Superpower raises $30M Series A to build an AI doctor in everyone's pocket

longer constraint. And we're building a super team to reinvent healthcare. Okay. Crazy. Give us a backstory. Uh how does it start for the consumer? Get last. No, I was gonna say let's go back a little bit. Start with backtory. 2023 you had a had a rough year. Uh you want to you want to share that? Oh yeah.

How that kind of catalyzed superpower? Rewinding the clock. It was 2022 actually. And uh that year I almost lost my life to reverse healthcare incentives and a system that doesn't necessarily help people be proactive and take control. So that was when I was building my last company.

else is diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. It's one called Crohn's, which those listen might be might be familiar with. 50 million Americans have autoimmune disease, two-thirds of which are undiagnosed.

And in my case, it led me to being hospitalized for close to four months, had multiple surgeries, lost part of my stomach, got stuck with a multi-million dollar bill. And you realize really quickly that, you know, the thing that health systems are designed to do from a business model perspective is make the most money.

So that's build pharmaceuticals or surgery versus getting at the root cause of like what's actually driving complex diseases in my case. So I was really, you know, more seen as a way for them to make a l lucrative uh billing, you know, cash flow versus versus actually getting to the root of of what was ailing me.

Talk about uh yeah, talk about how that led into uh superpower. I remember we had a I think we had lunch uh just after that period. I remember you were like, it felt like you were almost still in a days because you just like almost, you know, spent a year almost dying.

Um, but you knew from, you know, basically right at that moment kind of what you wanted to do. Yeah. It actually comes back to Twitter.

So, I posted about my hospital story and it went really, it went mega viral and as a result, I got connected to a handful of these like high-end concierge doctors who basically work with the tech billionaire class. Yeah. And they charge like 50 to 100K for their clinics.

And what you do when you're a patient at these practices is they test everything in your body, leave no stones unturned.

They'll like sit down with you on a whiteboard for four hours, connect the dots across every little thing in your health, uh, and then pair you with a full-time team to basically put your healthcare on on autopilot.

So, if you're fortunate enough to be in a financial position or in the know to be a patient one of these practices, you're basically never going to die of chronic disease. You're going to look like, you know, the memes of Bezos and Zuck that are super yolked.

You know, I know the doctors that probably do their peptide regimens. Uh, you think it's just peptides? You use peptides or is there secret juice? Jiu-jitsu. I I can't reveal too much. Um, but you realize really quickly that there's a gap between healthcare for the best and healthcare for the rest.

And obviously being a technologist and a brand builder, it just became very obvious that there was a big opportunity here to to democratize once I went on my own healing journey. M um do you think that founders should um like I feel like there's this balance between founders need to be performant.

You need to have high energy. You need to be able to oftent times go 20 meetings in a single day, whatever that looks like. You basically have the life, you know, the intensity in many ways of a professional athlete.

uh where what do you think the sweet spot is for founders in terms of uh or investors in terms of caring about their health but not letting it sort of like take over their entire life?

I I went through a period in in um college when I had a bit more time where it felt like 60% of my brain power was just like going to like lifting and eating and things like that and obviously it's not sustainable if you're trying to run a company and things like that.

So I'm curious what you think the kind of like sweet spot is in terms of, you know, wanting to be high performance, wanting to be healthy, wanting to not be like, you know, age, you know, accelerating your aging, things like that. It's it's quite a quandry, right? Because we obviously pride ourselves on being a team.

We even joke that our office is the world's healthiest office yet, you know, sometimes we still have to put in the hours and we have the engineering team up on the floor for the evening.

Um but uh yeah it really I think is an opportunity to usher in a new paradigm shift where we can put health at the forefront of the conversation.

You know I think we're actually about to have our first board meeting here uh this upcoming quarter and we plan to have some statistics on the health of our founders and our team in our in our board.

So we want to kind of set the lead the vanguard in what it what it looks like to to have health be like a tracked foundation just as you would you know your amplitude or your stripe data or all the metrics that matter for business. Yeah.

I was joking John and I uh gave a sort of humorous talk in Miami last year and we were talking about the case for like VC platform teams should just be like basically like doping you know like helping helping their portfolios just like what's your creatine you know how much are you working out what's your eight sleep score?

Looks like we need to add a little bit of tea in the mix here. Um, uh, what I think someone's going to launch a fund with this thesis where, you know, how maybe it'll be me. I don't know. Oh, and ironically, no, I don't think it's I I think it's a very real, you know, I I joked about this, but I think it's very real.

A lot of venture funds, especially if you're niche, you need some type of edge. Some people are like, "Oh, we're going to help you with sales. We'll help you with recruiting. We'll help you with your next round. " But just saying like, "We're going to help you. We'll help you with your one rep max.

