Anil Okay used to frequently describe his company’s approach as “asset-light.” The workspace perfectly mirrors this philosophy: Adalvo’s headquarters, which has been shaking up the pharmaceutical industry since 2018, is located in Rotkreuz, Switzerland; yet, the office remains simple and functional. Only the lettering at the entrance indicates that this is where a global player in the pharma industry is based.

It is no coincidence that the strings of this global network are pulled from the Swiss canton of Zug. For Okay, Switzerland is far more than just a prestigious address. Canton Zug alone is home to nearly 100 pharmaceutical companies, and industry giant Novartis operates a facility right next door to the Adalvo office. This dense ecosystem provides direct access to the highly qualified talent needed for Okays scientifically driven team. Alongside tax and regulatory incentives and robust patent protection, the computer engineer highly values the location’s international credibility. Most of the company’s contracts are drafted under Swiss law – a crucial factor for building trust. Furthermore, the geographical proximity to Zurich Airport serves as an ideal hub for ­management to efficiently coordinate the platform’s global operations.

Okay himself lives very close to the office, but his team is spread across the globe. With operations in over 90 countries and key hubs in Malta, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and India, the CEO is constantly traveling to partners, industry events or simply to the office hubs.

Anyone speaking with Okay quickly realizes that he sets the tempo. The B2B pharmaceutical company he founded develops complex generics, secures their intellectual property rights, and commercializes them through global partners. It is currently moving on the fast track: Last year alone, over 1.3 million patients were treated with Adalvo products. Another 60 new projects are in their R&D phase and will be launched ­within the next five years – Adalvo has the largest B2B sector pipeline for the next years and beyond.

“We didn’t have a heritage to rely on,” Okay recalls during his conversation with Forbes Swiss. “As a newcomer, you are not trusted in the early years. The competition looks back on 40 or 50 years of history. So, we had to work 50 times harder to catch our competitors.” Today, Adalvo is ranked among the top three in the sector – with the clear objective of taking over market leadership in the coming years.

The fact that Adalvo plays in this league is also thanks to a decision Okay made back in 2019: At that time, the market segment for GLP-1 receptor agonists and peptides was worth around $2 billion; by 2026, it is hovering around $60 billion.

“It was a very risky decision back in 2019,” Okay openly admits. “Of course, nobody could forecast what would happen. But we have seen that the big pharma pipelines were very rich with peptide developments, and we knew about their immense technical complexity. Most of our customers didn’t have these technology capabilities in-house, so it was pretty clear that they would need us.”

The boldness paid off: “Back in 2024, we became the first company to get a GLP-1 approved in a regulated market,” says Okay. Adalvo’s second GLP-1 asset is already commercialized in various countries today. To ensure sustained global supply, Okay backed up the en­tire value chain with a rigid double- and triple-sourcing strategy: “A product is as valuable as your capacity to deliver it. Even the big pharma originators have failed to supply the demand that they have seen in the market.“

For a long time, Adalvo was referred to as the “Airbnb of pharma” due to its asset-light, network-oriented approach. It is a comparison Okay finds charming, but one that only partially reflects today’s reality. “Our business has evolved tremendously from an asset-light model to an integrated platform. Today, we are more focused on orchestrating the outcomes predictably, at scale.”

Driving this rapid growth is a ­fundamental evolution in corporate philosophy. While Adalvo’s initial creed was “portfolio is king,” the motto today is “platform is king.” Anil Okay relies on a technology- and indication-agnostic approach. In practice, this means the company recognizes no rigid boundaries regarding targeted medical indications or galenic formulations – the spectrum ranges from classic oral solid products to topical dermatology treatments, all the way to highly complex, long-acting injectables.

To succeed in the highly competitive generics market, Adalvo focuses on three pillars: value-added medicines with direct benefits for the patient; highly complex peptides and biosimilars; and the fierce ambition to always target “first-to-file and first-to-market” on patent expirations. In this context, the asset-light structure serves as a strategic lever to react to market shifts and global challenges with significantly more flexibility than traditional pharma giants.

The deep technical expertise underscores this transformation: roughly 70% of the organization has a technical or scientific background – ranging from formulation scientists and development experts to CMC specialists. The portfolio now encompasses development expertise across more than 30 different technologies.

The next growth phase was reached in the last year, when the Swedish financial investor EQT acquired a strategic stake in Adalvo. “EQT enables us to accelerate our transition, and they give us of course the capital to scale. But above all, they are helping us with the governance to further professionalize our business and are providing strategic support to strengthen operational excellence,” says Okay. Over the last six months, the C-level was expanded internationally with new CFO and COO positions across different locations; a new Chief Legal Officer also joined recently. Additionally, management consultancies Kearney and Boston Consulting Group were brought on board to restructure and refresh operations in the supply chains.

Despite the rapid scaling, Okay works hard to keep the agility of a startup anchored in the company’s DNA. Red tape is an absolute red flag for him. “We cannot afford bureaucracy in Adalvo. If a decision needs to be made, it needs to be made fast. We have thick skin and all the power to take wrong turns as well. I believe that there is no perfect decision. But we want to be fast.”

To maintain flat hierarchies, he starts with himself: “If an employee writes me an email, I answer that email within the same day. If I change my cultural approach to the business because we’re a bigger structure ­today, I think it will have a big domino effect in the entire organization. It always starts from the top.”

The immense growth also demands a radical rethinking of ­internal structures. While departments like HR, IT, or legal are often viewed as administrative support functions in classic corporations, Okay believes they must be a genuine competitive edge. On the flip side are the two core functions where Anil Okay refuses to compromise: ope­rational excellence in the supply

chain and uncompromising customer satisfaction. In these areas, the founder demands absolute top ­performance, driven by a culture where every employee – from order management to the C-level – thinks and acts like an independent business owner.

As a computer engineer, Okay is also aggressively driving the implementation of artificial intelligence within the company. There are currently eleven small AI projects running in-house – ranging from more precise forecasting and analyzing demand peaks to predicting bioequivalence studies and automating responses to regulatory deficiency questions from authorities. “Our ambition is to be one of the first B2B companies to embed AI across multiple business functions,” says Okay.

The progress of these restructured processes is already visible in the hard key metrics: the Year-To-Date (YTD) On-Time In-Full (OTIF) delivery rate stood at 86% as of April 2026 – representing a five-percentage-point increase compared to 2025. The long-term target is to keep it above 90%. Just how complex this background logistics operation is was highlighted by the scale of 2025: Adalvo launched 30 different active ingredients (INNs) into 70 markets for 50 different customers.

When asked what keeps him going after eight intense years and reaching the top tier of the global market, the CEO answers without hesitation: being part of making affordable medicine available to everyone.

“I’m not selling a drug that costs $1 million for a patient who cannot afford it,” Okay says. “We are in an affordable medicine segment. Any medicine that we develop reaches a patient with a certain discount and a patient can afford it through the insurance system, or even in some cases out of pocket.”

Adalvo’s long-term legacy should therefore not just be measured in economic growth rates. Okay puts it this way: “If we succeed, it’s pretty clear: a platform that just didn’t develop products, but redefined how pharmaceutical generic medicines and how pharmaceutical value is created and delivered globally.” The next milestone on this journey has already been set: expanding into more than 100 countries and delivering care to over 100 million patients.

Fotos: Lukas Lienhard