TinyRx Injected With $5M To Expand Prescription Delivery

While the breadth of retail apps that have been released over the last several years have done their part to disrupt the industry, they’ve also served to streamline the buying and checkout process for millions of consumers. Could they do the same for the notoriously convoluted health care system?

That’s the ultimate goal of newly launched startup TinyRx, TechCrunch reported. With its official launch on Tuesday (Nov. 17), TinyRx can begin using its $5 million in initial funding to help ferry deliveries of prescription medicines to the patients who need them. However, in a move that might prove immensely popular with consumers who struggle to find the most cost-effective means of controlling their health, TinyRx is also launching with the ability for users to shop their medications around various providers so they can find the absolute best prices without ever leaving their devices.

“The simple truth about the pharmaceutical industry is that prescriptions are getting more expensive, and less convenient to fulfill,” Andrew Lockhart, co-founder of TinyRx, told TechCrunch. “TinyRx is changing that by leveraging all available resources to find savings for customers, and offering a platform that gets their prescriptions to them fast.”

The Next Web explained that TinyRx is launching with the expectation that pharmacy deliveries will be made in as little as two hours after ordering. Instead of taking a cut of the pharmacy’s revenue on each transaction, TinyRx instead established revenue-sharing models with its initial partners, which may have made joining forces with the unproven startup a less risky proposition than it might have been for pharmacies.

TinyRx is only available to California patients in the San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley areas, though Lockhart and co-founder Chris Bockman told TechCrunch that they aim to expand into other markets as soon as 2016.

If TinyRx can do for patients and pharmacies what it promises, seeing the service spread across the country shouldn’t be a tough pill to swallow.