Retail health · Digital pharmacy

FastFarma

A Quito startup that promised prescription and over the counter medicine delivered from neighborhood dark stores in 30 minutes across Ecuador and Mexico. It grew fast on Y Combinator backing, then closed operations in every market in December 2022 and said it was returning capital to investors.

A pharmacy with no storefront

Order through a website or a WhatsApp message, and a rider on an electric motorcycle picks the medicine up from one of the company's warehouses and brings it to the door. No pharmacy counter, no waiting room. That was FastFarma's pitch to Ecuador and, briefly, to Mexico City: a dark pharmacy model built around nine warehouses in Quito, Guayaquil and Mexico City that carried the same permits as a traditional pharmacy, according to a January 2022 Forbes Ecuador profile.

Co-founder Santiago Ribadeneira told Forbes Ecuador the product range ran “desde pañales hasta medicinas recetadas,” and every order carrying a prescription went through a verification step meant to keep the service from being misused. Eight riders covered Ecuador and four covered Mexico City, all on electric motorcycles, part of what Ribadeneira described as a sustainability commitment that also meant no plastic bags on deliveries.

The problem it targeted

The idea took shape in the middle of the pandemic. Ribadeneira and his partners began developing it in November 2020, according to Forbes Ecuador, when a trip to a pharmacy counter carried real risk. Operations began in February 2021. The pitch, later repeated at Y Combinator's Summer 2021 Demo Day, was simple retail logistics: hold inventory close to customers in small dark stores, and delivery speed turns a pharmacy visit into a habit rather than an errand.

Bloomberg Línea's write up of that Demo Day called FastFarma “the first Ecuadorian company to present at YC.” TechCrunch's recap of the same event reported that co-founder Santiago Ribadeneira said the company was doing about $20,000 in monthly revenue at the time, roughly seven months after commercial launch.

Founders

Santiago Ribadeneira and Marcelo Albuja are listed as FastFarma's founders on Y Combinator's company page. Ribadeneira's YC bio also credits him as founding managing director of Endeavor in Ecuador. Albuja's YC bio lists a previous role as a territory manager at UberEats and a master of science degree from Columbia. Forbes Ecuador's January 2022 profile named a third partner, Daniel Bucheli, as one of “los tres socios” running the company at that time. Bucheli does not appear on FastFarma's current YC founder listing.

Growth, then the wall

By the time of the Forbes Ecuador profile in January 2022, FastFarma had grown to a 35 person team split between Ecuador and Mexico, serving about 2,800 customers a month, with sales the company said were growing 40% a month. Full year 2021 revenue was reported around $300,000, with about 30% of that from the Mexico City operation. The founders told Forbes they expected to beat that full year total within the first four months of 2022 and were preparing to launch a mobile app.

Eleven months later, the story reversed. On December 7, 2022, Ecuadorian outlet Primicias reported that FastFarma had announced the closure of its operations days earlier, citing a company communique: “Luego de dos años hemos decidido cerrar nuestra operación definitivamente en todos los mercados y devolver el capital a los inversionistas.” The same communique blamed the “entorno macroeconómico negativo en que nos encontramos y lo difícil que se proyecta 2023 para las startups que apalancan su crecimiento en el levantamiento de venture capital o capital de riesgo.” Primicias placed the closure alongside a global venture pullback that quarter, citing a CB Insights report that put global startup funding down 54% year over year.

The company's own website corroborates the timing. A Wayback Machine capture from July 2023 shows fastfarma.com returning a page titled “404 - FastFarma,” with the page's own metadata recording a last modification date of November 30, 2022, about a week before the Primicias story ran. As of September 2026, fastfarma.com does not resolve at all. Y Combinator's company page now lists FastFarma's status as Inactive, with a final team size of 8.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the clearest, most independently corroborated fact about FastFarma is that it stopped operating at the end of 2022. The growth numbers reported in early 2022 and a revenue estimate published two years after the shutdown communique do not sit easily next to each other, and no public filing resolves that gap.

What to watch

• Whether a dissolution or liquidation record appears for Fastfarma S.A.S. with Ecuador's Superintendencia de Compañías; none was located in this research.
• Whether any of FastFarma's named investors, Magma Partners, Axial VC or BuenTrip Ventures, disclose how the promised return of capital was handled.
• Whether GetLatka or another data aggregator corrects its post-2022 revenue and headcount estimates for the company.

In their words

Related companies

• NimbleRx: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. Nimble began as a licensed dispensing pharmacy with its own stores, shut them in early 2019, and rebuilt itself as the software layer sold to the independent pharmacies
• Digi-Prex: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A WhatsApp-first subscription pharmacy for chronic disease patients in Hyderabad, funded in one of India’s largest 2019 seed rounds
• Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A Dallas public benefit corporation that publishes what it pays for every generic drug it sells, adds a fixed 15 percent, and now fills sterile injectables of its own
• AIOS: Also in Consumer Health and Wellness. A San Francisco company that built its business running GLP-1 telehealth brands like Fella Health and Bolt Pharmacy, and in 2026 started pitching itself as something

Sources

1. Public recordFastFarma company profile, status InactiveY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. Public recordFastfarma S.A.S. company profileEMIS · updated Mar 9, 2026
3. Public recordEDGAR company search, “fastfarma,” Form DSEC · accessed Sep 25, 2026
4. Public recordfastfarma.com, archived captureInternet Archive Wayback Machine · Jul 24, 2023
5. IndependentReceta de exportación, una startup ecuatoriana creceForbes Ecuador, Pedro Maldonado Ordóñez · Jan 3, 2022
6. IndependentStartups sufren golpe por escasez de fondos para financiarsePrimicias, Gabriela Coba · Dec 7, 2022
7. IndependentHere are all the companies from Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo DayTechCrunch · Sep 1, 2021
8. IndependentY Combinator’s Summer 21 Demo Day had 46 LatAm companiesBloomberg Línea · Sep 4, 2021
9. IndependentFastFarma company and investor listingParsers.vc · accessed Sep 25, 2026
10. IndependentFastFarma Revenue 2024: $2.9M Est. ARRGetLatka · accessed Sep 25, 2026, data labeled as of Aug 10, 2026
11. CompanyPortfolio: FastFarmaMagma Partners · accessed Sep 25, 2026