When Mat Rezaei began approaching the age of 40, he noticed something odd: men were willing to whisper about hair loss, weight gain, challenges in the bedroom and testosterone loss, but few people were building a legitimate medical business to treat those issues.
At the time, for men, addressing their sexual health often meant trawling shady overseas websites and hoping the pills that arrived were real.
Rezaei, a Vancouver-based pharmacist, saw an opening to serve the roughly 50 percent of men 50 and over who have noticeable baldness and some degree of erectile dysfunction. He started working on a plan to merge what were then the relatively new areas of telemedicine and digital pharmacies into a new men’s health platform.
“The seed of the idea was combining a clinic, the best research, the lab results, as well as pharmacy technology, and come up with a solution for men,” he says. “Selfishly, I was thinking about myself.”
He partnered with entrepreneur Ramin Behzadi to figure out how to comply with all the byzantine medical licensing and privacy requirements of the different Canadian provinces, putting together a business model and technology platform that was ready to fly—just before COVID-19 hit.
Overnight, the pandemic ushered in a new frontier of digital medicine.
And from it, Upguys was catapulted into launch.
The Burnaby-based business was positioned to get an early jump on what has since ballooned into a surging men’s health and wellness industry, one that’s estimated to reach .
Upguys now has more than 50,000 active patients in six provinces, more than $25 million in annualized revenue, two years of profitability under its belt and a year-over-year growth rate of more than 50 percent.
Last year, the Globe and Mail ranked it second in the health-care category for fastest growing companies in Canada, with an impressive three-year revenue growth of 3,052 percent.
Upguys’ Burnaby headquarters sits in an unremarkable business park, wedged between an engineering consulting firm and a water purification business. Perhaps it is fittingly low-profile for a company built on discretion.
It also remains a lean operation, with around 50 employees. Upguys hasn’t had to go to the market to raise capital. Behzadi says it has a scalable model.
“So far our focus was to find and identify the eligible customers, bring them on board and cater to them,” he says. “Interestingly, there has been a huge growth factor coming from word of mouth from all these patients we’ve brought to the system.”
Online men’s health has become a crowded marketplace. In Canada, Phoenix, Rocky Health and Hims and Hers have a large online presence, while in the United States sites like BlueChew, Hims and Rex MD are visible major brands with large-scale marketing campaigns.
But unlike the many venture-backed telehealth startups that outsource prescribing and dispensing, Upguys owns two pharmacies, giving it control over margins, supply chain and compliance.
It has also pivoted into the fastest-growing segment of the market, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), which can help men address the fatigue, libido, muscle mass loss and weight gain issues that can arise as the body gradually loses testosterone after 40.
A key selling point of Upguys, compared to its competitors, is that there are no monthly fees or per-appointment charges to speak to a doctor or health-care practitioner.
“The way that our pricing model works is we do not charge for anything until the medication is prescribed, and [we] only charge for the medications,” said Rezaei. “I don’t know any other platform doing that.”
For patients, it also means physician visits covered by MSP using Upguys’ medical partners, and lab work paid for under the public health-care system. There are phone calls from medical staff and follow-up appointments in-between regular testing, all without fees.
It does not require a doctor’s referral, or for a patient to even have a family doctor. That’s key when many British Columbians, especially in rural areas, don’t even have a physician. In short, it’s not a one-and-done pill shipment service.
There’s also a high rate of denials for people wanting to join—upwards of 40 percent, says Rezaei. That’s because acceptance to testosterone therapy requires actual test results to show that it’s needed.
“says Rezaei.
“It is a high rate of denial for a reason: we are dealing with potential life-saving, life-changing medications and we need to make sure your body can tolerate that for the long-term.”
Upguys now runs offices in Vancouver and Toronto, with plans to open another space in Montreal later this year. But the headquarters will remain in Burnaby. “We live in B.C. and love B.C.,” says Rezaei.
The goals of the co-founders for 2026 are expanding brand awareness and scaling patient acquisition through broader marketing initiatives that explain how their health-care-first model is different from fly-by-night online operators. While their online campaigns have catchy slogans—with suggestive imagery of hands interlocked in passion—they lack the reach of competitors. Rezaei says adds that the company has historically relied on digital growth channels and product-led growth rather than on large traditional advertising campaigns.
Still, Upguys is already financially successful. For Rezaei, however, success also comes from normalizing men’s health for men in their 40s, like himself.
“The way I judge it is by the big difference we feel we are making in Canadian men’s lives,” he says. “I’m so disappointed in the [health] system that discourages testing for men in our case, but [also] for everyone. Why should we keep people in the dark?”
In an industry long driven by stigma, Upguys is betting that transparency is good medicine. And good business.
