t first glance, TJ Parker looks a bit more like a guy whom you might buy pot from at a Dead concert than the person you’d seek out to purchase your prescription meds.  On Tuesday morning, the sandy-maned 29-year-old pharmacist was wearing a chambray shirt and jeans, desert boots, and an Apple Watch in the Davis Square headquarters of his two-year-old startup, PillPack, an online pharmacy that provides personalized, prefilled, single-serve packs of pills that are organized by date and time. But this atypical drug seller is now in possession of some kingpin-level cash. On Wednesday, the company said it had raised $50 million in a funding round led by the Cambridge and San Francisco venture capital firm Charles River Ventures and others, including Accel Partners, Atlas Venture, Menlo Ventures, and Sherpa Ventures.  “We think it’s a huge market and a chance to modernize the entire pharmacy,” said George Zachary, a partner at CRV in San Francisco who will join PillPack’s board. He said CRV committed $30 million, one of its largest investments to date, because of Parker’s experience and vision. “He’s an authentic founder . . . He knew that from being in it that it could be way better.”  Parker is a second-generation pharmacist who grew up behind the counter of his father’s mom-and-pop drugstore in Concord, N.H. Whenever he went out to deliver prescriptions, he grew frustrated, watching as customers used Excel spreadsheets and day-of-the-week pill containers to keep track of their medications. So he would color-code their pill bottle caps or write out the names of the drugs in huge letters — anything to help them.  “I got very fascinated with why this experience was so bad,” he said.  And it’s not only bad, it can also be dangerous. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 10 percent of the US population, or about 32 million people, are prescribed five or more medications each month. But getting them to take the prescriptions correctly and routinely is a challenge.  “The other drug problem in this country is adherence,” said Joseph Ferullo, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. The Network for Excellence in Health Innovation has determined that Americans spend $290 billion annually on health care because of their inability or unwillingness to adhere to their prescribed care plans.  Parker studied pharmacology at the college but often found himself dipping into design classes across the street at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He started to merge his interests around 2010, when he signed up for the pharmacy school’s annual business-plan competition. Parker’s father had started a company to deliver prefilled pill packages to New Hampshire nursing homes. Parker wondered if he could replicate the concept for a retail consumer.  “TJ found a gap in the marketplace,” said Ferullo, who oversaw the contest in which Parker first pitched his concept. “He took something that was already being done with nursing home and long-term care facilities to the general public, and that’s where the game-changing began.”  After the contest, Parker volunteered to help organize MIT’s annual $100K entrepreneurship challenge, where he met his cofounder, Elliot Cohen, who was attending the university’s Sloan School of Business. Cohen had just started a hackathon series called Hacking Medicine, which brought together Boston’s academic and hospital communities to find ways to rethink the delivery of heath care.  Cohen had his own pharmaceutical frustrations while growing up: His mother ran community clinics near his home in Davis, Calif., and his father suffered through two heart attacks and two rounds of cancer. After finishing school in 2012, Parker persuaded Cohen to launch the company. A string of successes followed as the team got into the TechStars accelerator that fall, then partnered with the IDEO design firm to prototype their products. In early 2013, they raised over $3.5 million in just a few months.  The company has now accumulated $62.5 million and employs more than 60 people in Somerville and Manchester, N.H. (Parker’s father works for him as vice president of the pharmacy.) Parker won’t disclose the company’s valuation or the size of its customer base, but he said it has distributed more than a million individual dose packets since the service was launched in February of last year, and is now licensed to serve 47 states.  Customers logging onto PillPack’s website can provide their prescription information in minutes. The PillPack team then navigates the complicated process of working with insurance companies to coordinate delivery of the medications. “Frankly, putting the pills in the right pack is the easy part,” Parker said. “It’s all the stuff around it that makes it really complicated.”  Forbes has estimated the company will bring in $15 million in revenue this year.  The new round of funding, Parker said, will provide an opportunity to expand the client base and establish a brick-and-mortar footprint. The company plans to open storefronts this year to promote the PillPack brand, using a model similar to the online retailers Warby Parker and Bonobos. He said they will launch a PillPack mobile app in the coming months, probably with features that connect users directly with pharmacists.  “Our vision has always been to replace retail,” Cohen said. “This gives us the capital to do that at scale.”  “We should probably hire a finance guy,” Parker joked. “That would be smart.”
PillPack is a Somerville-based startup that is overhauling the pharmacy experience providing single-serve pre-filled packets of prescription medicine to patients. The company has raised $50 million in a new funding round which will help expand their reach and establish brick and mortar storefronts.