Queue launches robotic pharmacy with USD $12.6m seed

Queue has emerged from stealth with an autonomous robotic pharmacy and USD $12.6 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding to USD $18.6 million.

The seed round was led by AlleyCorp and follows a USD $6 million pre-seed round led by Riot Ventures less than a year earlier. House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital also participated in the latest financing.

Queue says it has built a working system that takes sealed wholesale pill bottles and produces filled, verified prescription vials. The platform currently supports 250 of the most prescribed medicines in the US.

The company is entering a market under pressure from staff shortages, store closures and weak prescription economics. Research it cited found that nearly one in three pharmacies in the US has closed since 2010, contributing to so-called pharmacy deserts.

Trade and industry groups have also reported strain on the workforce. Drugstore News has described overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction in the sector, while the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists has reported pharmacy technician vacancy rates of 40% or higher.

Queue says its system can dispense medicines at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations. The technology could be used in retail pharmacies, hospitals, rural communities and other settings where access to pharmacy services is limited.

Early deployment

Queue has signed a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype. It did not name the chain or disclose the scale of the initial rollout.

That early commercial foothold gives Queue a starting point in the US retail pharmacy market, which it values at USD $670.6 billion. The sector has faced growing concern over negative reimbursement, which can leave pharmacies losing money on prescriptions.

Josh Liu, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, outlined the company's view of the sector's problems.

"Pharmacy in America is structurally broken," said Josh Liu, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Queue. "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."

Investor backing

Investors said they were drawn by the scale of the operational problems facing pharmacies and by the technical difficulty of automating prescription fulfilment.

"What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare," said Abe Murray, General Partner, AlleyCorp. "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."

Riot Ventures, an earlier backer, also pointed to the market's structural challenges.

"Pharmacy has an infrastructure problem. While the industry has been forced to work around labor shortages, store closures and broken unit economics, Nick and Josh have taken a fundamentally different approach: automating the physical fulfillment layer itself," said Will Coffield, Partner, Riot Ventures. "Queue is exactly the kind of company Riot backs early. It has exceptional founders solving a massive, urgent problem with technology that can deliver outsized impact."

Founders and plans

Queue was co-founded by Nick Desai, Chief Executive Officer, and Josh Liu, Chief Technology Officer. Desai previously founded and led Heal, a home healthcare company that raised more than USD $200 million, while Liu has worked at Tesla and Zipline.

The new funding will go toward product development, broader deployments with pharmacy customers and expansion of the engineering team. Queue currently employs 20 engineers in Silicon Valley across robotics, hardware, software and pharmacy operations.

Queue's pitch is that pharmacy automation can address several problems at once: labour gaps, cost pressure and limited geographic access. In practice, the commercial test will depend on whether large pharmacy operators are willing to hand more of the dispensing process to autonomous systems while maintaining regulatory compliance and patient safety.

For now, the company's main claim is that it has moved beyond the concept stage with a functioning machine and an initial customer. The platform currently supports 250 of the most prescribed medications in the United States.