Matthew Gallagher, a 41-year-old self-taught entrepreneur from Los Angeles, built Medvi in two months with $20,000 and more than a dozen AI tools. The GLP-1 telehealth startup hit $401 million in sales in 2025 with 250,000 customers and is tracking toward $1.8 billion in 2026 revenue. The company has two employees: Gallagher and his brother Elliot. The New York Times was given access to the company’s financials to verify the numbers.
Gallagher used ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to write the code powering Medvi’s platform, produce website copy, generate images and videos for ads, and handle customer service, according to the NYT profile published Wednesday by Erin Griffith. He built AI systems to analyze business performance in real time. Rather than building medical infrastructure, he partnered with CareValidate and OpenLoop Health to handle doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and compliance. His focus was branding, marketing, and customer acquisition.
The numbers in context
Medvi posted a 16.2% net profit margin in 2025, generating roughly $65 million in profit, per the NYT. For comparison, Hims and Hers — which competes in the same GLP-1 market with over 2,400 employees — posted a 5.5% net margin the same year.
The company launched in September 2024 and scaled from 300 customers in its first month to 1,300 in its second, according to What’s Trending. Medvi charges as little as $179 for a first month’s supply of GLP-1 drugs, competitive with broader market pricing.
In February, Medvi launched a men’s health line including erectile dysfunction drugs, which reached 50,000 customers in its first month. The company has since added healthy meal delivery and is preparing to enter women’s health, including hormone therapy, per What’s Trending.
The agent-builder lens
The story lands roughly two years after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted AI would enable a single person to build a billion-dollar company. Forbes described the Medvi case as evidence that AI is compressing the traditional startup playbook.
Critics have noted that Medvi’s growth owes as much to the GLP-1 market’s demand surge as to the AI toolkit. Gallagher chose a sector with desperate customers, built an interface connecting them to prescription providers, executed aggressive marketing, and scaled fast. The AI tools handled functions that would normally require a team, but the market did the heavy lifting on demand.
OpenLoop CEO Jon Lensing, one of Gallagher’s key partners, told the New York Times: “Matthew’s native tongue seems to be A.I.”
For solo founders, the operational model is the story: one person using AI agents to run code, copy, ads, customer service, and analytics, while outsourcing compliance and fulfillment to specialized partners. Whether Medvi’s revenue trajectory holds depends on regulatory and competitive dynamics in the GLP-1 space, but the company formation pattern is already being replicated.