Apr 7, 2026
The New York Times ran a story on April 2, 2026 (1), about how AI helped Los Angeles-based Matthew Gallagher build a startup that is on track to do $1.8 billion in sales this year. His business, Medvi, is touted as a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs that generated $401 million in sales in 2025 — its first full year in business.
Interestingly, Medvi only has two employees, Matthew and his brother Elliot, making the sales figures they’ve achieved almost hard to believe.
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Matthew admits that he outsources a lot of the work he cannot do himself (or with the help of AI), including working with CareValidate and OpenLoop Health to help handle doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance of the products Medvi supplies to consumers.
Matthew’s brother Elliot was only recently brought on to help with communication so Matthew can focus where his energy is most needed.
“I just helped take a lot of the weight off of him,” Elliot Gallagher said in an interview (1).
In 2024, Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, shared on a podcast (2) that he felt there would soon be a new breed of company — one that used AI to get started and grow. A one-person business worth $1 billion “would have been unimaginable without AI,” he said, “And now [it] will happen.”
Although Medvi has two employees (not just one as Altman predicted), Gallagher’s idea of becoming a middleman for weight-loss drugs and using AI to ramp it up seems to have paid off. Gallagher said of his success.
The New York Times outlines that Altman shared in an email that he had won the bet with his tech CEO friends about when such a company would appear and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.
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What the New York Times profile fails to include are the allegations of deepfake images and misleading advertisements, the FDA warning letter, and the class action lawsuit.
Allegations against Medvi
A 2025 article from Futurism (3) delves into concerns over deepfake before-and-after weight loss photos. It flags that Medvi’s website has lots of images of people but alleges none of them are real. “Each image in the smiling, sports-bra’d crowd appears to have been generated from scratch using AI — and the before-and-after photos, more insidiously, are eerily convincing deepfakes, seemingly generated by lifting existing images of real people from across the web and using AI to alter their faces.”
Gallagher admits he used AI to “write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service.” (1) The New York Times reports he used image and video generators Midjourney and Runway to create media for his website and ads. The same article outlines that some of its initial ads were AI-generated and that a ticker of mainstream media logos suggested the company was featured on well-known sites Bloomberg and The Times, though Medvi had only advertised there.
Even with this admission and seeming transparency around how AI is used to help market Medvi, it serves as a cautionary tale for consumers to be skeptical of what they read and what they see online before they choose to spend their hard-earned cash on a product or service.
On February 20, 2026 (nearly six weeks before the NYT profile), the FDA issued a warning letter #721455 (4) to Medvi outlining its misbranding allegations against the company. It alleges the products pictured on the website suggest that Medvi is the drug compounder, but it is not and therefore the drug products are false or misleading. It also states that compounded drug products are not FDA-approved. Business Insider reports (5) that while the warning letter was addressed to Medvi, the website mentioned in the letter was medvi.io. Gallagher claims this site is operated by an affiliate marketer and that Medvi’s website is medvi.org. Gallagher said the marketer used his company name without permission and has since removed the website and responded to the FDA.
Beyond the deepfake and misbranding allegations, there is also concern about how Medvi allegedly advertises to consumers. It is alleged that there are over 800 Facebook accounts for doctors that are used to advertise the slew of drugs Medvi has to offer, but all of them are allegedly fake (6). An April 3, 2026 search of Meta’s ad library for “medvi” returned over 5,000 active ads (7), many of which were run under these doctor accounts. That number has since fallen to 2,800, following a Business Insider investigation, according to Drug Discovery & Development (7).
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As of April 6, Dr. Matthew Anderson, MD (8) appears across Medvi ads (8) but the Facebook account seems to at one time have been for a gospel band and Dr. Spencer Langford, MD’s (8) profile appears to be for someone located in the “Republic of the Congo.” Business Insider also found these profiles in their research (5).
With this allegation, Medvi could be in violation of the FTC’s truth in advertising requirements. The requirement states that when consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence (9). The FTC’s updated Endorsement Guidelines explicitly cover virtual endorsers, bots and fake personas — and penalties can run up to $43,792 per violation (10).
In September 2025, the National Consumers League and other organizations named Medvi and five other telehealth companies in an investigation request to the FTC. Nancy Glick, the NCL’s director of food, nutrition, and obesity, says Medvi’s use of terms like “trusted by experts” and “doctor-approved” confuses consumers about the safety testing of its compounded drugs. “What Medvi is doing violates the FTC act,” she told Business Insider (5). A class action lawsuit was filed in California on March 20, 2026 (11) and alleges that Medvi is benefiting from affiliate spam. It states that emails with subject lines like “This might be the easiest way to start Ozempic” route consumers to a Medvi landing page when they engage (7). The lawsuit was filed under California’s anti-spam law and at least 100,000 people are involved.
Drug Discovery & Development reports (7) that after the New York Times profile, Gallagher took to social media to defend Medvi’s business model in a now-deleted X (12) post claiming “White label telemedicine is a huge benefit with a net positive for humanity. It has been the driving force behind big pharma lowering prices and making healthcare accessible to everyone from home. Low energy people think offering life-changing weight loss medication, prescribed by a doctor, is a trendy ‘pill mill’. Wait til you see what’s possible with longevity services and peptides. I’m bullish on humanity. If you are too, I’ll help you build.”
These allegations and lawsuit serve as a strong reminder to consumers to do their due diligence when considering any health-related program or medication. For example, remember to always check with your doctor for guidance and advice that is best suited to your individual needs and if your telehealth provider’s doctors are not listed in state licensing databases, then it’s a sign to proceed with caution — if at all.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
The New York Times (1); @alexisohanian (2); Futurism (3); U.S. Food and Drug Administration (4); Business Insider (5); @Brand (6); Drug Discovery & Development (7); Facebook (8); FTC (9, 10); Justia (11); X (12)
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Joanna Sinclair is an engagement editor for Moneywise. She holds a B.A. in Professional Writing from York University and has been working in digital media for nearly two decades.
