Queue, a company building an autonomous “robotic” pharmacy kiosk that dispenses medication, today announced that it has raised $12.6 million in seed funding led by AlleyCorp.

The company is launching today with $18.6 million under its belt, which includes today’s seed round and $6 million in pre-seed funding led by Riot Ventures less than a year ago. Additional backers bringing capital investment include House Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Grep Ventures and Banter Capital.

Queue provides a robotic kiosk that supports about 280 medications. It’s designed to make fulfilling a prescription as simple as walking up and displaying a QR code on a phone to verify the script. The idea is to make going to the pharmacy quick and accessible.

“Pharmacy in America is structurally broken,” said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Josh Liu. “Queue isn’t an incremental fix; it’s a complete reimagining of how medications get dispensed, verified and delivered.”

According to the company, Queue can deliver most medications at 96% lower cost than a traditional pharmacy and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other locations where quick access to a drugstore might be difficult.

Although the kiosks have limited space, the selection of 250 medications includes the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States. Each machine would most likely have a curated selection based on the expected needs of the community it serves. A predictive artificial intelligence system tracks the usage and calls a pharmacy technician to refill it when certain meds get low.

Aside from targeting underserved markets, Queue’s machine presents a second opportunity: providing pharmacists in existing venues with relief when they are understaffed and overwhelmed. Customers who arrive at the pharmacy seeking these common meds need not wait in long lines while pharmacy staff handles less common cases, Queue says; they can simply interact with the machine and have their prescription filled quickly.

The company said it has secured a major national pharmacy chain as a customer and deployed a working prototype to work out early market validation. Queue also noted that the retail-facing pharmaceutical industry is currently facing a labor shortage, with schools graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed in the years to come. A figure backed by the trade journal Drugstore News, which also noted growing dissatisfaction in the industry and that 70% of independent pharmacy managers had difficulty filling open staff positions.

According to analyst Persistence Market Research, the retail pharmacy market size was estimated to be $670.6 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $901.4 billion by 2032. Throughout human history, pharmacies have evolved from providing bespoke remedies to communities to becoming the core of the healthcare industry’s logistics, delivering patient-focused care by distributing and dispensing medications. Their role has expanded beyond that origin, especially in the wake of treatments for chronic disease and COVID-19, and this has driven an expansion in services for more than 131 million Americans.

Pharmacies, from smaller independent shops to large chain operations, have also continued to adopt technology in front of customers and behind the scenes. This includes incorporating AI solutions to improve efficiency and patient engagement. It’s an industry that could readily extend into spaces where pharmacies don’t usually go, without brick-and-mortar buildings or their digital counterparts that deliver to doorsteps.

The company said it expects to launch the first wide-scale rollout at the beginning of next year, around January.

Queue said it would use the funding to build product development, expand deployments with existing pharmacy customers and grow the company’s engineering team. The company currently employs 20 engineers in Silicon Valley and is actively hiring for robotics, hardware, software and pharmacy operations.

Image: Queue