$12.6M · Robotics + Queue

What they're building

Queue built a self-contained machine that runs a pharmacy without a pharmacist on site. Sealed wholesale medication bottles go in one end; filled, verified prescription vials come out the other. Each storage cell holds thousands of pills loaded from sealed manufacturer bottles; a patient walks up to the kiosk, shows a QR code to verify their prescription, and the machine runs the fill sequence — filling a 60-pill vial roughly every 30 seconds, using computer vision to identify every pill down to its National Drug Code. A predictive AI layer monitors inventory and alerts a technician to reload before a medication runs out — the one human touchpoint in the workflow. It currently supports the 250 most-prescribed medications in the US and claims up to 96% lower fulfillment cost than traditional pharmacy operations (a figure without a published methodology). The context making this viable: nearly one in three US pharmacies has closed since 2010 (USC/UC Berkeley research in Health Affairs), 15.8 million Americans live in pharmacy deserts, pharmacy schools are graduating 3,000-4,000 fewer pharmacists than needed, and technician vacancy rates run 40%+.

Why this matters

An oversubscribed seed led by AlleyCorp less than a year after a Riot Ventures pre-seed, with a major national pharmacy chain already signed, is unusually fast commercial validation for healthcare hardware. AlleyCorp GP Abe Murray: 'What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare.' Riot's Will Coffield frames the contrarian bet: rather than working around labor shortages and broken unit economics, Queue is 'automating the physical fulfillment layer itself.' The founder pedigree de-risks execution — Nick Desai previously built Heal (home healthcare, $200M+ raised, acquired by Humana) and CTO Josh Liu comes from Tesla and Zipline, the exact talent pipeline feeding the current robotics wave. The open question every serious candidate should understand: most states legally require a licensed pharmacist for final dispensing verification, so regulatory strategy is as existential as the engineering — a point Queue's own site acknowledges, positioning the machine as freeing pharmacists to 'practice pharmacy again.'