[ad_1]
TJ Parker grew up at the counter of his father's pharmacy in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was frustrated by the number of clients struggling to keep track of their medication
. business, he and a friend undertook to change him. In 2013, they launched an online pharmacy from Manchester, N.H. Thursday, the 32-year-old CEO said he sold his start-up to
Amazon.com
Inc.
This was a transaction of about $ 1 billion, according to people familiar with it. agreement. It is expected that Mr. Parker will remain involved after the case, said a person familiar with the case.
The idea behind PillPack Inc. was to create a faster and easier way to deliver medications. Last year, the company, said Parker in a blog post in November, had accumulated "hundreds of thousands" of monthly customers and was on track to generate more than $ 100 million in revenue annual. PillPack declined to make Mr. Parker available for an interview.
The genesis of the company dates back to an entrepreneurship contest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when Mr. Parker was at the pharmacy school. He teamed up with his friend
Elliot Cohen,
an engineer who was pursuing a M.B.A at MIT.
The duo put forward a nascent idea for PillPack and won the contest, said
Zen Chu,
a Boston-based venture capital investor who oversaw the contest. He knew Mr. Cohen and was a fan of the duo and their ambition.
"I gave them a blank check and I said, I hope this will help you gain trust and attract other investors". "It was a very clear vision."
In the end, the duo raised $ 120,000 in investors, including the Techstars startup accelerator, according to PitchBook.
"We believe that when it is easy to take prescribed medications, people will do it." Parker wrote in a blog post last year. "For people with chronic conditions, research shows that medication compliance goes a long way towards achieving health goals.It is a simple premise."
This has been a dizzying climb for PillPack. When she received her first big share of investment in 2014, a $ 4 million injection, she was valued at just $ 9.4 million, according to PitchBook. As it progressed, large venture capital firms like Accel Partners and CRV injected more money. In 2016, according to PitchBook, investors invested money to the tune of $ 360 million. In all, he raised $ 118 million in venture capital.
One of the first investors of the company,
David Frankel
Boston founder Founders Collective wrote in an article published on the Medium Medium website on Thursday that the company was promising with two founders who complement each other.
"TJ cherishes the beautiful design but looks like a doctor" Parker, while Mr. Cohen was able to master the technical challenges behind an "indispensable pill dispensing solution." [19659003] "Their vision and progress made for a convincing argument," he writes.
Before going to the pharmacy school, Mr. Parker was working in his father's company, who provided drugs to nursing homes and long-term care facilities, the company grew rapidly and eventually amassed its own fleet of delivery drivers, giving Mr. Parker an appreciation of the logistics involved in the delivery of drugs, he said during an interview in 2015 at the Pando.com technology news site .Physician College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, he began to take fashion design course at Massachusetts College of Art nearby. "The pharmacy school was so boring," he said in the interview
. Her design school experience was short-lived, but her expertise inspired the PillPack concept of simplifying drug treatments by sorting doses. packages, "distributed from a small box in bags marked with the date and time when they must be taken.
It has turned out to be an idea of a Billion Dollars.
Write to Eliot Brown at [email protected] and Sharon Terlep at [email protected]
Source link
