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Hims & Hers is an online health company that sells prescription medicines and personal-care products directly to consumers, mostly through subscriptions.
Hims & Hers is an internet pharmacy and telehealth company. It sells treatments for things people would rather not talk about in a doctor's waiting room — hair loss, erectile dysfunction, acne, anxiety, weight loss — plus generic versions of everyday drugs. You answer some questions online, a licensed provider reviews them, and if a prescription makes sense, the medicine shows up at your door in discreet packaging. The company runs two brands: Hims for men and Hers for women.
The business model is subscriptions. Customers pay a recurring fee, often monthly, for a supply of their treatment, and that recurring revenue is the whole point — it is predictable, and it compounds as more people sign up and stay. Hims & Hers does not own the pharmacies that fill most orders; it contracts with licensed pharmacy partners, which keeps its own costs light. It also sells non-prescription items like supplements and skin creams, but the prescription business is the engine. Customers choose it largely for convenience and privacy: no office visit, no pharmacy line, no awkward conversation. The company went public in 2021 by merging with a blank-check company, a deal that briefly valued it at roughly $1.6 billion. For a while it looked like a money-losing novelty. Then it started reporting real profits and steady subscriber growth, and the stock took off. Revenue reached about $1.5 billion in 2024, up sharply from the year before, and the company has been consistently profitable on an adjusted basis. Its biggest competitive threat is obvious: regular drugstores, insurers, and huge retailers like Amazon all want the same customer, and copycat weight-loss offerings are everywhere.
In early 2016, Andrew Dudum started a company called Hims. He noticed that men were too embarrassed to go to a doctor for private health problems, so he built a fully digital service meant to make those issues feel normal and easy to treat. The whole idea was to shrink the shame and connect people to real professional care.
The first products were for men, mainly prescriptions for hair loss and erectile dysfunction. But the plan was never to stay with men only, and the company soon added women's products and the '& Hers' to its name.
In early 2021, Hims & Hers merged with Oaktree Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company, and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The deal raised about $280 million and valued the company at $1.6 billion, giving it a big pile of cash and a claim to lead the telehealth industry.
The shares jumped to about $25 from $10 soon after the deal, then fell hard as other direct-to-consumer health care companies piled on pressure. For a while, Hims became a symbol of the broken promise of SPACs, the fast deals that often did not live up to the hype.
In 2024, the company jumped into weight-loss drugs. During a nationwide shortage of the famous branded medicines, it offered pharmacist-made compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide, starting at $199 a month against more than $1,000 for Wegovy. Customers came fast.
Then came a sudden turn: Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wegovy, cut off its brief partnership with Hims in June 2025, blaming illegal mass compounding and deceptive marketing. The stock crashed 35% in one day, as investors saw both lost branded sales and doubts about the whole weight-loss plan.
Hims brought in Nader Kabbani, a former Amazon executive, as chief of operations while it pushed into new areas like blood testing. He had led Amazon's purchase of PillPack and the launch of Amazon Pharmacy, and he replaced the company's 13th employee, Melissa Baird.
In 2026, the FDA moved to restrict the GLP-1 ingredients used in compounded drugs, and Novo Nordisk sued to block the sales. On February 9, the stock fell as much as 27% in a single session, part of a brutal slide from a 52-week high near $65 to a low near $14, roughly an 80% drop.
In March 2026, Hims gave up the compounding shortcut and switched to a collaboration with Novo Nordisk selling branded GLP-1 products. The cost showed up right away: net income flipped from a profit to a $92 million loss, U.S. revenue fell 8%, and gross margin shrank from 73% to 65%.
Also in March 2026, the company completed a $1.15 billion acquisition of Eucalyptus, a leading Australian telehealth business. With about $240 million in upfront cash, the deal took Hims into Australia, Japan, Germany and Canada, turned it into a truly global health platform, and helped drive a 50%-plus rally in the stock.
The most interesting and most dangerous chapter is weight loss. Hims & Hers began selling compounded semaglutide — a copy of the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — at a fraction of the brand-name price, and it became a major revenue driver almost overnight. That window is closing. Federal regulators declared the brand-name shortage over, which legally restricts compounded copies, and the company has been pivoting toward selling the real branded drugs and lower-cost alternatives. It also bought a peptide manufacturing facility to control more of its own supply. The bet is that a lean, direct-to-consumer health platform can undercut the traditional system. The risk is that regulators, drugmakers, and bigger retailers squeeze it from every side.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026