From Side Project to $70M Business: Inside the Growth of Ageless RX
Most startups begin with a market map or a gap in the spreadsheet. Ageless RX began with a question: What would you do with more healthy years?
For founder and CEO Anar Isman, aging wasn’t just a scientific challenge. It was the biggest source of preventable suffering humanity has come to accept. Cancer is a tragedy. Heart disease is a tragedy. But dying from aging? We shrug it off as natural.
That mindset—aging as inevitable—is exactly what Anar set out to challenge. And along the way, he built Ageless RX into a direct-to-consumer telemedicine platform that now generates more than $70 million in annual revenue.
The path from hedge fund analyst to longevity founder wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t even meant to be a business at first. But what’s striking in Anar’s story isn’t just the growth metrics. It’s how reframing a “given” like aging into a solvable problem unlocks not just new markets, but new movements.
Reframing the problem makes it solvable.
Talk about extending human life, and you’ll hit resistance: fears of overpopulation, ethical concerns, sci-fi dystopias. But ask someone if they’d like their dog to live longer, and you’ll get universal agreement. Ask about preserving fertility or delaying menopause, and the conversation changes from radical to obvious.
The insight: longevity isn’t a fringe obsession—it’s a matter of context. And by reframing the problem, Ageless RX tapped into a demand people didn’t know how to articulate.
Constraints shaped the business model.
Biotech breakthroughs in longevity might take decades. Clinical validation requires enormous resources. But a direct-to-consumer model could do something biotech couldn’t: build an audience today. By connecting consumers with clinicians open to prescribing evidence-based, off-label interventions, Ageless RX created a viable business model that doubled as a platform for cultural change.
COVID, which could have killed the idea, instead accelerated it. Overnight, telemedicine went from fringe to mainstream. Clinicians became more open-minded, regulators loosened, and customers became comfortable with digital-first healthcare.
Listening became the growth engine.
In the early days, Anar himself ran customer service. Not just to solve problems, but to ask questions. Where did you hear about us? What else are you looking for? What’s missing? Those conversations shaped the roadmap more than any spreadsheet.
One of those conversations even led to an early investor—proof that sometimes listening creates opportunities you couldn’t design if you tried.
Mission drives culture.
Ageless RX has grown to over 70 employees while raising only $6–7 million. That’s lean by startup standards. Anar still interviews every hire, making sure they understand the mission: aging isn’t just natural, it’s a solvable problem.
The lesson here isn’t just about longevity. It’s about how founders build conviction in controversial spaces. When the culture of a company is rooted in a mission bigger than the product, the product becomes a vessel—not the end state.
Why this matters
Longevity will remain polarizing. But whether you agree with the science or not, the business story matters. Ageless RX shows how reframing a “given” into a solvable problem can unlock new markets. It shows how regulation, timing, and consumer psychology shape what’s possible. And it shows how following curiosity—rather than chasing TAM—can produce not just a business, but a movement.
This isn’t just a story about extending life. It’s about extending imagination.