Queue Raises $12.6 Million to Deploy Fully Autonomous Pharmacy Robots

A Silicon Valley startup that wants to take the pharmacist out of the pharmacy has stepped out of stealth with fresh cash and an audacious claim: that the physical act of filling a prescription can be handed almost entirely to a machine.

Queue, a Palo Alto, California-based robotics company, announced on June 30 that it has raised $12.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by AlleyCorp. The round follows a $6 million pre-seed led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago, bringing Queue's total funding to $18.6 million. Additional backers include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital. The raise lands squarely within a July 2026 wave of AI and robotics infrastructure financing, and reframes an unglamorous corner of healthcare as a hardware problem worth venture money.

Sealed bottles in, filled vials out

Queue's pitch is mechanical simplicity married to software rigor. Its system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles in one end and produces filled, verified prescription vials out the other, without requiring an on-site pharmacist. Each cell in the machine can hold thousands of pills, and the system can fill a 60-pill vial roughly every 30 seconds, according to the company. The platform currently supports around 280 of the most prescribed medications in the United States, with each deployed unit expected to carry a curated selection tuned to the community it serves. A predictive AI layer tracks usage and signals a pharmacy technician when stock runs low.

The consumer experience is designed to feel closer to a kiosk than a counter: Queue says a patient can walk up, display a QR code to verify the prescription, and collect medication without waiting in line. The company claims it can deliver most medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals and rural communities where drugstore access is thin.

Queue was co-founded by chief executive Nick Desai, a six-time venture-backed entrepreneur who previously founded and led home healthcare company Heal, which raised more than $200 million, and chief technology officer Josh Liu, whose background spans Tesla and Zipline. The company employs 20 engineers in Silicon Valley drawn from Rivian, Waymo and aerospace, and is hiring across robotics, hardware, software and pharmacy operations.

"Pharmacy in America is structurally broken," Liu said. "Queue isn't an incremental fix; it's 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."

A labor crisis that automation is racing to fill

Queue's timing is not accidental. American pharmacy is under acute strain. The trade journal Drugstore News has documented overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction, and reports that schools are graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than the country will need over the next five to six years. Pharmacy technician vacancy rates have been reported at 40% or higher by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and 70% of independent pharmacy managers have reported difficulty filling open positions. Researchers at USC and UC Berkeley found that nearly one in three retail pharmacies has closed since 2010, creating so-called "pharmacy deserts." The U.S. retail pharmacy market was estimated at roughly $670 billion in 2025.

That backdrop is precisely what investors are underwriting. "What the Queue team has accomplished is rare in the development of hardware for healthcare," said Abe Murray, general partner at AlleyCorp, framing the company as "critical infrastructure" that can expand patient access while easing pharmacy labor constraints. Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, argued that rather than working around shortages, Queue is "automating the physical fulfillment layer itself."

The deeper question the round raises is one automation always forces: what happens to the people. Queue publicly positions its machine as relief rather than replacement, letting pharmacists offload routine, high-volume fills so they can focus on complex cases and clinical care. Liu has framed the mission in those terms, telling The Robot Report that robotics and AI should "enable greater human flourishing." But a system explicitly built to fill and verify prescriptions "without requiring an on-site pharmacist" will inevitably invite scrutiny from regulators and pharmacy boards, where state-level rules on pharmacist verification, supervision and dispensing vary widely and were largely written for a human-in-the-loop world. Chain of custody and dispensing accuracy are the pressure points; Liu insists accuracy "has to be 100% end to end."

What to watch

Queue says it has already secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype for early commercial validation, with a wider rollout targeted for early 2027. The tells to watch: which regulators sign off and in which states, whether that unnamed chain converts a pilot into scaled deployment, and whether Queue's cost and speed claims hold up under real-world volume and audit. If they do, the company will have turned one of healthcare's least glamorous bottlenecks into a template for automating the last mile of medicine, and reopened a hard debate about the pharmacist's role in it.