Eric Kinariwala

Founder & CEO Capsule

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Eric Kinariwala is the founder and chief executive of Capsule, a New York-based pharmacy that operates through a mobile app rather than a storefront: prescriptions are coordinated with the prescriber and the insurer, delivered the same day at no charge, and followed up by pharmacists reachable over text or chat. The idea came from a failure rather than a thesis — he could not fill a sinus-infection prescription at a Manhattan chain pharmacy, and went looking for why the one retail category people visit most often was the one least changed by software. Coming from a decade on the investing side at Bain Capital and Perry Capital, he framed pharmacy as the intersection of two trends he had been underwriting: non-experiential local retail migrating onto the phone, and healthcare shifting toward value-based models. Capsule raised $300 million in 2021 at a valuation above $1 billion, and cut staff twice the following year.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Capsule, an app-based pharmacy offering free same-day prescription delivery and pharmacist support by text or chat.
• Raised a $300 million round led by Durable Capital Partners, announced 29 April 2021, taking Capsule past a $1 billion valuation.
• Expanded the service beyond New York into Minnesota and Connecticut, the latter through a partnership with the insurer HealthPartners.
• Named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year winner.
• Invested in healthcare, technology and retail companies at Bain Capital in Boston and Perry Capital in New York and London before founding the company.

Professional Journey

Kinariwala read economics at the Wharton School as a University Scholar, Penn’s undergraduate honours programme, and went straight into investing. At Bain Capital in Boston and then Perry Capital in New York and London he covered healthcare, technology and retail — three sectors that later converged in the company he founded. He has also said that his mother’s own entrepreneurship shaped his decision to build rather than continue investing. Along the way he took an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The founding story is unusually specific. In 2015, trying to fill a prescription for a sinus infection in New York, he could not find the pharmacy, which was in a basement; when he did, there were sixty people ahead of him; and after an hour’s wait the medication was out of stock. He left without it. His conclusion as an investor rather than as a patient was that the average person visits a pharmacy roughly ten times as often as they see a doctor, which made it the highest-frequency and therefore most valuable point of contact in consumer healthcare — and it was being run badly. Sources disagree on whether Capsule was incorporated that year or the next, so no founding date is claimed here.

Capsule launched in New York and grew as a licensed pharmacy rather than as a marketplace, taking on the regulatory and fulfilment burden directly. The pitch to each constituency differed: consumers got delivery and a pharmacist who answered; prescribers got a pharmacy that confirmed fills; insurers and manufacturers got adherence data. Kinariwala was explicit that the model kept humans in the loop rather than automating them away. Growth came through insurer partnerships as much as consumer marketing — the Minnesota and Connecticut expansion ran through HealthPartners.

The peak was April 2021, when Durable Capital Partners led a $300 million round that valued the company above $1 billion. Kinariwala described the ambition at the time in platform terms: a single app through which a curated set of healthcare products and services could be reached, with the pharmacy as the entry point.

That ambition ran into the 2022 correction in digital health. Capsule laid off staff in July 2022 and again in October 2022, the second round affecting about 13% of the workforce across sales and marketing, software engineering, product, operations and expansion. The company continues to operate and to accept prescriptions, and no change in its leadership has been reported, but substantive public coverage of Capsule largely stops after 2022.

Education

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Bachelor’s degree, Economics — University Scholar

Stanford Graduate School of Business

MBA