When I Saw This $1.15bn Acquisition, My First Reaction Wasn't Excitement

My First Reaction Was a Feeling I Couldn't Quite Name

On February 19, 2026, Hims & Hers announced the acquisition of Australian digital health company Eucalyptus for up to $1.15 billion.

When I saw the news, the first thing that flashed through my mind wasn't "congratulations" or "brilliant strategic move." It was a few seconds of quiet.

Not because I was surprised. Because I recognised the shape of the story.

Eucalyptus's flagship brand is Pilot — a men's telehealth platform focused on erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and weight management. Yes, Eucalyptus also operates

• Juniper (women's weight management)
• Kin (fertility and reproductive health)
• Software (skincare).

But in the dominant market narrative, Eucalyptus has long been known as "the Australian Hims" — and Hims itself is a company that built its empire on men's ED and hair loss.

Two telehealth giants, both originating in men's health, completed their merger with a $1.15 billion cross-border deal. In that moment, I thought about the deal values in women's health.

I wasn't angry. It was something more familiar — the particular clarity that accumulates after years of working in women's health, watching capital flow with a quiet, practised eye.

But I caught myself quickly. Stop sitting in the feeling. Follow the money.

I Calmed Down and Started Tracking the Capital

Eucalyptus was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Sydney. Its fundraising trajectory reads like a masterclass in capital efficiency:

• 2020: Series A, AUD $8m.
• 2021: Series B, $30m.
• 2022: Series C, $60m.
• 2023: Extension round, AUD $50m, valuation reaching $560m.
• November 2025: $190m round, valuation surging to $1.37bn — officially a unicorn. In under six years.
• Just three months later, Hims & Hers announced its acquisition at up to $1.15 billion.

Eucalyptus's annualised revenue (ARR) now exceeds $450m, with triple-digit year-over-year growth still intact.

From $560m to $1.37bn to a $1.15bn acquisition price — this is a capital story worth reading carefully.

The deal structure itself deserves attention. Hims & Hers pays only approximately $240m cash at close, with the remainder structured as deferred payments over 18 months and performance-linked earnouts extending to early 2029.

In the shadow of GLP-1 regulatory turbulence and ongoing Novo Nordisk litigation, this structure is a pragmatic choice — protecting balance sheet flexibility without walking away from a strategic imperative.

CEO Andrew Dudum's logic is clear: domestic US growth has hit a ceiling. International expansion is the next engine. Eucalyptus hands Hims & Hers a ready-made key to Australia, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan — not just revenue, but proven operational infrastructure in five markets simultaneously.

Eucalyptus's Rise: 天时地利人和 — The Ancient Chinese Triad of Conditions for Success

In Chinese strategic thinking, there is a concept that has guided military commanders, merchants, and statesmen for over two millennia:

天时地利人和 (Tiān shí dì lì rén hé) — The right time, the right place, and the right people working in harmony

It is the idea that truly transformational success rarely comes from a single brilliant move. It emerges when three forces align simultaneously:

• the moment in history is right (天时, Tiān shí),
• the structural conditions and environment are right (地利, Dì lì)
• the human factors — team, culture, execution — are right (人和, Rén hé)

When all three converge, outcomes can compound in ways that look, in retrospect, almost inevitable.

Eucalyptus's rise is one of the clearest illustrations of this principle I've seen in the digital health space. Let me break it down.

天时 (Tiān shí) — The Right Moment in History: A Pandemic Rewrote Consumer Behaviour

Eucalyptus completed its Series A in 2020, landing precisely at the inflection point of the global telehealth explosion. COVID-19 forced hundreds of millions of people to accept "remote consultation" in a matter of weeks — breaking the hardest barrier in healthcare consumer behaviour: inertia.

It didn't just bring users. It fundamentally restructured how regulators, insurers, patients, and investors think about digital medicine.

Eucalyptus was positioned to catch that wave from day one.

地利 (Dì lì) — The Right Structural Position: Men's Health Pain Points, Plus the Hims Benchmark

Pilot launched into a category defined by stigma: erectile dysfunction, hair loss, weight — the health concerns men carry quietly and rarely discuss with a GP. Traditional healthcare channels had inadvertently built a wall of shame around these topics. Telehealth had the structural advantage of anonymity.

At the same time, Hims & Hers had already gone public in the US, providing an investable benchmark and a validated business model. When a comparable comps set exists, investor conviction is far easier to build.

Eucalyptus had the right market conditions, the right structural moat, and a publicly traded proof point to point to.

人和 (Rén hé) — The Right People in Harmony: Early Globalisation and GLP-1 Foresight

Most digital health companies default to the same playbook: dominate home market first, then consider international expansion.

