When PillPack CEO and Co-founder TJ Parker took to the stage at Techstars Boston Demo Day in spring 2013, he had much good news to share about the local healthcare startup. PillPack, a licensed online pharmacy that delivers pre-sorted prescriptions to patients’ front doors, had shipped more than 1,000 prescriptions. The company was, at the time, looking to raise $3 million.
Now, not even a year later, the Somerville-based company devoted to making managing multiple prescriptions easier has pocketed $4 million from Atlas Venture and Founder Collective, and is ready for its national debut.
Tuesday marks the date of PillPack’s public launch. Since July 2013, the company’s 12-person team has been hard at work going through the regulatory processes to have PillPack’s Manchester, New Hampshire pharmacy licensed to fill and ship prescriptions to patients in 31 states, noted Parker.
“Our biggest goal is to get PillPack into the hands of as many people as possible,” shared the chief executive.
Parker grew up fully immersed in the pharmacy world. Both his parents operated a long-term care pharmacy, and one of his first jobs was going door-to-door, hand-delivering prescriptions to people in their homes, he told BostInno. When it became time for him to decide which career path to pursue, the answer was clear: Parker donned his own white coat and set off to pharmacy school.
After a few months working behind the counter, Parker pitched in as a founding organizer of Hacking Medicine at MIT – the fateful 2011 event at which he met the hackathon’s creator and his future PillPack partner-in-crime, Elliot Cohen. At the time, Cohen, who has a background in design, was finishing up his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
It was then that Parker and Cohen realized a tremendous problem, with life-threatening proportions: 30 Million patients in the U.S. have trouble juggling five or more over-the-counter medications and vitamins each day. Why not take the stress away by divvying out the daily doses for them?
“We believed design and technology could fix a couple of things about this problem,” posited Parker.
The PillPack dispensers and individualized packages are environmentally-friendly, too. “Each dispenser is very recyclable, and compared to a bottle there’s not a big difference. We do everything we can to make it as green as possible,” noted the CEO.
Flash-forward to January 2013, and Parker, Cohen and the PillPack possy were accepted into Techstars Boston program, eager to get advice and iterate upon their idea. “Katie [Rae] and Reed [Sturtevant] are pretty phenomenal people, and were super helpful during the program and after,” shared Parker.
Nearly a year to date since the startup’s admittance into the accelerator, PillPack is preparing to enter into a new phase of the company lifecycle. Helping usher in this chapter in the company’s growth are its two recently appointed board members and investors, Atlas Venture partner Fred Destin and Founder Collective partner David Frankel.
"PillPack is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has spent endless hours counting pills, coordinating medications and navigating a complex system that causes frequent and often serious errors,” said Destin in a statement. “PillPack customers spend less time dealing with medication and more time doing the things they enjoy, all while finding it incredibly simple to consistently take the right medication at the right time."
Said Parker, in closing:
