that predated modern web platforms. Every price update, every new customer, and every new vendor added more manual work to an already manual process, rather than less.
That structural ceiling, more than any single outdated screen or spreadsheet, was the real problem to solve. Modernizing meant breaking that link between growth and headcount, not just giving the existing process a new interface.
Challenges
What began as a request for an online catalog to replace a manual, email-based pricing process grew, as the team learned how Altro Pharmaceuticals actually operated, into a full multi-sided marketplace.
Solution
Xmartlabs built Fetch, a cloud-based web platform that replaced a manual, largely offline workflow with a single system serving all three sides of the business. Each user type gets role-based access to the catalog, pricing, and forecast data relevant to them, and a self-service ordering pilot now lets some customers place orders directly, instead of going through manual back-and-forth.
The frontend runs on a React-based stack, built around the shadcn component library from early on, a deliberate choice: well-documented, predictable components turned out to matter as much for AI-assisted development as for the interface itself.
Stack: React · Next.js · TypeScript · shadcn/ui · Claude Code · Figma MCP · Playwright · Jira MCP
The Role of AI
Claude Code didn't replace engineering judgment; it removed enough of the mechanical work (implementation, documentation, design-to-code translation) that a lean team could focus on what actually needed people: understanding a complex, regulated business and earning the trust of a long-tenured internal team.
Results
Fetch changed how Altro Pharmaceuticals operates day to day, letting the business grow without growing its overhead at the same rate.
In Their Words
"The engineering cadence and velocity have been remarkable. A very small team, working with Claude Code, delivered in three months what we would have expected from a team three times the size."
— Nick, CEO, Altro Pharmaceuticals
Takeaway
Altro Pharmaceuticals' engagement with Xmartlabs started as a request to move a manual pricing process onto the web. It became a multi-sided marketplace, built and maintained by a small team shipping weekly, one that let the business grow without growing its overhead at the same rate.