Queue Raises $12.6 Mn to Expand Autonomous Robotic Pharmacy Kiosks Across the U.S.
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The funding round was led by AlleyCorp and follows an earlier $6 million pre-seed investment led by Riot Ventures.
Healthcare robotics startup Queue has emerged from stealth with $12.6 million in seed funding to scale its autonomous robotic pharmacy kiosks, designed to dispense prescription medications without requiring an on-site pharmacist. The funding round was led by AlleyCorp and follows an earlier $6 million pre-seed investment led by Riot Ventures.
The Bay Area-based company said it has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype, providing early commercial validation for its technology. The latest funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand deployments with enterprise pharmacy customers, and grow its engineering team.
Queue's robotic pharmacy system automates the prescription fulfillment process from sealed wholesale medication bottles to verified prescription vials. The platform currently supports 250 of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States. Customers verify prescriptions by scanning a QR code, while the kiosk uses computer vision to identify each pill against its National Drug Code (NDC) before dispensing.
The company claims its system can reduce pharmacy operating costs by up to 96% compared to traditional pharmacy operations. Queue said the kiosks are designed for deployment across retail pharmacies, hospitals, rural communities, and other healthcare settings where pharmacy access remains limited.
Queue was co-founded by healthcare entrepreneur Nick Desai and Josh Liu, a former engineer at Tesla and Zipline. Desai previously co-founded Heal, a home healthcare startup acquired by Humana in 2023, and later co-founded the AI-powered healthcare app Together by Renee.
"Pharmacy in America is structurally broken," said Josh Liu, co-founder and chief technology officer of Queue. "Queue is a complete reimagining of how medications get dispensed, verified and delivered."
The company's launch comes as U.S. pharmacies continue to face workforce shortages and financial pressures. According to the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA), more than three-quarters of community pharmacists report difficulty filling open positions. The National Pharmacy Workforce Study also found that 73% of full-time pharmacists rated their workload as high or excessively high in 2024, up from 66% in 2014. Data from the NCPA and the University of Southern California further indicates that one in eight U.S. neighborhoods qualifies as a pharmacy desert.
The announcement follows similar efforts by Amazon Pharmacy, which began deploying prescription medication kiosks at One Medical clinics in Los Angeles in late 2025.
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