The MEDVi Files

Inside the lawsuits connecting MEDVi, OpenLoop, and the affiliate marketing engine behind the GLP-1 boom

Oh what twisted GLP-1 webs we weave. The story of MEDVi has been circulating widely over the past week, driven by a mix of court filings, media coverage, and a steady drip of new details about the two-person telehealth company the New York Times described as a $1.8 billion operation. At first glance, it reads like a familiar digital health curiosity: rapid growth, an unconventional operating model, and a cluster of lawsuits that seem to follow in the wake of success. But taken together, those filings begin to reveal something more structured beneath the surface—a coordinated system spanning affiliate marketing, prescribing infrastructure, and pharmacy fulfillment.

When we first mentioned MEDVi back in January, it appeared as one of many nearly identical storefronts in the OpenLoop litigation, just a name among a list of brands sharing templates, infrastructure, and a common backend. It looked interchangeable. The recent filings suggest otherwise. Across multiple cases, MEDVi shows up not just as a participant, but as a central node connecting traffic generation, conversion, and downstream clinical and fulfillment processes.

What emerges is less a story about a single company and more a map of how a GLP-1 telehealth businesses scale: outsourced acquisition, high-velocity conversion, and tight coupling to an existing prescribing and compounding pipeline. And in building that map, the cases collectively surface a larger battleground: digital health’s unresolved and increasingly fraught relationship with consumer internet economics.

The Litigation Map

There are currently four federal lawsuits and one state court case involving MEDVi. They span three distinct legal theories and together they sketch the outline of a customer acquisition machine that grew very fast and very aggressively.

The Text Messages

The first shot came almost a year ago, well before the NYT profile and most of the digital health world had heard the name. Jona Siuksta filed a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) complaint in the Southern District of Florida alleging MEDVi sent unsolicited text messages to his phone (which was registered on the National Do Not Call Registry) advertising semaglutide eligibility. The complaint brought class action claims under both the federal TCPA and Florida’s state-level equivalent, the FTSA.

MEDVi was served on May 20, 2025. It didn’t respond. Strangely, Siuksta chose to walk away, filing a voluntary dismissal without prejudice rather than move for default judgment, suggesting perhaps settlement.

Six months later, the pattern repeated. Kymberly Starling filed a TCPA complaint in the Central District of California alleging she received unsolicited texts in August advertising semaglutides, followed by a MEDVi email with an LA area code callback number. The complaint’s distinctive contribution is its “John Doe” theory: Starling alleges MEDVi hired an unidentified third-party entity to amass phone numbers from unknown sources and blast texts to Do Not Call-registered numbers.

This time, MEDVi showed up and filed an answer, admitting it “markets and sells semaglutides to consumers” but denies sending unlawful texts or knowing who “John Doe” is.

The Lost Third TCPA Case

While Siuksta and Starling are currently the two canonical TCPA cases, deep experts of MEDVi lore accept Wilson v. Medvidi a worthy apocryphal entry. Filed in the Northern District of California in May 2025, Wilson is a class action against Medvidi, a separate ADHD-medication telehealth company with an unfortunately similar name. The plaintiff alleges unsolicited texts advertising GLP-1 medications, but it seems obvious from the texts that Wilson sued the wrong company entirely. The hyperlinks embedded in the plaintiff's own text message exhibits either resolve to medvi.org, redirect to a bulk SMS service called ClickSend, or are dead. The case is a reminder that MEDVi's spam operation was prolific enough to generate litigation that lands on someone else's doorstep.

The Emails

The third federal case, Dallas James v. Medvi, filed just in March (again in the Central District of California), looks at first glance like TCPA case number three. But it’s actually an email case under California Business & Professions Code § 17529.5, the state's anti-spam statute.

The complaint alleges MEDVi pays affiliate marketers to send mass spam emails using falsified headers, spoofed domains, and deceptive subject lines. Exhibit A is the actual email: sent from “Medvi” at 147936572@kcjvjydhd.us, with the subject line rendered in monospace Unicode characters to evade spam filters. When you added in that the physical address listed in the email was “123 Wellness Blvd, Healthtown, USA”, you start to get a sense of just how unsophisticated the sophistication was. The complaint states the email also falsely claims the recipient opted in via MEDVi’s website.

