You’ve probably noticed; on-demand pharmacy services are springing up like daisies. New York-based ZipDrug, for example, is an online app that customers’ payments and dispatches messengers to pick up their medicine for a $10 delivery service fee. The company has so far raised more than $2.6 million in seed funding from Notation Capital, Lux Capital, and Collaborative Fund, among others.
A better-funded upstart is PillPack, a full-service pharmacy that delivers pre-sorted pills packaged individually on a tape-dispenser-like roll to customers every two weeks. It’s mostly operated behind the scenes, but after raising $50 million last year led by CRV, it’s opening small brick and mortar locations, too, where patients can consult with licensed pharmacists — and more people can learn of the company.
ScriptDash is yet new pharmacy formed in the last 12 months around the same opportunity.
None are stopping yet another new entrant from gearing up to compete with them. Instead, RobinHealth — a 10-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that has already raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding — will be pitching investors at the March 1, invite-only demo day of NFX Guild, a Bay Area accelerator program that graduated its first batch of startups last summer. (We’ve written about NFX here.)
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the company says that it’s different. The big idea: to providing on-demand access to licensed pharmacists around the clock, as well as to deliver on-demand to customers. Those consultations and deliveries are free, offset by increased operational efficiencies in fulfilling the meds.
RobinHealth is working with a pharmacy right now toward that end, but it plans to eventually build out its own network of tiny pharmacies. Says CEO and cofounder Elliot Poppel, “Set-up isn’t that complex. If you have a pharmacist, you can open your own pharmacy.”
Asked how the company differs from PillPack specifically, Poppel, a former VC turned operator, tells us that “PillPack is going after mail order. We’re going after retail pharmacy.”
Pillpack, says NFX co-founder James Currier, is also going after older customers, while RobinHealth is going after families and parents in particular.
Of course, it’s very early days for both. And all of these startups all are going after an enormous industry that’s ripe for disruption. (If you’ve driven to a pharmacy any time lately, only to be told that your prescription will be ready in another 20 minutes, you’ll understand.)
In 2014, the sale of prescription drugs in the U.S. reportedly totaled a whopping $263 billion. CVS filled about 23.7 percent of those prescriptions. Walgreens and Rite Aid combining to fill about 22 percent.
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