While Everyone Was Watching the Novo Drama, Hims Was Building a Holding Company
Andrew Dudum isn't running a telehealth startup anymore. The Eucalyptus acquisition is the clearest evidence yet.
Hey everyone, sorry for the brief silence lately. I’ve basically been circling Hims & Hers for around a month. There’s been a lot going on — Novo Nordisk suing them, the stock down ~60% from its 2024 highs, a DOJ referral — and I kept waiting for a clean angle. The Eucalyptus acquisition (announced February 19th, 2026) gave me one.
Because if you zoom out from the recent GLP-1 drama and look at what Hims has actually been doing for the past 18 months, a very different picture emerges. One that Wall Street, fixated on the compounding soap opera, seems to have largely missed.
The Acquisition Pattern Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s Hims’ M&A history since mid-2024, laid out in sequence:
Zava — a European telehealth platform operating in Germany, the UK, France, and Ireland. Gives Hims immediate regulatory relationships and licensed infrastructure across four European markets.
Livewell — a Canadian digital health and weight-loss platform. Establishes a DTC presence in Canada with existing subscribers and local operational know-how.
YourBio Health — a Boston-based company that pioneered capillary whole-blood sampling technology. This one’s easy to overlook, but it’s the most telling: it’s pure infrastructure, a diagnostics capability that plugs into any consumer health offering regardless of geography or therapeutic category.
Eucalyptus — a Sydney-based house of consumer health brands (Pilot, Juniper, Kin, Software) operating across Australia, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan. $450M+ ARR. Triple-digit growth. Nearly two million consultations facilitated.
Look at those four deals together. Each one adds a distinct layer: European market access, North American presence, diagnostic infrastructure, Asia-Pacific and expanded European footprint. This is not a company making opportunistic acquisitions. This is a deliberate platform assembly.
The company most worth comparing this to isn’t another telehealth player. It’s IAC.
The IAC Playbook, Applied to Consumer Health
If you’re not familiar: IAC is Barry Diller’s holding company — three decades of acquiring consumer-facing digital businesses (Match, Vimeo, Dotdash), building shared infrastructure underneath them, and eventually spinning them out as independent public companies. The model is built on one insight: certain capabilities (technology, distribution, capital allocation) are more valuable at the platform level, while consumer brands stay distinct and market-specific. You don’t merge everything into one brand. You run a portfolio.
Hims is running this playbook in consumer health, globally.
The asset Hims has spent eight years building isn’t the brand. It’s the infrastructure underneath it: the telehealth platform, pharmacy fulfillment, subscriber acquisition engine, personalization stack. That stuff is expensive and slow to build from scratch. But once you have it, plugging a new consumer health brand into the platform in a new market becomes dramatically cheaper than building one from the ground up.
Eucalyptus is proof that model works internationally. Founded in 2019, it built the same thesis — distinct local brands on top of shared operational infrastructure — across five markets simultaneously. When Hims acquires Eucalyptus, it isn’t buying $450M in ARR. It’s buying the proof of concept, plus the local regulatory expertise that would take years to replicate. Eucalyptus is the first Australian telehealth company accredited by the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards. That doesn’t get rebuilt overnight.
What the Portfolio Actually Looks Like
Post-close (expected mid-2026), Hims will operate a multi-brand consumer health portfolio across six markets:
US — the core: men’s and women’s health, mental health, weight loss, skincare. $2.35B revenue in 2025, 2.5M subscribers.
UK — Juniper (Eucalyptus’s biggest brand) plus Zava, consolidated in what became Eucalyptus’s single largest market by 2025.
Germany — Zava plus Eucalyptus means combined infrastructure in one of the hardest regulatory environments in digital health. The DiGAV framework for digital health apps alone is a Byzantine legal maze that takes years to navigate. Hims now has operators who already have.
Australia — category leadership in digital health, clean regulatory standing after Eucalyptus transitioned cleanly off compounded GLP-1s when Australia banned them in October 2024 — ahead of the US.
Canada — Livewell plus Eucalyptus, two-pillar DTC presence.
Japan — create a Juniper beachhead in the world’s third-largest healthcare market, notoriously underpenetrated by digital health and slowly opening up.
Different brands, different markets, different regulatory environments — with one single platform underneath. That is, by definition, a holding company structure.
The Deal Structure Reinforces the Thesis
Hims is paying ~$240M in cash at close on a $1.15B deal. The rest is deferred payments over 18 months plus earnouts through 2029, payable in cash or stock at Hims’ discretion.
This is textbook holding company deal structuring: minimize upfront capital, align seller incentives with integration success, preserve the balance sheet for the next acquisition. With $318M in Adjusted EBITDA in 2025, Hims services the deferrals from operating cash flow without stress.
The talent move is equally telling. Tim Doyle, Eucalyptus’s co-founder, pockets ~$160M and becomes SVP International, overseeing all non-US operations. That’s not an acqui-hire — the term for when you buy a company mostly to absorb its team. That’s installing a proven international operator at the platform level. There’s a meaningful difference.
Why the Market Is Missing This
Holding company theses are slow burns. IAC wasn’t legible as one until well into its second decade. Right now, Hims trades as a wounded telehealth startup — and the Novo lawsuit, DOJ referral, and SEC investigation are real overhangs that aren’t going away soon.
But there’s a growing mismatch between what the market is pricing and what the company is actually building. Dudum used the GLP-1 boom to generate the cash and scale needed to fund a different long-term vision. He’s now deploying it while the stock is cheap and international targets are willing to sell. Whether that was always the plan or just smart opportunism is unknowable — but the outcome looks the same either way.
Two risks are worth flagging, however.
The GLP-1 mirror problem: Juniper, Eucalyptus’s biggest revenue driver, is fundamentally a GLP-1 business. The diversification here is geographic and regulatory, not therapeutic. If Novo Nordisk eventually plays hardball internationally the way it has in the US, that thesis gets stressed.
Execution bandwidth: running a multi-brand, multi-market holding company while fighting a legal war at home demands management depth Hims hasn’t yet proven it has.
The Story Everyone's Missing
Dudum’s stated target is $6.5B in revenue and $1.3B in Adjusted EBITDA by 2030. That number was never achievable from the US alone. The acquisition cadence, the deal structures, the operator-as-executive moves — they all point toward a company building for an end state the market isn’t currently pricing.
The GLP-1 drama will resolve one way or another. What’s left when it does is either a wounded US telehealth player — or the foundation of a global consumer health conglomerate that assembled itself while everyone was looking the other way.
I believe the evidence, right now, points toward the latter.
Merge & Monitor covers M&A, technology/industry trends and corporate strategy in the healthcare space at mergeandmonitor.com. Nothing here is investment advice.