Ubiquity Backs Queue: the First Fully Autonomous Pharmacy
Queue has raised a $13 million seed round to build the first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy that fills and verifies prescriptions without a pharmacist on site.
Picture a pharmacy that fills and verifies prescriptions without a pharmacist on site. Sealed wholesale bottles go in one end, and filled, verified prescriptions come out the other.
That’s Queue, a Bay Area-based robotics startup building an autonomous robotic pharmacy
I drove out to their workshop in Fremont to meet the team, and the first time I watched the system run I knew I wanted in.
This is my favorite kind of diligence. We stood around the hardware, looking at the boards and the motors, and I asked a lot of questions about how it actually works. We talked through the engineering, the tradeoffs they’d made, and where they wanted to take the design. It barely felt like work, more like nerding out with fellow engineers about the demos in front of us and where the whole field is headed.
When I walked out of the building I was smiling. I’d just spent an afternoon with people who see this world the way I do, and Queue’s view of the future lined up with ours. That’s usually when I write the check.
The founders
Queue was co-founded by Nick Desai and Josh Liu. Nick, the CEO, previously founded Heal, the doctor-house-call company that raised more than $165 million from investors before being acquired by Humana. He has spent his career inside healthcare and knows this problem from the inside, the mistakes, the approvals, the work it takes to get the right medication into the right hands, and he’s obsessed with solving it. Josh, the CTO, has built hard things at Tesla and Zipline, and he moves easily between the robotics, the software, and the messy realities of pharmacy operations.
Between them they understand both the weight of the rules that sit behind every prescription and the engineering it takes to automate the work safely. That combination is exactly the founder-market fit I look for.
“We’re not trying to replace pharmacists,”
Nick initially shared with me.
“We’re taking the work off their plate that never needed a human in the first place, the counting, the labeling, the double-checking, so they can spend their time on valuable work only people can do.”
What Queue does
Queue is the first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy, filling and verifying prescriptions without an on-site pharmacist. The system already supports 250 of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, dispenses up to 600 pills a minute, and runs around the clock. By taking on the repetitive counting and labeling, it lets pharmacists focus on the work that needs a human in the loop.
Underneath is real engineering. Robotics handle the physical work while computer vision verifies every step, and the team has already worked through the regulatory questions that stop most people before they start. The result is prescription fulfillment at up to 96% lower cost than a traditional pharmacy, in a footprint that can go into retail locations, hospitals, and rural communities where pharmacy access is thin.
To date, Queue has deployed a working prototype and signed its first major national pharmacy chain as a customer.
Why this is a Ubiquity company
More than 4,000 pharmacies closed last year, one in four pharmacy jobs sits unfilled, and the major chains lose money on the prescriptions they fill. A pharmacy that runs without a pharmacist staffing the counter is cheaper to run and can open almost anywhere. That’s the layer Queue is building.
This is software beyond the screen in its purest form. Filling a prescription is a hands-on, physical-world job that automation has barely touched, and the stakes are real every time, because a patient is waiting on the other end.
Deeptech doesn’t have to live in orbit or behind a factory wall to count. Some of the best opportunities are hiding in everyday places. We backed Eyebot to put a real eye exam in a retail aisle, no appointment and no optometrist’s office, and BusRight to run the software behind the school buses that get kids to class every morning.
Ubiquity is proud to have co-led this $13 million seed round with AlleyCorp, alongside Riot Ventures, House Capital, Grep Ventures, and Banter Capital.
When I find founders who nerd out the way Nick and Josh do and aim that energy at a problem this real, I want to be in early. I’m glad we are.
You can read Queue’s full announcement here.
Ubiquity Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm investing in software beyond the screen. We back founders building AI, software, and smart hardware for the physical world — technology you can touch, hear, and feel.
If you know a founder working on something nerdy and early, we’d love an introduction.