ZappRx lands $1M more to manage specialty prescriptions on mobile

Health startup ZappRx launched with a promise to become your electronic boarding pass for the pharmacy.

It was an ambitious goal, which required partnerships with leading drug companies, doctors, and pharmacies around the country. So the company has shifted focus to specialty pharmacies and is helping patients with a variety of acute and chronic conditions. These patients and their caregivers make the most frequent trips to the pharmacy and need a service like ZappRx.

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Ultimately, ZappRx wants to streamline the prescription process. The startup is looking initially at helping patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), which is a condition that accounts for about 2 percent of the specialty market.

With its new focus on specialty pharmacies, ZappRx founder and chief executive Zoe Barry has landed $1 million in additional funding, bringing the total to $2.2 million. Atlas Ventures led the round, with participation from SR One (the venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline) and Terry Meguid, David Hamamoto, Sean Trigony, and physicist James Glimm.

“Specialty pharmacies cater to a lower volume of patients but they are often high-need patients living with chronic and complex conditions. The drugs to treat these condition are also complex and as a result high margin,” Barry wrote to me.

“We realized in consulting with our advisors that this was a far better space to start in given the current lack of options that exist for processing these types of orders.”