What the business is
Direct-to-patient telehealth for men's and women's health: sexual health, hair growth, fertility, skin and weight
The bet
That obesity care belonged at the center of a telehealth platform because it drives the fertility and sexual-health conditions Ro already treats
Starting capital
More than $1B in venture funding; most recent $150M round led by ShawSpring Partners valuing Ro around $6.6B
How it started
Ro was founded in 2017 by Rob Schutz, Saman Rahmanian and Zachariah Reitano as a telehealth company focused on erectile dysfunction, later expanding into hair growth, fertility and skin health.
What happened
In 2021, before GLP-1s were a mainstream story, Ro began developing its weight-loss program and moved a significant percentage of its resources into the category, Reitano said at Axios' BFD event. The drugs became available on the platform in 2023. He argued the expansion was natural: conditions like obesity impact many categories Ro already covered, and by October 2024 the GLP-1 business was, he said, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the company.
What has to be true
The GLP-1 bet was made in 2021, before the category was obvious, and it reshaped what a men's-health telehealth company became.
Resource allocation at that scale — a significant percentage of company resources into one new category — is a textbook bet-the-company decision.
The category logic (obesity driving adjacent conditions Ro already treated) shows a repeatable way to judge platform expansions.
Reitano's case for staying private adds the capital-markets dimension to the same decision window.
What can be applied
When a new drug category maps onto several existing product lines, over-investing early beats waiting: the bet compounds across the whole catalog rather than adding one product.
Aftermath
As of 2024-10-22: Ro remains private, with Reitano dodging IPO questions and saying the company is focused on product quality for patients. GLP-1s are self-reportedly one of its fastest-growing sectors. TechCrunch noted venture-backed companies are staying private longer per PitchBook data, with the secondaries market growing as a liquidity route — context that favors Ro's stance.
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