The next phase of Andrew Dudum’s quest to change how Americans get their health care is taking shape behind the walls of a nondescript factory, tucked off a side street in Silicon Valley.
As co-founder and CEO of telehealth company Hims & Hers, Dudum has helped lead the tech industry’s encroachment on traditional medicine, using social media to sell popular prescription drugs over the internet.
He was 29 when he launched the San Francisco company nine years ago with medications for hair loss and erectile dysfunction. Then in 2024, Dudum dramatically boosted the company’s profile — and revenue — by selling cheaper, off-brand versions of the immensely popular GLP-1 weight-loss drug Wegovy.
Now, with the compounded weight-loss business in the crosshairs of a Food and Drug Administration crackdown, Dudum is ready to pivot again.
The Hims & Hers factory in Menlo Park, California, is serving as a research and development lab for peptides — promoted by bodybuilders and longevity buffs — as the Trump administration weighs loosening sale restrictions on the drugs, short chains of amino acids that come in multiple forms.
Many peptides are sourced in China and sold on an internet gray market, with only limited evidence of their safety or effectiveness. But there’s rising consumer interest in the United States, and Dudum said he plans to take them mainstream by sourcing them domestically and deploying the extensive Hims & Hers marketing machinery to stoke demand.
If the FDA allows U.S. practitioners to prescribe peptides, it stands to become a major part of the company’s shift to wellness, along with other popular but controversial offerings: biological age analysis through blood tests and full-body scans.
“I see it trending from the biohacker to my mom,” Dudum said in an interview.
Dudum plans to popularize these wellness products by using the same disruptive playbook he brought to health care almost a decade ago. A technology start-up executive and investor with no background in health care, he saw an opening in an industry that failed to prioritize the customer experience.
Why shouldn’t patients get their health care like they get movies from Netflix or fast food through a delivery app, he asked, with on-demand choice?
“The system is not listening to them,” he said. “It was truly the only industry — and it still exists today this way — where the financial incentives are entirely independent of the consumer’s happiness.”
Leveraging social media
Hims & Hers started by connecting with potential customers on social media to advertise what many of them were seeking: drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. The prescriptions were written by doctors after patients filled out a form and messaged with the provider. The sales strategy bypassed doctor’s offices and storefront pharmacies, and the company does not accept insurance.
These practices are not without controversy. Hims & Hers acknowledges in its investor disclosures that its contracts with dedicated physician prescribers could run afoul of a federal law aimed at preventing conflicts of interest if the company accepted federal insurance.
And some critics say advertising that is pushing consumers to order specific drugs from a website — a model now widely used by companies, especially over the last two years for weight loss — turns the doctor-patient relationship upside down.
“Patients really require maximum support, multidisciplinary support, and often times that is lacking in the telehealth platform,” said Christopher McGowan, a specialist in gastroenterology and internal medicine in North Carolina.
But bucking the traditional model is baked into Dudum’s plan.
“I don’t think it’s a surprise that everyday people have lost trust in the system,” Dudum said. “It’s rigid, it’s built in a manner that is not in alignment with outcomes, and it lacks the things we have come to expect: on-demand, price transparency and having choice and empowerment as a consumer.”
The model Hims & Hers built supercharged the company’s revenue once weight-loss drugs took off. Brand-name manufacturers of GLP-1 drugs couldn’t keep up with demand, which triggered a federal rule that temporarily allowed compounding pharmacies — including Hims & Hers and a host of online compounder competitors — to sell their own versions.
Hims & Hers, which went public in 2021, generated $2.35 billion in revenue last year, up 59 percent from the year before. It spent nearly $1 billion of that on marketing.
Along the way, the company became known for provocative advertising during the last two Super Bowls, positioning itself as a renegade fighting against everything that’s burdensome and unfair about American health care.
“The system wasn’t built to help us,” its 2025 spot declared. “It was built to keep us sick and stuck.”
Its marketing has attracted scrutiny. The FDA sent Dudum a warning letter last year accusing Hims & Hers of making “false and misleading” claims about its compounded GLP-1s because the company’s website said its drugs had the same active ingredient as FDA-approved brand names. The agency does not license or inspect compounded drugs, it said, so compounders can’t claim to be the same. Hims & Hers responded at the time that it would work with the FDA to resolve its concerns.
Hims & Hers also edged closer to Washington and its Big Pharma rivals.
It contributed $1 million to President Donald Trump’s second-term inaugural fund last year and spent more than $1 million on lobbying in 2025, after spending almost nothing as recently as 2023.
Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wegovy, in February sued Hims & Hers after it began selling a compounded version of a Wegovy pill. But Novo Nordisk dropped the lawsuit after Hims & Hers agreed to sell brand-name Wegovy on its website and announced it would no longer advertise its compounded GLP-1 drugs.
By then, the company’s shift to a wider array of offerings had already begun, since the FDA had declared that the shortage of brand-name GLP-1 drugs was over.
Hims & Hers started selling testosterone supplements, then announced an initiative for lab testing where it says it will scan for 50 biomarkers for $199, based on a single annual blood draw, or 120 biomarkers for $499, with two blood draws. In March, it announced partnerships with a whole-body MRI scanning company.
Biological age tests have been shown to be unreliable for an individual, although researchers say they can be useful for estimating population health. Full-body scans are costly and controversial, because they can generate false positives for cancer that trigger invasive, emotionally stressful biopsies.
Going beyond GLP-1s
In many ways, the ethos that guides Hims & Hers dovetails with the Make America Healthy Again movement that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded — and which is helping guide some of the Trump administration’s decisions. Dudum recalled being told by a doctor after inquiring about supplements, “I can’t help you with that,” citing it as an example of a rigid approach that health consumers are rejecting in droves.
“I do believe that the traditional health care system has moved in a way that is too paternalistic,” he said. “It doesn’t have room for consumer flexibility.”
Kennedy’s support for peptides, which are a central focus of the wellness and longevity movement, have opened up an opportunity for Hims & Hers. Kennedy has been critical of FDA restrictions on peptides, saying he personally used one to help recover from an injury.
The agency said last month that it will consider permitting compounding pharmacies to sell seven different peptides that were previously restricted because of an earlier warning over safety concerns. It is convening an advisory committee meeting in July to consider the question.
But health experts caution that clinical trial evidence that would help physicians understand the risks and benefits of peptides is lacking.
Hims & Hers has been preparing for this moment since it purchased its Menlo Park manufacturing plant in February 2025, announcing it planned to explore the use of peptides for “preventive health, metabolic optimization, cognitive performance, recovery science, and biological resistances.” It says it also is now using the facility to research other products.
Dudum said the key to selling peptides, if authorized by the FDA, will be building trust with customers. Purchases now are taking place on the internet with no physician oversight and zero supply-chain transparency, he said.
“We believe patients should have access to this type of responsible path,” he said, adding that there will have to be “physician oversight” and “a supply chain that is bulletproof.”
The potential market is enormous. Many adults have watched their parents age “ungracefully” after years of unhealthy behavior, Dudum said, and they don’t like what they see.
With greater access to these kinds of health treatments, he said, people are “feeling like they want to get ahead. And they want to start feeling better.”
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