Eucalyptus took a different path — building in the UK and Germany from an early stage , accumulating hard-won cross-market operational experience and regulatory fluency across multiple jurisdictions. This is precisely the human and organisational asset that makes this acquisition strategically valuable far beyond its revenue multiple.

And then came GLP-1. From 2023, semaglutide-class weight loss drugs ignited a global consumer health revolution. Eucalyptus's Juniper — its women's weight management brand — had the positioning, the clinical infrastructure, and the brand trust to move quickly.

The GLP-1 market is projected to grow from $15B in 2024 to over $150B by 2035, with international penetration still below 3%. First-mover advantage in this category compounds exponentially.

People Say the Digital Health Era Is Over. I Disagree — and the China Data Proves It.

Since the telehealth valuation bubble burst in 2021, the narrative of "digital health is dead" has never fully gone away. But the fundamentals are telling a different story.

I want to introduce a dimension that Western analysis consistently underweights: China . As someone who has spent years observing China's digital health ecosystem through both an investment lens and a cultural one, the numbers from this market are striking.

Alibaba Health reported FY2025 revenue of RMB 30.6bn, up 13.2% year-on-year, with net profit of RMB 1.43bn — up 62.2% and breaking the billion-yuan threshold for the first time.

China's digital healthcare user base reached 418 million by December 2024, representing 37.7% of total Chinese internet users. Tmall Health is actively expanding into women's health, the silver economy, and nutritional supplements through its "New Product Growth Programme."

China's consumer health industry is projected to reach RMB 16 trillion by 2030.

Digital health isn't dead. It's going through the maturation every durable industry must pass through — from narrative-driven to fundamentals-driven .

From Hims & Hers' continued expansion to Eucalyptus's hypergrowth to Alibaba Health's steady profitability, the market has given its verdict:

digital health is not a speculative bubble. It is a structural transformation of how healthcare is consumed — playing out simultaneously across the US, Australia, Europe, Asia including China.

The geography is different. The underlying demand is the same.

But We Also Need to Name the Privilege Eucalyptus Benefited From

After giving Eucalyptus full credit for what it built, I want to say something more honest.

Eucalyptus was founded by four men. Its first product served men. Its first category — erectile dysfunction and hair loss — is one that, in investor conversations, has never been treated as a "niche" concern. It has always been framed as "suppressed demand" or "under-served mainstream."

This is not a criticism of Eucalyptus. It is an observation about the private market funding environment in which it operated.

Eucalyptus's success is real. But it also unfolded in a structurally more accommodating environment for male founders building products for male health concerns. In a venture ecosystem where the majority of cheque-writers are men, "men's health pain points" naturally generate faster resonance, require less explanation, and face a lower bar of proof to be taken seriously.

Female founders building around female bodies — menstruation, fertility, menopause, pelvic health — have historically faced more data validation requirements, more scepticism about market size, and a higher "burden of being believed."

This is not complaint. It is ecosystem fact. And naming it accurately is the first step toward changing it.

The encouraging development: Eucalyptus did expand its portfolio to include Juniper and Kin, bringing genuine women's health infrastructure into its platform. And "Hers" is not a footnote in the Hims & Hers strategy — it is a structural pillar.

Following this acquisition, the telehealth coverage for women's health globally will meaningfully expand. That deserves to be acknowledged.

Health Is a Global Conversation — And Globalisation Is Not Optional

Let's take a step back and look at the larger frame.

Whether it's men's health or women's health — whether the market is the US, Australia, China, or Germany — health has become one of the defining consumer themes of the 21st century.

Digital health is not fading. It is needed more than ever: ageing populations, chronic disease burden, unequal distribution of medical resources. These are global problems. Their solutions must be global too.

The Hims & Hers acquisition of Eucalyptus is, at its core, a US-headquartered telehealth platform using a single cross-border deal to acquire validated operational capability in five international markets simultaneously . This isn't a financial investment in a growth asset. It's a capability acquisition — one that took Eucalyptus six years to build and Hims & Hers one transaction to obtain.

And Eucalyptus's own trajectory illustrates a rule that bears repeating: when you invest in international infrastructure before your home market is saturated, you accumulate not just revenue but barriers to entry . The advantage compounds before the competition even realises the game has changed.

You cannot afford to think locally . For any digital health platform with genuine ambitions, globalisation is not a strategic option — it is an inevitability.

For founders, investors, or practitioners working in this space — wherever you are based — this deal is worth reading carefully. It is not just a transaction. It is a live case study in what a winning digital health globalisation playbook looks like.

And for those of us working in women's health: capital ultimately follows demand. The demand for women's health has never been in question. The market is beginning to listen. We are catching up — and this time, we are building the infrastructure to make sure the catch-up sticks.