A Marina del Rey-based startup that has developed an online pharmacy-to-pharmacy marketplace for surplus medications has won a recent Los Angeles Tech Week competition.

RxPost Inc. was selected as the winner of the PitchLive LA competition where companies seeking early-stage funding pitch their businesses to a panel of venture fund executives. The competition, held in October, was sponsored by Redwood City-based law firm Gunderson Dettmer and Westwood-based venture capital firm Alpha Edison Partners.

RxPost was founded in 2021 by pharmacy technician Amantha Bagdon, who was frustrated with the amount of paperwork and the overall difficulty of finding other pharmacies to take up surplus prescription medications.

Typically, these are medications that have been ordered but are never picked up by the customer or the customer decides to go with an alternative.

“This is a $40-billion problem for the entire (pharmacy) industry,” Bagdon said. “It’s wasted money.”

Narrowing the losses

For years, Bagdon would call other local pharmacies to see if they would be willing to pay wholesale cost for these surplus medications and then personally deliver the medications. An advantage to buying medications at wholesale cost is that health insurers often don’t pay the full purchase cost of medications. There are times that the pharmacies are left holding the bag.

Buying wholesale can narrow these losses, she said.

In April 2021, Bagdon decided to strike out on her own to build an online pharmacy-to-pharmacy marketplace, using a software prototype buildout program provided by UC Irvine.

To date, RxPost has signed up roughly 700 pharmacies in 16 states; this year, the fledgling company is on track to bring in nearly $3 million in revenue.

Bagdon said she is already putting the $50,000 in prize money to use, seeking out public relations, financial and legal services. Also, she plans to move the company’s operations out of her home and into co-working space early next year.

Her near-term goal: expanding into roughly three dozen states and achieving run-rate annual revenue of $12 million.

But to do that, Badon said she will have to overcome a significant hurdle.

“Our biggest challenge is trying to get more (pharmacy) customers onto the platform,” she said. “Most don’t even realize this option exists.”