The Pill Club, an online birth control prescription and delivery service, raises $41.9M as an extension to its $51M Series B from Jan. 2019, led by Base 10
Every day at The Pill Club, we focus on making women's healthcare … Mallory Hackett / MobiHealthNews : Birth control-focused startup The Pill Club scores $41.9M Cromwell Schubarth / Silicon Valley Business Journal : The Funded: Women-run health startup The Pill Club just scored $42M in new funding as it expands its focus
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pill Club is topping up a war chest it first built more than two years ago: the new $41.9M arrives as an extension of its January 2019 era-defining wave of pharmacy-delivery funding that also saw PillPack lock in $50M to challenge Walgreens. In direct-to-consumer birth control specifically, the company now sits alongside Nurx, which raised a $32M Series C plus $20M in debt at a reported ~$300M valuation while live in 26 states.
The raise also rides on an infrastructure layer that did not fully exist when the original Series B closed: Truepill, which supplies telehealth and prescription fulfillment to brands like this one, went from a $75M Series C in September 2020 to a $142M Series D at a $1.6B valuation by October 2021 — evidence that the backend serving these consumer brands is itself becoming the bigger business.
First-order effects
- Base 10-led capital gives The Pill Club room to widen its focus beyond birth control prescriptions into broader women's health, per its own expansion messaging — directly pressuring Nurx, its closest funded rival in the category.
- Ro, The Pill Club and Hims together account for $349M raised around subscription healthcare models, so this round deepens the capital gap between subscription-first players and traditional pharmacy chains still selling through stores.
Second-order effects
- Truepill's rapid Series C-to-Series D climb signals where the leverage sits: as more Pill Club-style brands scale, they compete for the same fulfillment and telehealth rails, strengthening the infrastructure provider's pricing power over its customers.
- Capsule's $300M Series D at a $1B+ valuation weeks earlier shows general online pharmacy players raising at multiples of The Pill Club's round size, pushing category specialists toward differentiation on clinical focus rather than delivery logistics alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, women's health prescribing consolidates into two tiers — consumer-facing brands competing on experience and an oligopolistic fulfillment layer beneath them — echoing how PillPack's early take-on-Walgreens bet foreshadowed delivery-first pharmacy as a structural threat to retail chains.
The trend: Venture capital is stratifying direct-to-consumer healthcare into brand-layer specialists like The Pill Club and Nurx and an increasingly dominant prescription-fulfillment infrastructure layer exemplified by Truepill.