Startup Queue emerged from stealth to launch what it calls the first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy in the form of prescription medication kiosks.
The Bay Area company secured $12.6 million in a seed funding round led by AlleyCorp and previously raised $6 million in pre-seed funding led by Riot Ventures. Additional investors include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital.
Queue says it has secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and has deployed a working prototype to provide the company with early commercial validation.
The startup plans to use the fresh funding 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.
The company was co-founded by healthcare entrepreneur Nick Desai and Josh Liu, who previously worked at Tesla and Zipline. Desai was the co-founder and CEO of startup Heal, which provided insurance-backed doctor house calls and was acquired by Humana in 2023. He also co-founded, with his wife Renee Dua, M.D., an AI-powered healthcare app, Together by Renee, that was acquired by Cairns Health last year.
Operating autonomously, Queue’s system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles in one end and produces filled, verified prescription vials out the other, with no on-site pharmacist required. The platform currently supports 250 of the most prescribed medications in the United States, executives said.
According to a company video, consumers use the kiosk to scan a QR code on their phones to verify their prescriptions. The kiosk uses computer vision to identify every pill to a National Drug Code (NDC) and prescription for high accuracy, according to the company.
The company says its robotic system 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.
“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” Liu, the chief technology officer at Queue, said in a statement. “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.”
Pharmacies in the U.S. are facing workforce shortages and economic pressures. More than three-quarters of community pharmacists say they are having a tough time filling open positions, according to data from the National Community Pharmacists Association. Overall, 73% of full-time pharmacists in 2024 rated their workload at their place of practice as “high” or “excessively high,” compared with 66% in 2014, the National Pharmacy Workforce Study found.
Data compiled by the NCPA and the University of Southern California shows that 1 in 8 U.S. neighborhoods are considered pharmacy deserts.
Last year, Amazon Pharmacy rolled out kiosks stocked with prescription medications to help patients get their meds immediately after appointments. The kiosks launched across One Medical locations in Los Angeles starting December 2025. The kiosks contain commonly prescribed meds like antibiotics, inhalers and blood pressure medications.
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, company executives said.
“What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare,” said Abe Murray, General Partner at AlleyCorp, in a statement. “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.”