Queue emerges from stealth with $12.6M in funding to launch the world’s first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy

America’s pharmacies are under pressure from every direction. Pharmacists are leaving the profession, stores are closing, and many prescriptions now lose money to fill. The result is a system that is struggling to keep up with patient demand. A Palo Alto startup believes the answer isn’t hiring more people. It’s removing much of the manual work from the pharmacy altogether.

Queue, a startup building what it calls the world’s first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy, has emerged from stealth with $12.6 million in seed funding after quietly developing a system that automates prescription fulfillment from start to finish. The round was led by AlleyCorp and follows a $6 million pre-seed round led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago, bringing the company’s total funding to $18.6 million. House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures, and Banter Capital joined the latest investment.

The company says its robotic platform takes sealed wholesale pill bottles at one end and produces filled and verified prescription vials at the other, without requiring an on-site pharmacist during the dispensing process. Queue says the system currently supports the 250 most commonly prescribed medications in the United States.

The funding arrives as retail pharmacies face mounting operational and financial strain. According to Drugstore News, pharmacies continue to report overwhelming workloads and growing job dissatisfaction, with pharmacy schools expected to graduate thousands fewer pharmacists than the healthcare system will need over the next several years. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists has reported pharmacy technician vacancy rates of 40% or higher, creating staffing shortages that pharmacists warn can increase the risk of dispensing errors.

Financial pressures have added another layer to the industry’s challenges. Many pharmacies now lose money filling a growing share of prescriptions due to negative reimbursement rates. Research from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley found that nearly one in three U.S. pharmacies have closed since 2010, contributing to the rise of so-called pharmacy deserts in many communities. Against that backdrop, Queue sees automation as a way to lower operating costs and bring pharmacy services closer to patients.

The company says its robotic pharmacy can reduce prescription fulfillment costs by up to 96% compared with traditional pharmacy operations. Queue believes that economic advantage could make pharmacy services viable in retail stores, hospitals, rural communities, and other locations where staffing shortages or operating costs have made traditional pharmacies difficult to sustain.

“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.”

Queue (Courtesy: Queue)

Unlike existing pharmacy automation systems that still depend heavily on manual workflows, Queue built its platform to operate autonomously from wholesale inventory through prescription verification and dispensing. The company says the system accepts sealed manufacturer pill bottles, processes prescriptions, verifies each order, and prepares patient-ready prescription vials through an integrated automated workflow.

Queue has already landed its first major customer, securing a deployment with a national pharmacy chain. The company says a working prototype is already operating, giving it early commercial validation before broader expansion.

“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.”

Riot Ventures partner Will Coffield said the company’s approach addresses the industry’s underlying economics rather than making incremental improvements.

“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 Coffield. “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.”

Built by founders with healthcare and robotics experience

Queue was founded by CEO Nick Desai and CTO Josh Liu. Desai previously founded home healthcare company Heal, which raised more than $200 million in venture funding. Liu brings engineering experience from Tesla and Zipline, combining robotics and automation expertise with healthcare operations.

The fresh capital will support product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers, and grow the company’s engineering organization. Queue currently employs 20 engineers in Silicon Valley and is hiring across robotics, hardware, software, and pharmacy operations.

The company is entering one of the largest segments of U.S. healthcare. The American retail pharmacy market is valued at more than $670 billion, yet many operators continue to struggle with shrinking margins, labor shortages, and declining access in underserved communities.

Queue is betting that fully autonomous prescription fulfillment can become a new layer of pharmacy infrastructure, lowering costs for operators and making prescription services available in places where traditional pharmacy models no longer make economic sense.