How AI helped 1 man (and his brother) construct a $1.8 billion firm

Gallagher then employed his solely worker, his youthful brother, Elliot. This 12 months, they’re on observe to do $1.8 billion in gross sales.

A $1.8 billion firm with simply two staff? Within the age of AI, it’s more and more doable.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a brand new breed of superefficient firm in 2024. A one-person enterprise price $1 billion “would have been unimaginable with out AI,” he mentioned on a podcast, “and now it can occur.”

Now as AI instruments unfold, entrepreneurs are harnessing the know-how to develop their startups to an infinite scale at breathtaking pace with only a few people. Huge corporations, particularly in tech, are getting in on the disruption, too. Pinterest, Block and others have minimize hundreds of staff in latest months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI.

Gallagher, who previously ran a startup that offered wristwatches, mentioned he thought Altman’s prophecy of a one-person $1 billion firm can be a agency that constructed AI. He was excited when he realized he could have carried out it, taking an outdated thought — being a intermediary for weight-loss medicine — and utilizing AI to turbocharge it.

“It’s not an AI firm, however I did it with AI,” he mentioned.

In an e mail, Altman mentioned that it appeared he had gained a wager along with his tech CEO pals over when such an organization would seem, and that he “want to meet the man” who had carried out it.

Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion firm, since Gallagher employed his brother and has some contractors. The startup, which has not raised outdoors funding, additionally has no official valuation. However many extremely valued tech corporations can solely dream of hitting $1 billion in income with so few staff. Medvi can also be worthwhile, Gallagher mentioned.

The New York Occasions was given entry to Medvi’s financials to confirm its income and income and interviewed Gallagher’s enterprise companions.

On a latest afternoon on the Soho Home membership in Los Angeles, Gallagher, sporting unkempt curly hair, a dishevelled T-shirt and tattoos on his arms and arms, mentioned the final 18 months had been a whirlwind.

He works on Medvi from his home mainly anytime he’s not showering, sleeping or spending time along with his two kids, he mentioned throughout a two-hour dialog. He even made an AI clone of his voice to assist handle his private life, utilizing it to name and schedule appointments so he would have extra time to work.

Not everybody can construct such an AI-enabled firm, although many could strive. Gallagher is suited to the second as a result of he is aware of advertising and marketing and learn how to use cutting-edge AI, mentioned Kobie Fuller, an investor on the enterprise capital agency Upfront Ventures who has suggested him.

“These of us which have these expertise, it’s form of like their superpower,” Fuller mentioned. “That is an excessive instance, however I don’t assume it’s going to be the final by any stretch.”

Gallagher has informed hardly anybody about his firm, which he mentioned was raking in additional than $3 million a day. He was nervous to speak publicly about it, he mentioned.

“I imply, it’s loopy, proper?” he requested, earlier than answering himself. “It’s loopy.”

Recognizing Alternative

Gallagher had an itinerant childhood, residing out of motels and vehicles for a time earlier than touchdown in Cincinnati when he was 12. That was the place his uncle gave him a laptop computer, which he used to show himself to code so he may make a Bizarre Al Yankovic fan web page.

As a teen, Gallagher started constructing web sites for native companies. He at all times had a hustle, together with promoting candles and Samurai swords on eBay. At 18, after constructing a internet hosting enterprise, he offered it for $6,000.

Gallagher briefly attended the College of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky College however didn’t graduate. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to change into an actor. He ultimately returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs.

In 2016, he constructed Watch Gang, a startup that offered wristwatches through subscription. It had followers however by no means turned a revenue, whilst Gallagher chased income progress and employed 60 folks.

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022 impressed Gallagher to start out tinkering with AI. Two years later, he met Jiten Chhabra, a co-founder of CareValidate, a medical startup in Atlanta.

CareValidate affords what is actually a telehealth-in-a-box package. Firms, employers or retailers that wish to promote prospects pharmaceuticals can use CareValidate’s know-how and community of on-line docs to arrange a enterprise. The corporate’s software program connects sufferers with docs and pharmacies, which write, fulfill and ship the prescriptions. CareValidate costs charges for its software program.

Gallagher noticed a possibility for his personal telehealth enterprise. He may use AI to do the branding and advertising and marketing and let CareValidate and an identical platform, OpenLoop Well being, deal with the docs, pharmacies, transport and compliance. He deliberate to start out with GLP-1s.

He was coming into a longtime market. For almost a decade, Hims & Hers Well being, Ro and different corporations have offered medicine for erectile dysfunction and hair loss on-line, utilizing an internet community of docs to put in writing the prescriptions. Hims, which went public in 2021, has 2,442 staff and generated $2.4 billion in income final 12 months.

Hims and Ro had already expanded into GLP-1 medicine, however Gallagher thought he may do the identical factor sooner and extra effectively with AI and the doctor-on-demand platforms.

He used many AI instruments to construct Medvi’s web site, together with ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. He created customized instruments, together with AI brokers, or bots that carry out duties on their very own, to get his software program programs to speak with each other. He examined AI voice instruments from ElevenLabs and others for speaking with prospects. And he used the picture and video turbines Midjourney and Runway to create media for his web site and advertisements.

Altogether, he spent $20,000 on the software program and the primary month of promoting.

Medvi’s preliminary web site featured pictures of smiling fashions who regarded AI-generated and before-and-after weight-loss pictures from across the net with the faces modified. A few of its advertisements have been AI slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and the Occasions when it had merely marketed there.

However Gallagher was most involved with getting Medvi’s checkout to work easily and ensuring his AI customer support system caught to the duty at hand. He examined it by asking the system for lasagna recipes; it took some tweaking to get it to cease supplying them, he mentioned.

