Queue secures funding to develop fully autonomous pharmacy

Queue leverages automation to streamline prescription processing. Source: Queue

Queue has officially launched from stealth, unveiling an autonomous pharmacy system alongside a $12.6 million seed funding round. The company states its technology is engineered to accelerate prescription fulfillment, enhance accessibility, and reduce costs while maintaining strict safety and verification standards.

“The current U.S. pharmacy system is fundamentally flawed,” said Josh Liu, co-founder and CTO of Queue. “Queue represents a complete overhaul of medication dispensing, verification, and delivery. We’ve built the solution the industry has waited decades for, and the market response confirms its necessity.”

According to Drugstore News, pharmacies are currently grappling with “excessive workloads and widespread job dissatisfaction.” The publication notes that pharmacy schools are producing 3,000 to 4,000 fewer graduates than required over the next five to six years.

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists reports pharmacy technician vacancy rates exceeding 40%. As one industry expert pointed out, staffing shortages significantly increase the risk of human error.

Furthermore, pharmacies are losing revenue on an increasing number of prescriptions due to “negative reimbursements,” adding financial strain to the sector. Researchers from USC and UC Berkeley found that nearly one in three pharmacies has closed since 2010, creating “pharmacy deserts.” These structural challenges leave the $670.6 billion U.S. retail pharmacy market with limited viable strategies for growth.

Queue’s system addresses prescription fulfillment challenges

Queue was co-founded by CEO Nick Desai, a serial entrepreneur with six venture-backed ventures, including Heal, a home healthcare company that raised over $200 million, and Liu, who brings experience from Tesla and Zipline.

“We believe robotics and AI should be deployed to enhance human well-being,” Liu told The Robot Report. “For us, this means fostering greater human connection and improving service and health outcomes for the public.”

Palo Alto-based Queue’s robotic system fills and verifies prescriptions from sealed wholesale pill bottles without requiring an on-site pharmacist. The company claims this approach enables lower-cost fulfillment and broader access across retail, healthcare, and other environments.

Liu explained that each cell in the system can store thousands of pills, filling a 60-pill vial every 30 seconds. Queue has developed secure, user-friendly software, initially designed for pharmacists and eventually for direct customer use.

The platform currently supports 280 of the most commonly prescribed medications in the U.S., according to the company.

“Dispensing accuracy must be 100% from start to finish,” Liu emphasized. “We track the entire lifecycle, from drug manufacturing and importation into the U.S., to storage in our machine, and finally to the filled vial delivered to the patient. This end-to-end chain of custody is critical for safety.”

Queue states its system can deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacies, making it suitable for rural communities and other settings with limited access. The company positions autonomous fulfillment as “a new infrastructure layer for American healthcare, bringing pharmacy services closer to patients while improving economic efficiency.”

Queue has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a client and deployed a working prototype for early commercial validation in markets facing urgent labor, cost, and access issues.

“We believe the real test happens in the field, not in the lab,” Liu said. “We’re eager to deploy these machines into the real world, fulfill actual prescriptions, and learn from the process. The coming year is focused on scaling.”

AlleyCorp leads the seed investment

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 total funding to $18.6 million. Additional investors include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures, and Banter Capital.

“What the Queue team has achieved is rare in healthcare hardware development,” said Abe Murray, general partner at AlleyCorp. “We believe Queue is building critical infrastructure that improves patient access to prescriptions while using robotics and automation to address labor constraints across the industry.”

“Pharmacy faces an infrastructure crisis. While the industry has tried to work around labor shortages, store closures, and poor unit economics, Nick and Josh have taken a different approach: automating the physical fulfillment layer itself,” added Will Coffield, partner at Riot Ventures. “Queue is exactly the type of company Riot invests in early. It features exceptional founders solving a massive, urgent problem with technology that can deliver significant impact.”

Queue plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy clients, and grow its engineering team. The company currently employs 20 engineers in Silicon Valley, with backgrounds from Rivian, Waymo, and aerospace firms, and is actively hiring across robotics, hardware, software, and pharmacy operations.

“It’s not just about capital; it’s about the relationships we’re building and our shared vision to bring this future to life faster,” Liu said. “People may not see pharmacies as the most exciting sector, but what attracts our talent and investors is the recognition of a systemic issue. It’s a problem our nation hasn’t resolved, and it’s worsening. We’re addressing a foundational challenge that will have a lasting impact for years to come.”