Queue raises funding to build fully autonomous pharmacy
Queue is developing automated pharmacies to expand access to prescriptions in hospitals, retail sites, and underserved communities. The post Queue raises funding to build fully autonomous pharmacy appeared first on The Robot Report.
Overview
Queue is applying automation to improve prescription fulfillment. Source: Queue
Queue today emerged from stealth with an autonomous pharmacy system and $12.6 million in seed funding. The company said its system is designed to make prescription fulfillment faster, more accessible, and cost-effective while supporting rigorous safety and verification protocols.
“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” stated Josh Liu, co-founder and chief technology officer of 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.”
Pharmacies are facing “overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction,” according to Drugstore News. Schools are graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed over the next five to six years, it said.
Pharmacy technician vacancies have been reported at 40% or higher, reported the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. As one pharmacist noted, employee shortages can increase the risk of human error.
In addition, 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 $670.6 billion U.S. retail pharmacy market has few viable paths forward.
Queue develops system to ease prescription fulfillment
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 $200 million, and Liu, whose experience spans Tesla and Zipline.
“We think that robotics and AI should be applied in a way that actually enables greater human flourishing,” Liu told The Robot Report. “In our particular case, that would mean enabling more connection with people and enabling better service and health outcomes for the general public.”
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Queue said its robotic system fills and verifies prescriptions from sealed wholesale pill bottles without requiring an on-site pharmacist. It said this will enable lower-cost prescription fulfillment and broader pharmacy access across retail, healthcare, and other settings.
Each cell in the system can hold thousands of pills, and it can fill a vial of 60 pills every 30 seconds, explained Liu. Queue has developed software for security and ease of use, initially by pharmacists and eventually directly by customers.
The platform currently supports 280 of the most prescribed medications in the U.S., the company claimed.
Details
“The accuracy of the drugs we dispense has to be 100% end to end,” acknowledged Liu. “We think about the problem from the moment the drug is made to when it is imported into the states, put into our machine, and then on the outside coming in with the finished vial filled with your prescription drugs. The full chain of custody that supports safety is really critical for us.”
Queue said it can deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations, and it can be deployed across rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained. The company said it is positioning autonomous prescription fulfillment as “a new infrastructure layer for American healthcare, enabling pharmacy services to move closer to patients while delivering dramatically better economics.”
Queue said it has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype to get early commercial validation in a market facing urgent labor, cost, and access challenges.
“We believe the true test comes from the field, not in the lab,” Liu said. “We’re excited to get the machines out in the real world, fulfilling real prescription drugs for folks, and learning from that process. The next year is really about scaling.”
AlleyCorp leads seed round
Queue closed an oversubscribed $12.6 million round led by AlleyCorp, following a $6 million pre-seed round led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago, bringing Queue’s total funding to $18.6 million. Additional investors include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures, and Banter Capital.
“What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare,” said Abe Murray, general partner at AlleyCorp. “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 fulfillment layer itself,” added Will Coffield, a partner at 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 said it will use the funding to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers, and grow its engineering team. The company currently has a team of 20 engineers in Silicon Valley with experience from Rivian, Waymo, and aerospace companies, and it is actively hiring across robotics, hardware, software, and pharmacy operations.
“It’s more than just the capital; it’s really about both the relationships we’re building and the shared vision of how we can bring this future to reality much faster,” said Liu. “People think of pharmacies as not necessarily the flashiest, sexiest thing, but I think what draws both our talent as well as the folks who have invested in us is they see it more as a systemic issue. It’s one that, quite frankly, our nation hasn’t resolved, and it’s only getting worse. So we’re really hitting on something pretty foundational that’s going to be impactful for many, many years.”
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