What the £36m sale of disruptor CloudRx says about UK's pharmacy sector
Founder Daniel Lee tells Sheryl Moore how tech can transform community pharmacies
Hello Rainmakers,
From pioneering online prescriptions with Pharmacy2U to building Leeds-based CloudRx, Daniel Lee has spent more than two decades reshaping how patients access medicines.
He tells Sheryl Moore how the £36m sale of CloudRx clears the way for his next big disruption: turning community pharmacies into clinical hubs powered by technology, automation, and ambition.
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Daniel Lee doesn’t just know how to make an exit - he knows when. He walked away from his first venture, Pharmacy2U after selling a big stake to G-Square Capital for £40m in 2018. That was a win, but for Lee, it’s never about the money. It’s about the moment, the pivot, the inflection point. With CloudRx, he’s doing it all over again-- rewriting the rules of pharmacy, igniting the UK’s e-pharmacy revolution, and proving that finishing one project isn’t slowing down - it’s launching the next disruption.
Long before digital health became a buzzword, Lee was challenging how medicines could be delivered in the UK. His Leeds-based venture Pharmacy2U helped pioneer the online prescription model at the turn of the millennium, forcing regulators and the sector to rethink what pharmacy could look like in the internet age.
More than two decades later, the £36m sale of CloudRx marks the latest chapter in that story - and clears the path for Lee’s next attempt to reshape the future of community pharmacy.
It was in 1999 that Lee launched Pharmacy2U in Leeds, widely recognised as the UK’s first large-scale online pharmacy. At the time, the idea of ordering prescriptions online and receiving them by post seemed at best radical.
“At the time people said it was impossible,” he recalls. “You simply couldn’t send prescriptions through the post.”
Regulation had been written long before the internet existed, and the idea that medicines could be dispensed remotely, without patients standing at a pharmacy counter, seemed incompatible with existing rules. Rather than abandon the concept, Lee took the challenge directly to regulators. Working with government departments and pharmacy organisations, he argued that technology would inevitably transform how medicines were supplied and that legislation needed to evolve alongside it. Those discussions led to regulatory changes allowing distance-selling pharmacies to operate. Pharmacy2U launched publicly in 2000.
