Zachariah Reitano's heart stopped on a treadmill. A profile of him says it happened at the twelfth minute of a stress test, and the doctor had to call for help to revive him. The test came after a conversation he had put off for as long as he could.
When he was 17, he noticed something wrong that no teenager wants to explain to a parent. His father was a doctor who treated men's sexual health, and the profile says he delayed telling him. When he finally did, his father recognised it could signal something bigger. It was: an undiagnosed heart condition. A cardiac ablation followed. In February 2017 the symptoms returned, and the doctor said he would need the very medication whose side effect had sent him to his father in the first place.
When he was 17, he noticed something wrong that no teenager wants to explain to a parent.
His family could talk about anything at the dinner table, and his parents taught him that if something did not work, he should fix it or build something better. In high school he read a New York Times article about the lack of permanent rabbis in Cuba and went there for three months, six months before he was due to start at Columbia. At 22 he started his first company, Shout. The profile says that when his sister fell ill he cared for her for six months and refunded 80 percent of the money investors had put in.
What almost nobody sees behind Ro is that the company is an answer to luck. Reitano's father happened to be exactly the right kind of doctor. Most people are not that lucky. A reference work says he wanted to recreate his father, a physician who listens, in software, so anyone could have that first honest conversation.
He launched in October 2017 as Roman, with co-founders Saman Rahmanian and Rob Schutz, selling men's sexual health treatments online. General Catalyst wrote a $3.1 million seed cheque. In 2018 the name became Ro, and FirstMark led an $88 million Series A. In March 2021 a $500 million round valued it at $5 billion, a mark now more than five years old.
The cost came in public. A New York subway campaign was called too evocative, and a 2025 campaign with Serena Williams drew controversy. Even so, deals with Eli Lilly in December 2024 and Novo Nordisk in January 2026 followed.
The idea began with a night someone took a symptom seriously. Reitano has spent the years since trying to make that happen for everyone else.