Two of Britain’s best-known online weight-loss brands now sit inside one US-listed company, and while Numan and Voy carry on as independents, MPs are asking the NHS to make better use of private capacity.
The announcement that a well-known weight-loss brand had changed hands carried a Tokyo dateline.
On 2 June, Hims & Hers, a company headquartered in San Francisco and listed in New York, said it had completed its purchase of Eucalyptus, the Australian parent of Juniper, and described the deal as its formal entry into Japan.
For people in the UK, who take their prescriptions through Juniper, the practical meaning was less exotic. A women-focused weight-management brand now belonged to a US consolidator that had bought London’s ZAVA the previous summer.
We think that detail says more about weight loss jabs than most of the headline figures attached to them. The easy version of this story has home-grown telehealth start-ups riding a wave of demand. We believe the more useful question is who now owns the layer between the drugmakers and the patient, and what that layer is allowed to do once the NHS, the regulators and the manufacturers have each had their say.
The brands that changed hands
ZAVA was a London-based online doctor and pharmacy that prescribed and delivered weight-loss drugs in the UK, Germany, France and Ireland, and it reported around 1.3 million active users across those four markets.
Hims & Hers agreed to buy it in 2025, and by December, Hims & Hers UK was selling weight-loss programmes of its own, with Wegovy from £149 a month on a year’s subscription, Mounjaro and the over-the-counter orlistat product Orlos alongside it, and an intake assessment carried out by GMC-registered doctors.
“a significant deepening of our commitment to the UK” — David Meinertz, General Manager, International, Hims & Hers
The Eucalyptus deal was much larger, it was announced on the 19th of February, when it brought Juniper and the men’s health brand Pilot, more than 775,000 customers, and, on the company’s own figures, an annual revenue run-rate above $450 million.
Roughly 240 million was payable in cash at closing, and Australian trade depressions put the total at up to US$1.15 billion once deferred and earn-out payments are counted.
The company said the acquisition would give it line of sight to becoming a leading telehealth provider in the UK and Germany within two years.
We think the logic is plain enough.
A licensed UK pharmacy, a clinical team and an existing patient base take years to build and months to buy, and the UK GLP-1 weight loss business rewards whoever already holds them.
We believe that leaves Hims & Hers UK with a head start over rivals building from scratch, it also raises a question the start-up framing skips: how much of the British layer stays UK-owned if the consolidation continues?
Two independents with something to prove
Numan and Voy are the two sizeable independents we could verify, and both build their businesses on weight loss jabs made by two manufacturers.
Numan was founded in London in 2018 around men’s health and began prescribing GLP-1 medicines alongside an obesity programme in September 2023, and then in July 2025 it raised $57 million, made up of $30 million of equity led by Big Pi Ventures and $27 million of debt from HSBC Innovation Banking.
Its revenue more than doubled to $90 million in 2024, with weight loss now the majority of it, and the company says that year was its first year of profitability, so then Voy began life as the men’s health business MANUAL and publicly launched its weight-loss service in January 2024.
It took the Voy name for the whole group in 2025 and says it supports more than a million members across the UK, Germany and Brazil.
Neither company can advertise the medicines it sells by name, and that constraint has already produced rulings.
The ASA upheld a ruling against Menwell Ltd, which trades as Voy, over Instagram ads promoting Mounjaro, as part of wider work on prescription-only weight-loss medicines.
The ASA also ruled on ads from Juniper in July 2025, and then in December 2025 the MHRA published an advertising investigation into Voy, in which Menwell disagreed with the regulator’s assessment and said its advertisement promoted a weight-loss service.
These are marketing rulings, not findings about clinical care.
We think they show how narrow the lane is for any provider whose growth depends on attracting patients to drugs it cannot name.
A market built on a gap
The demand for weight loss jabs underneath all this is large and mostly private.
A UCL study published in January estimated that 1.6 million adults in Great Britain used weight-loss drugs between early 2024 and early 2025, with a further 3.3 million interested.
Four in five people taking them solely for weight loss were on tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro. IQVIA reports that Mounjaro was the most dispensed branded medicine in UK community pharmacies in the year to March 2026, at 16.3 million units, with private access accounted for 4 per cent of all medicines in the year to January 2026, up from 1.4 per cent two years earlier.
The NHS is the other half of the explanation.
NICE approved Mounjaro for obesity in December 2024, and GPs have been able to prescribe it since 23 June 2025, but only to people with a BMI of 40 or more and four of five named weight-related conditions.
Each NHS England cohort is phased in by BMI and condition count, and NICE has estimated that around 220,000 people will receive Mounjaro on the NHS by 2028, against 3.4 million eligible over the long term.
The Commons Health and Social Care Committee reported on 23 October that the plan reaches only about 6 per cent of eligible patients in its first three years.
It urged the Government to reassess the pace of the NHS Mounjaro rollout, including by making better use of digital providers and holding a summit on access.