The legal theory is that MEDVi deliberately outsources its customer acquisition to third-party affiliate marketers, pays them per lead or per conversion, and reaps the benefits of large-scale unlawful spamming while maintaining plausible deniability.

The Contractor

Fortunately perhaps for Dallas, another state-level case against MEDVi seems to corroborate that theory. In December, The Offer v. MEDVi landed in Los Angeles Superior Court with a breach of contract action between the telehealth storefront and one of its own affiliate marketing partners. The filings paint the most detailed picture yet of how the customer acquisition machine actually worked.

The Offer Inc. is a Canadian corporation that operates as that exact type of service affiliate marketing service, the kind of company that uses online personalities, custom content, and paid media to drive traffic to a client’s website in exchange for a per-acquisition fee. In September 2024, the two companies signed an Insertion Order (which apparently is ad-tech jargon for the contract specifying that The Offer would send customers and MEDVi would pay for each one who converted).

It worked. According to The Offer’s filings, the arrangement drove “tens of millions of dollars in revenues to Medvi per month.” MEDVi was required to maintain tracking pixels and custom landing pages so The Offer could measure the traffic it was sending. And for roughly a year, MEDVi paid every invoice on time.

Then things got complicated. In August 2025, Remedy Meds (one of the other consumer-facing storefronts named in the OpenLoop case, the surprise acquirer of 30 Madison last fall, and a direct MEDVi competitor also using OpenLoop) acquired The Offer’s assets and business and promoted Matthew Dobson (who filed the complaint) to be their Chief Marketing Officer. MEDVi says it didn't know until the deal was public. By then, The Offer had been collecting substantial data about MEDVi's operations for nearly a year: traffic patterns, conversion rates, the economics of customer acquisition. All of it now belonged to a rival.

Two invoices followed: $845,205 on September 1, $216,330 on September 8. MEDVi didn't pay either one, and by September 5 had pulled The Offer's tracking pixels from its sites entirely. The associated texting chain included in the complaint is truly something:

This is where Matthew Gallagher enters the record. His sworn declaration in opposition to The Offer's motion to attach MEDVi's assets makes a remarkable admission: MEDVi "has the funds to pay the due balance but chooses not to." He's telling the court (while fighting an asset freeze) that MEDVi is solvent and simply refusing to pay.

The court was unpersuaded. In early March, the judge granted right to attach orders against both MEDVi and Gallagher personally for the full amount owed. Gallagher's personal exposure stems from a guaranty clause: as sole owner, he guaranteed all of MEDVi's payment obligations under the agreement.

There’s some irony here. The Dallas James email spam complaint alleges MEDVi outsources customer acquisition to affiliate marketers and then hides behind plausible deniability when those affiliates break the law. This case shows us the other side of that transaction: MEDVi's largest known affiliate contractor, suing for over a million dollars in unpaid commissions, with a paper trail showing exactly how the per-lead economics worked. The spam emails that James received and the affiliate payments that The Offer invoiced are, in all likelihood, two views of the same pipeline. Even as MEDVi was generating the kind of revenue that would land it in the New York Times, the relationships powering that growth were already falling apart.

The Snake Oil

We covered Day v. OpenLoop Health in detail in January’s “Healthcare at Internet Scale”, where the RICO complaint alleged OpenLoop and its affiliated pharmacy Triad Rx sold pharmacologically worthless compounded oral tirzepatide through a network of consumer-facing storefronts, MEDVi among them.

What’s changed (at least for me) in that initial complaint upon re-reading is that MEDVi is disproportionally featured in the complaint compared to the other storefronts. The other twelve names appear briefly in a list, but MEDVi gets paragraphs:

• The plaintiff purchased oral tirzepatide through MEDVi specifically

• MEDVi is the only storefront whose corporate history the complaint traces (incorporated in Delaware, April 2024)

• It’s the only one whose litigation history is cited (the Siuksta non-appearance).

