PALO ALTO, Calif.: Queue, the company building the world’s first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy, today emerged from stealth with a working system designed to transform how prescriptions are dispensed, verified and delivered.

The company recently closed an oversubscribed $12.6 million seed 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.

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 $670.6 billion U.S. 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 fulfillment faster, more accessible and cost-effective while supporting rigorous safety and verification protocols. The system can be seen in action HERE.

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 & CTO 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.”

The result is a fundamentally different model for prescription fulfillment. 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 labor, cost, and access challenges.

“What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare,” said Abe Murray, General Partner at 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 fulfillment layer itself,” said Will Coffield, 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 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 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, labor shortages persist, and traditional pharmacy economics continue to erode, Queue 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.

About Queue

Queue is building the world’s first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy. The company’s robotic system fills and verifies prescriptions from sealed wholesale pill bottles without requiring an on-site pharmacist, enabling lower-cost prescription fulfillment and broader pharmacy access across retail, healthcare and underserved settings. Queue is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Fonte: Business Wire