Queue announced that it has 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.
The financing follows 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 building a fully autonomous robotic pharmacy designed to make prescription fulfillment faster, more accessible, and more cost-effective while supporting safety and verification protocols.
The system operates autonomously by taking sealed wholesale pill bottles and producing filled, verified prescription vials.
Queue said the platform currently supports 250 of the most prescribed medications in the United States.
The company said its system can deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations.
Queue’s system is designed to be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities, and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained.
The company has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype, providing early commercial validation.
Queue is entering the market as pharmacies face labor shortages, cost pressure, access challenges, and worsening pharmacy deserts.
The company cited industry reports indicating that pharmacies are facing overwhelming workloads, pharmacist shortages, pharmacy technician vacancies, and negative reimbursements on a growing share of prescriptions.
Queue also noted that researchers at USC and UC Berkeley found that nearly one in three pharmacies has closed since 2010, contributing to gaps in pharmacy access.
The company said these structural pressures are creating a need for a new model of prescription fulfillment.
Queue is positioning autonomous prescription fulfillment as a new infrastructure layer for American healthcare, enabling pharmacy services to move closer to patients while improving unit economics.
The funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers, and grow Queue’s engineering team.
Queue currently has a team of 20 engineers in Silicon Valley and is hiring across robotics, hardware, software, and pharmacy operations.
The company was co-founded by CEO Nick Desai and CTO Josh Liu.
Desai is a six-time venture-backed entrepreneur who previously founded and led Heal, a home healthcare company that raised more than $200 million.
Liu has experience across Tesla and Zipline.
Queue is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
KEY QUOTES:
“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken. 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.”
Josh Liu, Co-Founder and CTO of Queue
“What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare. 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.”
Abe Murray, General Partner at AlleyCorp
“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. 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.”
Will Coffield, Partner at Riot Ventures
