Healthcare technology company Queue has emerged from stealth with a fully autonomous robotic pharmacy platform designed to transform prescription fulfilment while addressing labour shortages, rising costs and access challenges across the US pharmacy sector.
Queue, the company building the world’s first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy, has emerged from stealth with a working system designed to transform how prescriptions are dispensed, verified and delivered.
The company recently closed an oversubscribed US$12.6 million seed round led by AlleyCorp, following a US$6 million pre-seed round led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago, bringing Queue’s total funding to US$18.6 million. Additional investors include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital.
Queue is entering the market at a critical moment. Pharmacies are facing reports of “overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction,” according to Drugstore News. The trade journal also noted that the crisis will likely continue, with pharmacy schools graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed over the next five to six years.
Pharmacy technician vacancies have been reported at 40% or higher, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. As at least one pharmacist noted, resulting employee shortages can increase the risk of human error. Complicating matters further, pharmacies are losing money on a growing share of prescriptions due to “negative reimbursements,” which put the industry under even more pressure.
Researchers at USC and UC Berkeley found that nearly one in three pharmacies has closed since 2010, leading to “pharmacy deserts.” Because of these structural forces, the US$670.6 billion US retail pharmacy market could compel the industry to make difficult choices in the years ahead.
Queue’s solution is a fully autonomous robotic pharmacy designed to make prescription fulfilment faster, more accessible and cost-effective while supporting rigorous safety and verification protocols.
Operating autonomously, Queue’s system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles in one end and produces filled, verified prescription vials out the other. The platform currently supports 250 of the most prescribed medications in the United States.
“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” said Josh Liu, co-founder and CTO, Queue. “Queue is a complete reimagining of how medications get dispensed, verified and delivered. We built the machine industry has needed for decades, and the demand we’re seeing proves it.”
The result is a fundamentally different model for prescription fulfilment. Queue can deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained.
Queue has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype to provide the company with early commercial validation in a market facing urgent labour, cost and access challenges.
“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.”
“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 fulfilment 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.”
Queue was co-founded by Nick Desai, CEO, a six-time venture-backed entrepreneur who previously founded and led Heal, a home healthcare company that raised more than US$200 million, and Josh Liu, CTO, whose experience spans Tesla and Zipline.
Queue’s funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers and grow the company’s engineering team. Queue currently has a team of 20 engineers in Silicon Valley and is actively hiring across robotics, hardware, software and pharmacy operations.
As pharmacy deserts expand, labour shortages persist and traditional pharmacy economics continue to erode, Queue is positioning autonomous prescription fulfilment as a new infrastructure layer for American healthcare, enabling pharmacy services to move closer to patients while delivering dramatically better economics.
