Meet The Sole Proprietor Of An AI Company

In the AI era, a lot has changed. The face of business will never be the same. And one of the phenomena that might seem most intriguing to people is the shrinking of the business organization by org chart reduction. In other words, in the age of AI, people are often redundant.

Now, some have raised the specter of an all-AI company, where all humans, from the CEO on down, are replaced by AI agents and bots. That’s doable, and it presents a chilling picture of an empty building with monitors and servers humming along, doing everything with no oversight, but there’s a slightly different model right now that’s very interesting, from a business standpoint, through a social lens, and in terms of American tax filing, etc.

That’s the concept of the one-person business, the “unicorn,” the one-man band.

Here, we have the example of Matthew Gallagher, who started and runs his company, Medvi, by himself, with only his brother assisting.

According to reporting by Erin Griffith at NYT, who calls the solo operation “super-efficient and a little bit lonely,” it only took around $20,000 and a couple of months to get Medvi running.

“Medvi got 300 customers in its first month,” Griffith writes. “In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.”

All of that, without human employees. Just Gallagher and his brother Elliot, dancing in the fray like a pair of one-armed paper hangers, to use an old and probably jettisoned idiom.

“Gallagher works on Medvi from his house basically anytime he’s not showering, sleeping or spending time with his two children, he said during a two-hour conversation,” Griffith reports. “He even made an A.I. clone of his voice to help manage his personal life, using it to call and schedule appointments so he would have more time to work.”

Apparently, it shakes out this way: Elliot handles a lot of the incoming customer service communications, while Matthew tinkers with ads and online infrastructure.

By his tweens, Gallagher was making things like a Weird Al Yankovic fan page online. He also has a track record of starting companies like CareValidate, which Griffith describes as “telehealth-in-a-box.”

Now, he supervises a company made of bots that has driven revenue of $70 million to $80 million, to date, and here is what I thought was Gallagher’s best, most targeted quote, on that:

“I mean, it’s crazy, right?” he said. “It’s crazy.”

One of the most interesting things about this, to me, is the idea that Gallagher’s shop is technically a sole proprietorship for the purposes of taxation, in the eyes of the IRS.

In the past, people have started companies that get around employee burdens by making all of the services contracted, and paying legions of “contractors” as 1099 workers. Then the IRS created a rubric, because employers were miscategorizing employees as contractors, in order to avoid providing benefits, withholding taxes, running payroll, etc.

Now, all of that can just go out the window. With AI doing the work, you don’t have worker’s comp, unemployment insurance, group benefits, or even a chair and a headset.

It’s just different.

You can structure your business so much more efficiently. A sole proprietor simply fills out a Schedule C at tax time, provides a list of business deductions, and whistles away. This is not tax advice – I’m not an accountant. It just speaks to a real revolution in how business works these days.

If you read the reporting on Medvi, a lot of what the AI is doing involves content creation: ads, customer-facing pages, mobile stuff, etc. Before AI, a lot of that was done by contractors, too. It’s now abundantly easy for AI agents to do these things, because it’s their world. They just copy from what they see humans have already done. But they make it unique to the business.

There’s a reason that a lot of what Matthew Gallagher does, according to his explanation of the company, is filter through “AI slop,” poorly targeted or low quality content. That’s the curation work in correctly using AI’s productivity.

I thought this was a pretty good story, a sort of canary in the coal mine, if you will, for the future of the automated business. In this case, there’s a guy in there – there are actually two – but the rest of it is being done by the ghost in the machine.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com