“Current plans to rollout Mounjaro are unambitious” — Commons Health and Social Care Committee, October 2026
The committee described a two-tier system in which access depends on the ability to pay.
The Health Foundation’s analysis of 113,630 people who received a private GLP-1 prescription through Voy between November 2024 and October 2025 gives that phrase some texture.
People in the most deprived areas accessed 32 per cent fewer prescriptions than those in the least deprived, even though obesity is about twice as common there. The data comes from one provider, so it describes Voy’s patients and not the whole market.
Lilly raised Mounjaro’s UK price on 1st September 2025, by as much as 170 per cent in England depending on the dose.
That landed while the NHS Mounjaro rollout was still confined to its first cohort. Voy told the London Assembly Health Committee that the higher cost would make private access unaffordable for many.
The rulebook is tightening
Regulators have now spent the same period narrowing what online prescribing of weight loss jabs can do without checks, so for any online pharmacy weight loss service, GPhC guidance published in February 2025 means a questionnaire alone no longer suffices.
The prescriber must independently verify a patient’s weight, height or BMI, for example by video consultation or by GP records, after the GPhC’s inspection framework, published in January 2026, says pharmacies will fail inspection if they do not.
In April 2026 the regulator published a review of the inspection reports and concerns from January 2024 to December 2025, and it found that 77 pharmacies, around 5 per cent of those inspected, were providing weight-management medicines or services, and that 106 of 2,002 individual standards across them were marked as failed.
Online pharmacies accounted for 49 per cent of the concerns raised and community pharmacies for 26 per cent. Seventeen per cent of concerns related to advertising, including reports that pharmacies paid influencers to promote the drugs through discount codes.
We believe UK online weight loss providers now work under the tightest scrutiny the category has seen, and we think the cost of that scrutiny falls more lightly on larger groups than on independents.
After the prescription
Support is where the commercial case and the clinical case meet together.
In the private sector, wraparound care, meaning the dietary, lifestyle and psychological support that NHS pathways are expected to provide alongside the drug, is optional.
The London Assembly Health Committee heard from pharmacy leaders that it is not mandatory, and from a Homerton NHS specialist that patients buying privately had largely not engaged with the self-guided support some companies offer.
The committee concluded that providers cannot compel it but should strongly encourage wraparound care and explain its benefits when prescribing.
“you cannot just rely on a jab” — Dr Leyla Hannbeck, Chief Executive, Independent Pharmacies Association
Numan told the committee it supplies medicines within an integrated programme that includes a clinical team, a coach and a platform to help patients understand side effects, and Voy pairs the prescription with coaching.
The Oxford review published in The BMJ in January gives the argument weight, and across 37 studies and 9,341 adults, weight returned faster after stopping drugs than after ending behavioural programmes, by roughly 0.3 kg a month.
Support alongside medication produced a greater weight loss during treatment without slowing regain afterwards. We think that last finding matters most for these companies.
A subscription that pays for a drug each month sells something different from one that pays for habits that outlast it, and we do not yet know which of the two UK customers will pay for.
The product itself is also changing, as the MHRA authorised the Wegovy pill in June and Eli Lilly’s Foundayo (orforglipron) on 10 August, the first European approval for that tablet.
Each weight loss pill that UK patients can now be prescribed, lowering the barrier to starting treatment and possibly changing how weight loss jabs are sold, while leaving open the question of stopping.
For the GLP-1 telehealth UK sector, the GPhC and other regulators have already warned businesses against promoting pipeline products, including waiting lists, before they are authorised.
What we’d still like to ask
We have not spoken to any of the companies named here.
We would like to ask Hims & Hers UK that whether ZAVA and Juniper will retain separate clinical teams and pricing; Numan and Voy how exposed they are to manufacturer pricing, what the 2026 inspection framework has changed, and whether NHS contracts offer growth or risk turning them into price-takers.
We would also like to ask NHS England how it will choose between independent providers and the groups that now own the largest brands if it uses private capacity as the Mounjaro rollout expands.
Editorial Note
This piece draws on public interviews, court reporting and company records.
We welcome additional context, corrections or first-hand perspectives from anyone with relevant knowledge of the story. Reach our editorial team at [email protected].
Also read: Taavet Hinrikus and Wise’s Unfinished Business
Sources: Hims & Hers SEC filings and acquisition announcement; Reuters, PharmaPhorum and PR Newswire UK on its UK expansion; Startup Daily on Eucalyptus; Sifted and Numan on competitor funding; The Daily Brit, Voy and ASA on weight-loss advertising; London Assembly, UCL News, Pulse Today, Pharmacy Magazine and the Health Foundation on UK market trends; Commons Health and Social Care Committee report; University of Oxford and The BMJ on weight regain; Pharmaceutical Journal and GPhC on pharmacy regulation; and MHRA/GOV.UK on orforglipron authorisation.
