When 25-year-old Devi in Bengaluru came down with a severe fever earlier in November, she did the obvious thing: she googled “at-home blood tests”. The first sponsored link was from Orange Health. She ignored it. “I’ve heard of Dr Lal Pathlabs, so I clicked on that,” she said.

Nothing unusual there. Most urban Indians default to the two or three lab brands they already know. What almost no one realises is that Amazon—better known for shipping phones and kitchen towels—would quite like to ship your blood tests too. And it’s already doing it, through Orange.

This arrangement began in June, when the e-commerce giant announced a partnership that funnels its customers to Orange Health Labs for at-home diagnostics.

While this should have brought Amazon’s famous frictionless platform to users’ bloodwork, you can spend several minutes wandering around the app and remain unaware that diagnostics exist at all. The feature is stashed under the Pharmacy tab, hiding behind a small rainforest of coupons and cross-sells, and when you finally tap your way through, Amazon immediately punts you out to Orange’s website and asks you to log in again.

For a company that once patented one-click buying, this whole experience feels like it’s checking an item on an internal to-do list: healthcare.

Most doctors, including Vishu Bhasin—a Delhi-based pathologist with 15 years of experience in the field—haven’t noticed either. Industry executives largely agreed, too.

Orange, though far from a household name, has built the kind of tightly controlled, fast-turnaround network that legacy chains dismiss as no real USP, but one Amazon clearly valued. 

Over the past few years, it has expanded across major metros, built out its own labs—including a national reference lab in Bengaluru—and sunk capital into logistics, operations, and capacity. It does the unglamorous things Amazon usually avoids in India: controlling the supply chain, hiring and training phlebotomists, running vans on time, managing cold-chain compliance, and delivering results “in six hours”.

Amazon even put $12 million into Orange last December—a round that brought Orange’s total funding to $47 million and included the usual marquee names: Accel, General Catalyst, Bertelsmann India Investments, and Y Combinator. Normally, such a gesture signals intent.