• All the fake doctors, Instagram ads, and advertising shown and mentioned… that’s all MEDVi

The Day complaint describes MEDVi as having "no publicly available information regarding its ownership or management" and lists it alongside those dozen other storefronts as if they were interchangeable. But stack that for a second against everything the other filings reveal:

• The Starling answer, filed by legitimate legal counsel, admits MEDVi "markets and sells semaglutides to consumers."

• The Dallas James complaint describes a sophisticated affiliate marketing apparatus with tracking parameters, campaign IDs, and per-lead payment structures.

• The NY Times article, despite its lack of scrutiny into basically anything about the company, does adequately show that MEDVi was an independent, revenue-generating operation at a huge scale: $1.8 billion, with real staff (albeit two people).

• The Offer case has sworn testimony by Matthew Gallagher about the company structure and solvency.

Put it all together and MEDVi stops looking like one of many shell company puppets and starts looking like the biggest player in the room, which makes its absence as a defendant all the more conspicuous.

OpenLoop's own motion to dismiss makes the same point, if unintentionally. The brief explicitly states: "The Complaint does not assert that OpenLoop owns MEDVi or any other consumer-facing website." In fact, OpenLoop does everything they can to throw MEDVi under the bus and distance themselves from any responsibility:

1. They reframe MEDVi as a non-party marketing layer: a separate website that controls the consumer-facing experience, the messaging, and the initial patient interaction.

2. They narrow OpenLoop’s role down to infrastructure: software, administrative support, and a network that connects patients to clinicians (and nothing more)

3. They then emphasize that clinical decisions sit with independent providers, exercising their own judgment after reviewing patient-submitted information.

4. Fulfillment runs through licensed pharmacies, again operating under their own regulatory framework.

The Family Business

Regardless of MEDVi’s role as an independent front door, the problem for OpenLoop is who owns what:

• Jon Lensing owns OpenLoop Health Inc., the technology company.

• His father, Dale Lensing, is an officer of OpenLoop Healthcare Partners, P.C., the medical group whose clinicians write the prescriptions.

• Triad Rx, the pharmacy that compounds and ships the oral tirzepatide, is alleged in the complaint to be owned by the Lensings, which seems corroborated by Alabama, North Carolina, Idaho, and Washington state documents that point to OpenLoop names (John Lensing, Jill Ferry) and addresses.

• Link Pharmacy, sued by Novo Nordisk in the Northern District of Texas for marketing non-FDA approved compounded semaglutide, filed a disclosure statement listing OpenLoop Health Inc. as a financially interested party - connected through LT Pharmacy Holdco 1, LT Pharmacy Holdco 2, and LT Pharmacy Buyer LLC. The same holding company structure that owns Triad Rx also owns Link Pharmacy, meaning Novo's litigation campaign against compounders is directly hitting OpenLoop's own pharmacy infrastructure.

• The OpenLoop website’s Careers page commingles both technical platform roles and clinical roles, undercutting any claimed separation between the technology platform and the clinical pipeline

• OpenLoop's own marketing guide (as shown in the plaintiff’s exhibits) offers prospective partners the full infrastructure to launch a telehealth storefront: suggested landing-page layouts, step-by-step marketing strategies, a prescribing pipeline, pharmacy fulfillment, and payment routing. The storefronts themselves "do not maintain any inventory, pharmacy licensure, or clinical infrastructure", so the product has to already exist, "manufactured, labeled, and ready for distribution by the OpenLoop-Triad network."

Thus, the plaintiff is showing (fairly convincingly) that the "back-end infrastructure provider," the prescribing entity, and the pharmacy are all in the same family, selling a business-in-a-box with oral tirzepatide ready on formulary to anyone who wants to be a telehealth brand. If the complaint's allegations hold up, OpenLoop isn't building the library where the story is being told. It wrote the story, printed the books, and stocked the shelves, and just lets someone else put their name on the door.

Consumer Complaint or Proxy War?

Why is this not just a plain consumer fraud case targeting MEDVi a la the spam texts and fake emails litigation? Read the defense’s framing closely and you hear something else underneath the legal arguments: the implicit suggestion that this plaintiff isn’t really a wronged consumer at all.