Every day, pharmaceutical representatives visit doctors’ offices to promote medicines, in a ritual that has been repeated for decades and costs the pharmaceutical industry billions a year. THE memed saw this routine as an opportunity that allowed healthtech to achieve, after 13 years, the long-awaited breakeven and start generating profit. And the best: without burdening the end of the chain.
“We found the problem. The pharmaceutical industry was large in size, but had an obvious pain: it spent a lot of money on medical advertising, which was done personally, with propagandists, in an inefficient way. This happened because this type of advertising is very restricted, you have to be sure that the doctor is a doctor. We realized that the memed it was the perfect place, because doctors log into the platform with a digital certificate. That is, the memed is one of the only places where the industry talks to doctors en masse, in a safe way”, says Rodolfo Chung, CEO of memed.
Today, according to him, there are more than 150 thousand professionals registered on the platform. Rodolfo estimates that there are around 500 thousand doctors in Brazil, which means that the memed still have relevant growth potential for its base.
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From cash burn to profit
Healthtech has existed for 15 years. Founded by doctors – the brothers Ricardo and Rafael Moraes, together with Marcel Ribeiro – the memed came up with the proposal to digitize medical prescriptions in Brazil and offer the platform free of charge to doctors, patients and pharmacies. The logic followed the school of Silicon Valley technology companies: first build value, then figure out how to monetize. For more than a decade, the memed burned cash betting on this thesis.
The company went through difficult times. In January 2023, it fired around 11% of its staff, in a move that its own employees described as a preventive cut in the face of an adverse macroeconomic environment and pressure from investors to reduce spending.
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In 2021, the DNA Capital had taken control of the memedpurchasing the stake of previous investors, such as Redpoint, Monashees e Qualcomm Ventures. After the restructuring carried out in early 2023, the company brought Rodolfo Chung as CEO in June, with the mission of making the business sustainable.
The executive arrived with a product and growth resume. He made a career in Ambevpassed through LTS Investments – fund linked to Jorge Paulo Lemann – and was CEO of Zé Delivery when the company became a unicorn. “I made Zé Delivery grow by spending zero on marketing,” he says. This background shaped his vision for memed.
In front of memedRodolfo helped the company finally find its calling: helping the pharmaceutical industry communicate with the doctor. “That’s where we can monetize the platform, through banners, retail media. I will never need to charge the doctor, the patient or the pharmacies, because my revenue comes from the side that has the most resources: the pharmaceutical companies”, highlights the CEO.
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Next unicorn?
In June 2025, the company reached breakeven. Today it operates profitably and plans to close 2026 with R$100 million in revenue.
The growth potential is significant because the market is still in its infancy. Only 15% of prescriptions in Brazil are made digitally, according to Rodolfo. “In the USA, 25% of the medical promotion budget is digital. In Brazil it is 1%, that is, nothing”, says Chung. “The potential we have for growth is in this order of magnitude.”
To scale, the memed wants to double the doctor base, from 150 thousand to 300 thousand by 2029, in addition to expanding the platform’s functionalities. The next frontier is treatment monitoring.
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The CEO highlights that 55% of patients with chronic problems do not adhere correctly to treatment. In other words, they don’t take the right medications at the right frequency, for example. “The doctor’s responsibility should not be limited to prescribing. We want him to be able to monitor whether the patient bought the medicine, whether he took the exam, whether he is following the therapy”, he explains.
With breakeven achieved, Rodolfo now focuses on the growth of healthtech. “I have an agreement with investors that we are still at the beginning of the thesis, so I don’t need to generate dividends. I can reinvest. In one year, I want to double revenue, number of people, prescriptions. It’s not slow and steady growth, it’s an inflection point.”
The horizon he sees is to become a unicorn within four or five years, with time until an eventual IPO. In a reference to old-time video games, he jokes that the company has gone up a level: “We left the lava world, burning cash, we faced the breakeven boss. Now we move on to bigger challenges.”
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