The Pulse
Hims closed the Eucalyptus deal and became the largest consumer health platform in the world.
On June 2, Hims & Hers completed its acquisition of Eucalyptus, the parent of Juniper and Pilot, in a deal valued at up to $1.15 billion.
Eucalyptus runs above a $450M annual revenue run rate and posted triple-digit ARR growth in every quarter of 2025. The deal moves Hims into Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, and Germany at once.
The largest player in your category just added capital, markets, and reasons to buy or bury smaller brands. Scale is the strategy now, and retention is what makes scale affordable.
Eli Lilly's lawsuit is testing who actually practices medicine in telehealth.
A STAT report last week laid out the escalating fights over the corporate-practice-of-medicine question, with Eli Lilly suing Mochi Health for allegedly steering clinical decisions from the corporate side.
More than 30 states ban corporate practice of medicine, which is why most telehealth brands run a two-entity firewall: the company on one side, an independent physician group on the other. Pharma and legislators are now testing whether that firewall is real or cosmetic.
If your brand was built to move scripts rather than treat patients, the next 12 months get uncomfortable. Retention built on real outcomes doubles as legal insulation.
Q1 digital health funding hit $4B, and 12 companies took 59% of it.
Rock Health's Q1 2026 numbers show the strongest first quarter since the pandemic peak, with average deal size at $36.7M, the highest in more than four years.
But the capital is concentrating hard. Twelve companies captured nearly six of every ten dollars raised.
The same concentration is happening to patients. Capital, acquisition advantage, and demand are all pooling at the top, and the brands that survive the squeeze are the ones keeping the patients they already paid to acquire.
The Deep Dive
Hims did not outspend everyone. It made spending affordable.
A $1.15 billion acquisition reads like "big company buys smaller company." The more useful read is what makes a check that size writable in the first place.
It comes down to one ratio: LTV to CAC.
A strong LTV:CAC ratio is a license to outbid.
Most operators treat LTV:CAC as a profitability number. It is also a weapon.
A 3:1 ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost is the rough floor most people call healthy. Strong subscription brands run closer to 5:1.
That gap is the whole game. A brand sitting at 5:1 can pay roughly two-thirds more to acquire the same patient and still land at the 3:1 you consider safe.
So they bid higher than you on the same Meta and Google auctions, win the click, and pay it back over a longer window they can actually afford. Hims-scale brands carry CAC payback out to 8 to 10 months for exactly this reason.
You are not losing the auction because your creative is worse. You are losing it because their retention lets them pay more for the same click.
Retention math is non-linear, which is the part most operators miss.
Here is the lever almost nobody pulls correctly.
Moving monthly retention from 80% to 90% does not lift lifetime value by roughly 10%. It roughly doubles it.
Because LTV compounds across the patient's lifespan, a 10-point retention gain on a single cohort is worth more than three new flows stacked on a leaky base.
That is why "we need more flows" is usually the wrong instinct. More flows spread effort thin. One repaired drop-off compounds.
The habit behind the gap: a monthly diagnostic-and-fix loop.
The brands that widen the LTV:CAC gap on purpose do one boring thing every month.
Open the churn curve by tenure.
Find the single biggest month-over-month drop-off (say, month 3 to month 4).
Ship one targeted fix for that exact cohort.
Next month, refresh the curve and attack the new worst drop.
Never run a vague "improve retention" project. Run a "fix the current worst drop-off" project, then repeat it.
Each fix moves a cohort forward, lifts the curve, and feeds back into the LTV number that decides how much you can afford to bid next quarter.
The takeaway. You cannot match Hims on capital. You can match the mechanic that produced the capital. Pick the one retention point costing you the most right now, fix it this month, and let the math compound the way theirs already has.
Quick Takes
Convenience stopped being a moat the day everyone sold the same pill.
Hims sells Novo's oral Wegovy at $149. Amazon runs GLP-1 renewals through One Medical from $29. Ro pairs the medication with clinician support.
When the drug, the price, and the delivery speed all converge, the only thing left to compete on is the relationship after the first refill.
If a patient can get the identical molecule cheaper or faster elsewhere next month, your onboarding and your check-ins are the product now, not the prescription.
Klaviyo is not HIPAA compliant, and your ESP choice says whether you know it.
Klaviyo will not sign a BAA, and its acceptable-use policy bars telehealth use and storing health information outright. That is why telehealth brands keep getting moved off it, usually onto a platform like Customer.io that will sign one.
If you are running a GLP-1 or hormone brand on Klaviyo, this is not a tooling preference. It is compliance debt, and your lifecycle work will eventually surface it.
Better to find it in your own audit than in a regulator's.
One Thing to Try
Pull your churn curve by tenure, not by calendar date.
Line up retention from month 1 to month 2, month 2 to month 3, and so on, then find the single steepest drop.
That one transition is your entire retention project for June. Not a new welcome flow, not a winback rebuild, just the cohort falling through that specific gap.
Write down the most likely reason they leave at that exact point (side effects, plateau, price, or silence) and ship one fix that speaks to it.
We have seen a single well-placed fix on the worst drop-off beat a quarter of scattered flow-building, because retention compounds and scattered effort does not.
If retention is your biggest revenue leak, that’s what we fix. growthtrigger.xyz
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