Alchemy founders Sid Viswanathan (left), Susie Crowe and Peter Park

Sid Viswanathan, cofounder of tech-enabled pharmacy Truepill, which was once worth more than $1 billion before falling back to earth, is back with a new healthcare startup. The new company, called Alchemy, is working to increase access to HIV medications by building and managing in-house pharmacies for community clinics.

After operating in stealth for more than a year, the San Francisco-based startup is launching publicly after raising $31 million in seed funding, led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, Viswanathan told Forbes. Magic Johnson, the NBA superstar who was first diagnosed with HIV in 1991, is also an investor.

To date, the startup has set up pharmacies inside 15 clinics across the country that serve a large HIV and hepatitis C patient population. Alchemy (not to be confused with the blockchain startup Alchemy, founded by Nikil Viswanathan) sets up and runs the pharmacies, and receives a percentage of revenue from them. It works with the clinics to access a federal program to get medications at lower cost, helping their patients get and stay on their medications.

“It all starts with building pharmacies inside the clinics,” Viswanathan said. “It was so existential for some clinics to open a pharmacy that they were literally taking down exam rooms.”

Forbes first profiled Truepill five years as part of the Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2019. Viswanathan, an Indian immigrant who sold his previous startup to LinkedIn, and cofounder Umar Afridi, a former pharmacist, set out to upend the heavily regulated pharmacy business with technology. By 2018, with just $13 million in venture funding, its revenue had reached $48 million thanks to the fast growth of direct-to-consumer customers like Nurx (which sells birth........

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