Amazon announced Thursday that it has agreed to acquire startup PillPack. Started by Forbes 30 Under 30 list member TJ Parker, 32, and Elliott Cohen in 2013, PillPack is an online pharmacy that prepackages customers’ medication by dosage and has been seen as potentially rivaling Walgreens or CVS in the future.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2018, according to a statement from both companies. This acquisition by Amazon increases its footprint into the healthcare industry, and was brought up during a Walgreens earnings call Thursday morning where Walgreens CEO and billionaire Stefano Pessina said, “We are not particularly worried.”
In April CNBC reported that Walmart was considering buying PillPack for less than $1 billion.
Just three years ago, Parker, who is also PillPack’s CEO, was featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2015. Before PillPack, Parker attended the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and later worked for his father, who had a business prepackaging pills for nursing home patients. Taking that piece and adding an online component, he met Cohen working on MIT’s Hacking Medicine contest (which they ultimately won). PillPack has since raised $118 million in venture capital funding in the past five years and was last valued at $361 million, according to Pitchbook.
In April 2016 PillPack made headlines after revealing to investors that pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts planned to remove the company from its commercial network over a contract disagreement. However, after the dispute was made public, it was resolved in a matter of weeks.
“People are so used to having to deal with this—the trips to the pharmacy, sorting the pillboxes, nagging the pharmacy for refills,” Parker told Forbes in 2015. “People who have been doing this for any amount of time are thankful that we exist.”
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