Insider Brief
- Queue emerged from stealth after raising a $12.6 million seed round led by AlleyCorp to build an autonomous robotic pharmacy system that fills and verifies prescriptions.
- The Silicon Valley startup said the round followed a $6 million pre-seed led by Riot Ventures, bringing total funding to $18.6 million, with additional backing from House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital.
- Queue said its system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles and produces filled, verified prescription vials, supports 250 of the most commonly prescribed U.S. medications and has been deployed as a working prototype with a major national pharmacy chain.
Queue has emerged from stealth after raising $12.6 million in seed funding to build an autonomous robotic pharmacy system that fills and verifies prescriptions.
The round was led by AlleyCorp and followed a $6 million pre-seed round led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago, according to the Silicon Valley startup. It has raised $18.6 million in total funding with other investors including House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital.
Queue is building a robotic system designed to automate prescription fulfillment. Queue said the system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles as input and produces filled, verified prescription vials. The platform currently supports 250 of the most commonly prescribed medications in the U.S.
The company said it will use the new funding to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers and grow its engineering team. Queue currently has 20 engineers in Silicon Valley and is hiring across robotics, hardware, software and pharmacy operations.
Queue’s system is intended for use in retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is limited or operating costs are under pressure. The company said the system can deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations.
The company indicated it has secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and has deployed a working prototype, according to the announcement.
“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” co-founder and CTO Josh Liu said in the announcement. “Queue is a complete reimagining of how medications get dispensed, verified and delivered. We built the machine the industry has needed for decades, and the demand we’re seeing proves it.”
Queue pointed out that it is entering a market under pressure from labor shortages, store closures and strained pharmacy economics, citing Drugstore News reporting that pharmacy schools are expected to graduate 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed over the next five to six years, American Society of Health-System Pharmacists data showing pharmacy technician vacancies of 40% or higher, and USC and UC Berkeley research finding that nearly one in three U.S. pharmacies has closed since 2010.
Queue was co-founded by Liu and CEO Nick Desai. Desai previously founded Heal, a home healthcare company that raised more than $200 million, while Liu has worked at Tesla and Zipline.
“What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare,” noted AlleyCorp general partner Abe Murray. “We decided to lead this funding round because we believe Queue is building critical infrastructure that can both increase accessibility for patients to get the prescriptions they need, while using robotics and automation to greatly improve labor constraints that exist across pharmacies.”
Image credit: Queue
