A two-person telehealth startup did $401 million in revenue last year using AI-generated fake doctors to sell weight-loss drugs on Facebook.
The Summary
- Medvi, an AI-powered telehealth company with two employees, generated $401 million in revenue and $65 million in profit in 2025, with projections hitting $1.8 billion this year
- Roughly 30% of its advertising runs through affiliate marketers who created fake doctor personas using AI-generated images and hijacked Facebook profiles
- After Business Insider flagged the fake profiles to founder Matthew Gallagher, over 5,000 active ad campaigns mentioning Medvi vanished from Meta's ad library within days
The Signal
This is what the agent economy looks like when nobody's watching. Medvi's founder Matthew Gallagher built the entire operation using AI to construct the website and coordinate with contracted medical providers. The company exists almost entirely in software, with just two humans steering a nearly half-billion-dollar revenue machine. That part is remarkable. The fake doctor part is where it gets messy.
The affiliate marketers pushing Medvi created elaborate deceptions: "Dr. Matthew Anderson MD" with an Angolan phone number whose Facebook page previously belonged to a gospel musician. "Dr. Spencer Langford MD" whose contact info traced to a clothing store in the Republic of Congo. "Wade Frazer MD" who quietly dropped the "MD" after questions started. Same AI-generated headshot used across multiple fake doctor profiles. Gemini watermarks left visible on some profile photos, like a burglar leaving fingerprints.
The scale tells you everything about Meta's moderation capabilities. Over 5,000 active ad campaigns were running Friday. By Monday, after a reporter sent a few questions, they'd disappeared. Meta's systems couldn't catch this on their own, but they could scrub it fast once someone pointed.
Medvi's business model is pure Web4 infrastructure: AI builds the storefront, contracts manage the medical fulfillment, affiliates handle distribution at scale. Strip away the fake doctors and you still have a functional system for connecting patients to prescription drugs with almost no human overhead. Add the fake doctors back in and you have a case study in why "move fast and break things" hits different when you're selling GLP-1 agonists instead of photo-sharing apps.
The medical providers Gallagher contracts with are real. The prescriptions are presumably real. The regulatory gray zone around telehealth prescribing makes this technically legal in many states. The fake doctors selling it are where legality gets interesting. Meta's ad policies prohibit impersonation. Medical advertising has additional restrictions. None of it stopped 5,000 campaigns from running until someone wrote an article.
The Implication
Watch how regulators respond here. If Medvi survives this intact, you'll see a dozen copycats launch within months. The playbook is obvious: automate the hard parts, outsource the messy parts, let affiliates run wild until someone complains. The unit economics work too well to ignore. The real test is whether "we didn't know what our affiliates were doing" remains a viable defense when your entire business model depends on what your affiliates are doing.
For anyone building in this space: the gap between "technically legal" and "obviously sketchy" is where your company's reputation lives. Medvi found the gap. They drove a telehealth truck through it. Now we find out if the bridge holds.
Source: Business Insider Tech