Pills2Me – An Innovation Success Story

Pills2Me is a Yale School of Public Health innovation success story. The company received its initial support and funding in 2020 from InnovateHealth Yale, YSPH’s social entrepreneurship program, and was recently named one of the U.S. recipients of the Google for Startups Black and Latino Founders Fund for 2023.

Leslie Asanga, Advanced Professional MPH ’20, is a pharmacist and the founder and CEO of Pills2Me, a technology startup that increases medication adherence through on-demand prescription delivery and medication therapy management. With the cash award as well as mentoring support from Google, Asanga is expanding his team and scaling up the Pills2Me business, with plans to expand to more U.S. cities between now and the end of the year. The plan is to eventually be a household name nationwide.

The Google for Startups Founders Funds provide cash awards and hands-on support to help Black and Latino entrepreneurs build and grow their businesses. The fund includes a $150,000 equity-free cash award to help fuel new businesses as well as sales and fundraising training and technical support from Google mentors to help take entrepreneurs to the next level.

Pills2Me is available in New Haven, Connecticut, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Houston, Texas.

“We're at a stage where we're ready to take off,” Asanga said. “We've built our playbook. We've tested user acquisition channels. Our technology's robust and can handle tens of thousands of deliveries at a time. And so now we're literally just copying and pasting in various cities.”

While a student at YSPH, Asanga took advantage of Yale University’s many entrepreneurial offerings including an entrepreneurship for social change class and the Student Innovation Lab at Yale School of Management. He collaborated with the Yale Institute for Global Health’s Sustainable Health Initiative, one of the first public health innovation and social entrepreneurship programs led by a school of public health.

When the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported in Connecticut in 2020, Asanga was a student at YSPH working part-time as a pharmacist in a retail chain in New Haven, Connecticut. Getting medications became a momentous task for people during city and state lockdowns. He founded Pills2Me with volunteers who delivered medications to people in need in the New Haven area.

Pills2Me received the Thorne Prize from Startup Yale in 2020, which came with a $25,000 award. The Thorne Prize is managed by InnovateHealth Yale. “The Thorne Prize was the first funding we got,” Asanga said. “That's what we used to begin our engineering process, to build our platform.”

After Asanga graduated from YSPH, he moved to Las Vegas where he expanded Pills2Me.

“The COVID-19 pandemic elevated the importance of innovation and social entrepreneurship in the field of public health,” said Associate Professor Kaveh Khoshnood, MPH ’89, PhD ’95. “Our aim is to support students such as Leslie to launch their innovative projects and turn them into sustainable and impactful companies. I am so proud of Leslie and hope his work inspires our current students to launch their own innovative approaches to solve public health challenges in the U.S. and globally.”