Truepill, the ‘AWS for pharmacies,’ gets $10M from Initialized Capital

NelsonG · March 12, 2019

Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space.

Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round.

Founded in 2016, the San Mateo-based startup employs 150 workers and plans to expand its team and fulfillment facilities into the U.K. with the fresh funding. Truepill is currently active in all 50 states and has delivered 1 million subscriptions for birth control, erectile dysfunction medication, hair loss treatment and more.

It is, as co-founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi explained, Amazon Web Services for pharmacies.

“We are really only scratching the surface of where this telemedicine landscape is going to go,” Viswanathan, who became a product manager at LinkedIn after the social network acquired his transcription service CardMunch, told TechCrunch. “We are catering to this first wave of those companies and we want to be that pharmacy fulfillment service powering that entire shift … We want to build the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure.”

Afridi, for his part, previously spent more than a decade as a pharmacist at retail chains like CVS and Fred Meyer.

In addition to operating a prescription delivery service, Truepill provides a set of APIs that give its customers programmatic access to its pharmacy and allows brands to fully customize packaging.

Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Social Capital, Box Group and Joe Montana are also Truepill stakeholders.