Las Vegas startup Pills2Me getting thousands from tech giant for expansion

Las Vegas-based startup Pills2Me is looking to more than double the markets it operates in within the next few months and it just received a quarter of a million dollars from Google to fuel that expansion.

Google for Startups awarded about $250,000 in resources to Pills2Me, a medication delivery company, with $150,000 coming in cash without a dilution to the company’s current ownership and $100,000 in cloud credits, as part of Google for Startups Black Founders Fund, according to an announcement from the tech giant.

Pills2Me will use the funding from Google as a “catalyst” to grow the company into its next stage and grow its workforce, Leslie Asanga, the founder and CEO of Pills2Me, said.

“The Google award and all the resources given, it really gives us that catalyst to take us to the next level,” he said.

The next level for Pills2Me is to more than double the number of markets the company operates in, according to Asanga. The company currently has four markets — Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston and New Haven, Conn. — but is set to launch in six new ones — Reno, Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio, Miami and Tampa , Fla. — by the end of 2023.

“We’ve built a scalable proprietary technology that can literally handle tens and hundreds of thousands of orders a day,” Asanga said.

The company has been operating for just over three years and was originally intended to deliver medications to seniors and other immunocompromised individuals during the pandemic. But Asanga said the company’s customer base has grown in recent years to individuals that may have transportation challenges and can’t get to the pharmacy as well as people who just prefer to have their medications delivered instead of waiting in line at a pharmacy.

“It kind of fits right into a lot of people’s normal lifestyle right now where they just order it just because they can,” Asanga said.

Eventually, Asanga wants to grow the Pills2Me operation nationwide and will use other resources offered by Google to help achieve that goal.

In addition to the funding from the Black Founders Fund, Google also provides other resources such as product support as well as mentorship and networking opportunities to help grow connections for the participating companies.

“The resources that Google provides I think is worth way more than that cash prize, because they’ve given us access to professionals that are sitting down with us, figuring out what each company’s unique problem is,” Asanga said.

Fundraising challenges

The Black Founders Fund’s mission is to support Black-founded startups across the globe because they usually don’t receive as many investment opportunities as other founders. In 2022, about 1.1 percent of the $215.9 billion in U.S. venture capital funds went to Black-founded startups, according to Crunchbase.

Asanga, who was a pharmacist before starting Pills2Me and originally from Cameroon, said fundraising has been “crazier” than he thought it would be and a difficult process because of his lack of background in the technology and startup industry.

“When you look at the fundraising landscape it’s based on relationships, and a lot of those you could see that it favors certain people of certain socioeconomic status,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, (fundraising) is hard. But for certain people, it’s next to impossible.”

Now with Pills2Me being a part of the Black Founders Fund, Asanga said he hopes the affiliation with Google will open more doors for his company and funding opportunities.

The award from Google also closed the pre-seed funding round for Pills2Me. Asanga declined to share the financial details of that round, but he said the company relied on a variety of resources for funding, including crowdfunding, family and friends, venture capital firms and angel investors.

For the next few months the main focus of Pills2Me is making sure it has a smooth launch in its six new markets by the end of the year, according to Asanga. But starting in 2024, the company will get back into the thick of fundraising for its next stage of growth.

Contact Sean Hemmersmeier at shemmersmeier@reviewjournal.com or on Twitter @seanhemmers34.