Medvi opened for enterprise in September 2024. It was completely timed. People wished low-cost GLP-1s, delivered with out going to a physician’s workplace. The startup charged as little as $179 for the primary month’s provide of the medicine, in step with opponents.

The Sky’s the Restrict?

From the start, “progress was insane,” Gallagher mentioned.

Medvi rapidly grew to become one in every of CareValidate’s and OpenLoop’s prime shoppers. The businesses mentioned they have been blown away by the startup’s pace and scale.

“You’re like, ‘Do you may have a military of individuals behind you someplace?’ And he’s like, ‘Nope,’” CareValidate’s Chhabra mentioned of Gallagher.

Dr. Jon Lensing, OpenLoop’s CEO, mentioned Gallagher had began sharing tech suggestions along with his firm. “Matthew’s native tongue appears to be AI,” he mentioned.

There have been snags. Medvi’s customer support chatbot generally made up costs for the medicine. (Gallagher honored these.) Or it hallucinated, claiming Medvi offered hair-loss medicine when it didn’t.

If prospects wished to speak to an individual, Medvi’s customer support chatbot had been educated to switch them to Gallagher’s cellphone. That led to greater than 1,000 customer support calls, he recalled.

To handle the onslaught, he built-in packages from OpenLoop and CareValidate that fielded customer support calls. Gallagher quickly graduated from utilizing the net authorized web site LegalZoom to utilizing a legislation agency, and from utilizing AI accounting instruments to utilizing an accounting agency. He additionally employed media businesses to assist purchase advertisements to entice prospects.

As gross sales took off, Gallagher requested Fuller, the enterprise capital investor, if he ought to increase enterprise funding. Fuller informed him that if he didn’t want the cash, he shouldn’t increase it.

“You need to simply preserve constructing,” Fuller mentioned he had informed Gallagher. Gallagher later thanked him for the recommendation.

In March 2025, Gallagher modified one thing minor on Medvi’s web site after which went on a hike. From the path, he obtained a name from one in every of his media businesses asking whether or not it was odd that there had been no orders for the final hour.

Gallagher realized that his replace should have damaged one thing. With nobody to repair it, he sprinted dwelling. The downtime misplaced him round 200 potential prospects, he mentioned.

Nonetheless, he was hesitant to rent anyone. At Watch Gang, having 60 staff had not helped the corporate develop.

“It simply elevated my prices, after which it delayed my decision-making as a result of I had extra folks to take care of,” he mentioned. Medvi’s largest benefit was his potential to maneuver rapidly, he mentioned.

Gallagher added two engineers on contract and determined to rent solely Elliot, his 36-year-old brother in Cincinnati in April. His brother’s job contains intercepting and filtering communication so Gallagher can give attention to his priorities.

“I simply helped take numerous the burden off of him,” Elliot mentioned in an interview.

That gave Gallagher respiration room to repair some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss pictures for ones from actual prospects. Some pictures on Medvi’s homepage stay AI-generated.

By the tip of final 12 months, Medvi had reached $401 million in annual gross sales and amassed 250,000 prospects. It produced 16.2% in internet revenue, or $65 million, with spending going to the charges for telehealth platforms, advertising and marketing after which software program. Hims, against this, had a internet revenue of 5.5% final 12 months.

Medvi’s aggressive promoting has led to authorized and regulatory points. In February, the Meals and Drug Administration despatched the corporate a warning letter about “false or deceptive claims” on Medvi.io, a web site run by a advertising and marketing company employed by Medvi, which prompt that Medvi mixes its personal medicine and implied that these medicine had been FDA-approved after they hadn’t. Gallagher mentioned the language was eliminated after the warning.

Final month, a lawsuit looking for class motion standing filed in U.S. District Courtroom of the Central District of California accused Medvi of violating California’s anti-spam legislation with its use of “falsified header data, spoofed domains and nonsensical sending addresses to evade spam filters.” The corporate declined to touch upon the lawsuit.

Gallagher is reinvesting a few of Medvi’s income into growth. He thought of shopping for corporations that present different well being merchandise, however determined it was simply as simple to construct himself.

In February, Medvi began promoting males’s well being merchandise, together with erectile dysfunction medicine. That enterprise hit 50,000 prospects within the first month and is on observe to eclipse the GLP-1 enterprise in 4 months, Gallagher mentioned.

Final month, Medvi added wholesome meal supply plans, which OpenLoop handles. Subsequent up is girls’s well being, together with hormone remedy medicine. Hair-growth medicine, dietary supplements and skincare merchandise are additionally on the agenda.

Medvi’s whole revenue of $70 million to $80 million thus far has made Gallagher emotional, given his upbringing.

“For the primary time, I’m not in survival mode,” he mentioned.

Final 12 months, he arrange a basis with $1 million and donated to a Los Angeles cat rescue group, with plans to additionally donate to a nonprofit that helps younger folks experiencing homelessness. His purpose is to run most of Medvi’s income by way of the muse. For enjoyable, he invests in movies and buys historic objects, together with a pocket watch from the 1700s.

Gallagher doesn’t anticipate hiring extra folks. He mentioned he simply didn’t see how it will assist Medvi, although he misses the camaraderie of colleagues.

“At this level, I form of wish to rent folks as a result of I’m lonely,” he mentioned.

However some human contact continues to be wanted.

In September, Medvi started assigning human account managers to a subset of shoppers. When these prospects name, textual content or e mail with a query, they connect with the identical account supervisor. The thought is that the account managers will get to know shoppers and keep in mind particulars corresponding to birthdays or kids’s names, creating increased buyer satisfaction.

Medvi’s seven account managers, all employed on contract, now have a number of hundred shoppers every. To handle that many relationships, they’re utilizing AI.