The back story behind the first “$1.8 Billion” dollar “AI Company”

AI isn’t the only thing behind Medvi

On Thursday, The New York Times published a thing

and it went viral, declared as a victory for AI:

Yuchen Jin@Yuchenj_UW

One person, 2 months, $20K bootstrap, no VC, vibe-coded software. $1.8B company. We’re about to see more such 1-person billion-dollar companies. AI is compressing 5 years of building, launching, scaling a team, and fundraising into a solo high-agency CEO + 2 months.

4:35 PM · Apr 2, 2026 · 37.1K Views

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71 Replies · 44 Reposts · 515 Likes

But there’s a lot more to be said that was only scarcely touched on in the article.

Like this

And this

Rob Freund@RobertFreundLaw

Medvi was sued in a class action last month for violating California's anti-spam law. "MEDVi’s affiliate marketers send spam use falsified header information, spoofed domains and nonsensical sending addresses to evade spam filters. They also use false and deceptive subject

4:18 AM · Apr 5, 2026 · 10.1K Views

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2 Replies · 12 Reposts · 84 Likes

And this brutal, compelling dissection on YouTube

which it itself built on and extending an earlier (May 2025) dissection from Futurism that The New York Times should have read and addressed in far more detail:

A friend of mine who has been tracking this for a while had sees Medvi as “a fraud-layer on top of also-scammy-but-possibly-less-illegal platforms”, speculating that “If there is any money there, they will be sued by all their suppliers and vendors, because I’m sure they’re in violation of every agreement in terms of compliance efforts, safe data handling, etc.” (The friend also is doubtful of the revenue reports, asking “why would this be the only thing they’re telling the truth about?”)

All in all, glorifying Medvi was not The New York Times’ finest hour.

And hardly the poster child AI boosters should be hoping for. Instead, as the YouTube video author, Voidzilla, notes, if anything Medvi is a warning sign — for how AI can be abused.