Matthew Gallagher does not look like a typical billionaire. Unkempt curly hair, a loose T-shirt, tattoos on his arms. He is sitting at the Soho House club in Los Angeles, telling a story that sounds almost unbelievable. In just two months and with $20,000, he built a company that made $401 million last year. And he did it practically by himself.
His startup Medvi sells GLP-1 weight-loss drugs online. No large office, no team of developers. Just Gallagher, his younger brother Elliot, and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools.
An Idea and Determination
Gallagher had a turbulent childhood. He spent part of his life living in a motel or a car before settling in Cincinnati at the age of twelve. There, his uncle gave him a laptop, and he learned to code so he could create a Weird Al Yankovic fan page. A typical story of today’s tech founders? Not even close. It is more the story of someone who never gave up.
In 2016, he launched Watch Gang, a watch subscription club. He hired 60 people and chased growth, but the company was never profitable. Gallagher learned a painful lesson from the experience: more people do not mean better results. The turning point came in 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. Gallagher began experimenting, and two years later he met Jiten Chhabra, co-founder of CareValidate, a platform that works like telehealth in a box. Doctors, pharmacies, prescriptions, delivery. Everything outsourced.
Gallagher saw an opportunity. He would take care of the brand, marketing, and customers. He would leave the rest to partners.
Artificial Intelligence for Everything
To build Medvi, Gallagher used tools that anyone can download today. ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok helped him write the website’s code and copy. Midjourney and Runway created images and videos for advertisements. Customer service? Also handled by a chatbot. Internal performance analysis? Custom tools built on artificial intelligence. He paid approximately $20,000 for the entire software foundation, including the first month of marketing.
He timed the September 2024 launch perfectly. Americans were looking for affordable GLP-1 drugs without having to visit a doctor. Medvi offered the first month of medication starting at $179, comparable to competitors such as Hims & Hers or Ro. But while Hims employs more than 2,400 people and achieved a net profit margin of 5.5 percent, Medvi reported a profit margin of 16.2 percent. With revenue of $401 million, that means a net profit of more than $65 million.
As he puts it: “It is not an artificial intelligence company. But I built it using artificial intelligence.”
Brothers Against the World
Problems naturally arose. The chatbot occasionally made up drug prices, which Gallagher then had to honor. At other times, it told customers that Medvi sold hair-loss medications even though it did not offer them. And if a customer wanted to speak to a real person? The call went directly to Gallagher’s cell phone. He received more than 1,000 customer calls this way.
Then one day, he made a minor change to the website and went for a walk in nature. A call from the media agency interrupted his hike: no orders had come in for an hour. Gallagher sprinted home. The outage cost him approximately 200 potential customers. Even so, he refused to hire people. Instead, in April 2025, he called his brother Elliot in Cincinnati. Elliot, 36, became Medvi’s only employee. His job? Filtering communications so Matthew could focus on what mattered. “I just took some of the burden off him,” Elliot says modestly.
More Than CZK 40 Billion and Still Just Two People
The results are impressive. By the end of 2024, Medvi had 250,000 customers and revenue of $401 million. The company did not take a single cent from investors. Its total profit to date has reached $70 million to $80 million, which brought Gallagher to tears, as he admitted. “For the first time in my life, I am not in survival mode,” he says.
This year, Medvi launched products for men’s health, including erectile dysfunction medications. Fifty thousand customers in the first month. Products for women’s health, hormone therapy, and hair and skin care are in the works. And the number of employees? Still two. Plus seven contracted customer care agents who, although they interact with people, use artificial intelligence themselves to manage hundreds of clients at once.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that he had made a bet with friends about when such a company would emerge. It looks like he has just lost the bet. And reportedly, he would like to meet the guy who pulled it off.
Meanwhile, Gallagher is investing some of the profits in films, historical artifacts, and a charitable foundation. He donated one million dollars to a Los Angeles cat rescue. He is not complaining. He only occasionally admits that he misses interacting with colleagues. “I would like to hire people because I am lonely,” he says with a smile.
Source: nytimes.com
