Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s
Hi HN, I’m Lloyd, one of two founders of RonanRx (https://ronanrx.com/). We are building a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company with software for prescribing, telehealth, compounding, manufacturing, and delivery. We are starting with GLP-1s and peptides. The path to RonanRx is fairly unconventional. During the pandemic, I built one of the largest mask manufacturing factories in the US. We could make a million masks in a day. We converted raw polypropylene pellets into finished pallets of masks. I had a background in software from my YC W10 company, so we took a software approach to building our factory. We used machine learning and computer vision to optimize production. We also vertically integrated almost everything. It worked. We built an efficient manufacturing operation and grew the business to 50 million dollars in revenue. Then people actually stopped caring about masks. Fair enough. Around the same time, I decided to try and lose the weight I had gained while building the factory. I ate nothing but chicken for six months. While this diet got some results, I plateaued. My doctor suggested tirzepatide, a GLP-1 medication. For me, losing weight was only the beginning. "Food noise" was gone. I showed less interest in other compulsive behavior. I stopped scrolling Instagram and quit biting my nails. But that was just the beginning. I was born with a congenital heart defect called aortic stenosis. My whole life doctors told me I'd need open heart surgery in my 40s (I am 45 now). After just 18 months using tirzepatide, my cardiologist’s began to think (and still thinks) my surgery could be pushed back until I am 70 or 80. This was all happening when I was deciding what to work on next. I wanted to keep working on manufacturing. I didn't want to build another product that could be replicated by a frontier model. Pharmaceutical manufacturing was the best combination of digital, physical, biological, and regulatory infrastructure I could find. The thing that bothered me was how disconnected all of the pieces were: telehealth, EHR, prescriptions, dispensing software, production, shipping. No one company has it all. GLP-1s come in a handful of predefined doses, but patients obviously aren't standardized: they respond differently, lose weight at different rates, experience different side effects, and may need very different doses. Compounding pharmacies can fill customized prescriptions, but they are not built like software companies. Workflows are manual, fragmented, and disconnected from the patient’s data. It's our goal to connect those pieces with RonanRx. Patients either come to us directly or are referred by a physician. Once a patient is in our system, we collect medical records, current meds, labs, and data from wearables. Our software follows the prescription through drug formulation, compounding, quality testing, and drug dispensing and distribution. The most interesting feature is the feedback loop. As the patient is undergoing treatment, their response becomes data that can be used by their doctor to modify the treatment. We keep the doctor in the feedback loop. We make money by selling drugs we manufacture. Because people can buy directly from us, their price is usually 3x-10x more affordable. We can do this because we start at the molecule and own the entire stack from manufacturing through prescribing, dispensing, and delivery, instead of paying a chain of middlemen at every step. We are beginning with GLP-1s and peptides since this was where I personally experienced the issue; however, we are more interested in the potential of patient-specific pharmaceutical manufacturing. We would love your feedback, especially if you have built pharmacy, manufacturing, clinical infrastructure, EHRs, or any other regulated software. There are a lot of assumptions in this model that should be tested.
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You know the answer was obvious and I didn’t think to submit this to ycombinator since the idea is basically you’re front running a compounding pharmacies. This is combining a compounding pharmacy and an MSO. At the same time, nothing is stopping you from hiring a fractional medical director and doctors alongside NP. I ran the numbers and 50k is is all you need to get a service agreement with a compounding pharmacy, back office tasks, incorporation, social media marketing policy to essentially drop ship your product as you use off the shelf products for charting and then begin expanding state coverage. The July Medicare glp1 coverage also makes this most opportune. Biggest barrier I thought was / is the credit card processing. You need to carry a certification for that. HIPAA not an issue, BAA with most orgs that offer a saas products. So damn. The glue isn’t really hard. Really didn’t think this would qualify as an ycombinator mvp. But here I am used To pitch decks promising exponential growth of subscription for cloud services. As for personalized peptides in general, are you going to be marketing non FDA approved ones? Or just stick with what’s already popular, generic wegovy, zepbound, etc. the market seems highly thin as a new MSO appears everyday using smartiq alongside med spas that offer more questionable inpatient services. While manufacturing controls supply chain / logistics, the external pressure from every compounding pharmacist scaling into peptides now makes me wonder the longevity abo it this. You can literally pop on subreddits and see the flavor of the month telemedicine practice offer teaser rates of $99 for 60mg/month tirezepatide. Oh and not forgetting the elephant in the room, gray market and china manufacturing which allows anyone with a telegram account to directly order whatever chemical name they read with no doctor oversight. It’s what, sub $1/mg now from the major vendors for tirezepatide?
I think most people on gray market GLPs will vary their dose, take tolerance breaks, etc to meet their personal weight loss goals, this stuff isn't that complicated. Where I think where the real technology opportunity is, is having a personalized endocrinologist for TRT/HRT. Bodybuilders have incredibly sophisticated trackers with hormone/ester PK models and the ability to adjust and tune your personal model based on bloodwork results. Most men's clinic, online or in person, are nowhere near as advanced. Prescribing for most of these guys is binary, or adjusting your dose is something that's done in response to some sort of a problem like hematocrit or gyno, rather than trying to keep levels in-line with whatever health goal you have. I don't think most guys really need the full TRT dose of 140 mg/week to feel energetic again, but depending on your fitness goals you can go well beyond that safely as long as you are paying close attention. There have been a couple of "high tech HRT" apps but I don't think they are really all that sophisticated, maybe daily dosing or includes a tasso device or whatever, but nothing afaik with multi-hormone PK modeling and testing feedback, so it could be right up your alley.
Hey, I love the idea and the fully integrated approach! The feedback loop sounds great, and overall far better than the pretty generic companies I've dealt with for GLP before. I've led building an EHR totally from scratch at one company and currently advising another as they build their EHR, both totally integrated approaches in industries where you usually have lots of disconnected care (adolescent serious mental illness and ABA/autism care). The state-by-state regulatory challenges are very real! If you want to chat, my email is in my profile!
Off by one letter compared to "Roman", which is a GLP prescriber farm, but you already knew this :). Hoping for a lawsuit to boost your fame? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_(company)
This is a fantastic idea and could do a lot of real good. Any plans to get your hands on a distribution agreement for small molecule or peptide oral formulations? I write a GLP1 newsletter and would love to learn more about what you’re building and how you see the landscape. Reta looks like it will make it out by early next year but I personally think they’ll squeeze in to end of this year — there will likely never be a undersupply of GLP1s again and I wonder if the customization loopholes will hold (Lilly will certainly fight Reta compounders harder than they have others), interested to hear your thoughts and chat.