Petr Toupal saves Czech online pharmacy Pilulka with AI push

Czech online pharmacy Pilulka, once a favorite among investors on the Prague Stock Exchange, is undergoing a sweeping transformation: since last autumn the company has been led by Petr Toupal, and its controlling stake now belongs not to the founders — the Kasov brothers — but to entrepreneur Tomáš Čupr and his group, TCF Capital. Toupal's task is to turn the firm, whose revenue has been sliding, into a steadily profitable business and to reinvent the very essence of Pilulka.

The 44-year-old executive joined Pilulka with extensive retail experience, having worked at Tesco, Žabka, Albert, Košík, Globus and Billa. It was the sheer scale of the challenge that drew him in: turning a strong but battered brand back into a “lovebrand” and transforming it from a mere pharmacy into a player in the health and longevity market.

Interestingly, before joining the company Toupal himself was not particularly immersed in the longevity scene — only after his appointment did he, for the first time in his life, get a paid blood test and start wearing an Oura smart ring, combining sleep data with blood test results for preventive health monitoring.

According to Toupal, the company has already weathered its worst difficulties, and the focus now is on major projects. “By the end of this year we want to operate as a fully AI-driven company,” he says. In this bet on artificial intelligence, Pilulka is also getting help from Tomáš Čupr himself — through a partnership with Duvo, one of the companies in his group that specializes in AI-driven business transformation.

Over the past year the company has changed so much that, according to the CEO, had his meeting with journalists taken place a year earlier, they would have been talking about “a completely different company” — logistics, internal processes and planning have all changed. Toupal admits that the flexibility and pace of change at Pilulka are incomparable to the speed of transformation at large corporations, where a similar overhaul would take considerably longer.