A company built by one founder, with no outside capital, is projected to bring in $1.8 billion in 2026. That is roughly 4 percent of the combined yearly revenue pace reported for OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the companies that build AI models. Yet many people judge AI by what those model companies spend, and overlook what others are already building on top of them.
The company is Medvi, a telehealth business that Matthew Gallagher launched in two months with about $20,000 and AI tools. For a time, his brother was its only other employee. Even so, Medvi generated $401 million in sales in 2025, its first full year in business.
Gallagher used AI tools to write code, generate marketing copy, build the website, handle customer service and track performance. That work once took several early hires before a company could move quickly. Handing it to AI made the launch cheaper and the path from idea to revenue shorter.
That shorter path produced a business big enough to measure against the model companies themselves. In March 2026, OpenAI’s revenue was reported to be running at a yearly pace of more than $25 billion, and Anthropic’s at $19 billion. Those figures alone do not settle whether AI is sustainable, but a single company reaching that share of their combined pace changes the discussion.
Medvi is one company in a much larger group: every startup, software company and developer building on top of OpenAI and Anthropic. For that group, the models mean faster launches, lower staffing needs and lower upfront costs. Some of its businesses would have been much harder to build under the old cost structure. Once businesses like these produce serious commercial value, the economics of the model companies stop being the whole story.
A product creates value mainly for the company selling it. A platform creates value for many businesses, because others can build on it. A product becomes a platform when the economy built on top of it creates more value than the company beneath it. For AI, the larger question is how much revenue, speed and capability other companies are creating through their software connections to these systems.