Help you with your one max. " Exactly. thousand pound ventures. Um talk about uh talk about the the sort of um opportunity in AI specifically for superpower. You guys have started with uh biomarkers. How do you plan to leverage that to kind of unlock value uh on the data side and and all that?

So in the limit something that we deeply believe is everyone will have a healthcare super app on their phone and today the consumer health experience is deeply fragmented. You know consumers have to run around town to a bunch of different places and it's all disconnected.

Uh and the front door to health is you know something like chatbt or or Google or WebMD. But the problem with those platforms is they don't really know much about you and they definitely don't know everything about medicine.

Uh so what that sort of culminates in with with what we're building is what we think will basically be an AI doctor in everyone's pocket.

So we're kind of aggregating all of your medical records and health data, making it super easy to test your whole body and combining that with all the world's medical knowledge which does not necessarily exist in foundation models today.

Each foundation model is sort of trained on a select aspect of the the healthcare and medical literature universe. So there's a lot of creative ways to get a full picture on what's actually happening at the edge of science and and medicine.

When you put all this together, you have a recipe for a really unique company that we think one day will be something that a large majority of Americans own. And healthcare is is ripe and it's it's you know demanding of better consumer experience.

We've seen the consumer experience being re reinvented for you know every other aspect of our lives but healthcare is sort of the last domino domino to fall and we want to be basically the predominant company to to to bring this to to the market. How do you think about the interaction with LabCorp?

Uh it's a$18 billion company kind of you know stocks up and stocks down like kind of you know up 60% over the last five years obviously. um when you're doing lab testing like you kind of got to build on top of like the railroad that's already there. Um but how does that relationship evolve over time?

Yeah, labs are a super commoditized business. What's really happening and what's exciting to pay attention to is innovation in testing. So today it's actually kind of a cumbersome process. You have to have like a nurse come to your house. You have to go to a lab corp. They test your blood.

They send it off to another facility. It takes like, you know, eight or nine tubes to get a full enough panel and picture and then a week to come back. uh and there's probably like a dozen or so friction points there. So something like Theronos over the next few probably is not that far off.

And thankfully we're building at the application layer. So we have to be best in the world at building a trustworthy brand uh lowcost customer acquisition and a really amazing AI doctor product. And what what is your takeaway from the Theronos story?

Do you think that there's any like sort of misread on that historical uh like anecdote? Like we've we we've done like a deep dive and we were like there's more nuance. The issue is don't apply build fast and break things to consumer health. Yep.

Healthcare doesn't move at the speed of code is all there's a certain reverence you have to have for the human body as as a healthcare founder which makes the you know the the Zuck adage a bit tougher to apply. Yeah. What about the what about interactions with the FDA?

Uh I'm I assume that there's oversight around you know you get the lab markers done with lab corp or quest or something and then uh you're interpreting that and you're at the application layer doing AI data analysis all sorts of good stuff but at a certain point um actually making a recommendation about someone's health is probably regulated.

What does that look like and how will it evolve over time? Yeah. Yes. So, we're not quite in a world yet where AI and the algorithm can make a medical diagnosis or a recommendation. So, the system that we've architected in the paradigm that we're in just as an industry is basically AI with human in the loop.

So, anytime it gets to a point where a human has to intervene, we do plug in a doctor on that help you with that which helps us avoid any sort of messy FDA regulation. That makes sense.

Got Uh do you see a world in the future where the average company maybe outside of our tech bubble is like giving budget to employees specifically for preventative health, right?

Like sort of health insurance broadly is a pretty standard benefit, but um feels like preventative health is like you know potentially the next place that employers uh want to invest. Undoubtedly.

So one of the challenges in healthcare today is because the average American is transitioning jobs every two to three years and healthcare is tethered to your employer that means it's just a game of bag passing where the insurers don't really have an incentive to underwrite anything that's a bit more long-term or preventative or optimization focused like getting your testosterone checked checked out.

So in that world uh the insurers don't necessarily want you to get access to to things like superpower and have it have it be covered.

So, that's where employers will ultimately step in and potentially start to cover these types of things as supplemental benefits because they're going to drive clear employee retention uh acquisition in a market where it's only more competitive to get the best to get the best people.

What's uh what's an underrated supplement right now? It feels like uh you know, magnesium. Magnesium's hot. Takes six different types of magnesium. I take I also take six different types of magnes. You take six different types. I'm only on four. Those are rookie numbers. Um, what do you think the next kind of magnesium?

I I I've been surprised to see creatine in the timeline so much just because it seems like something it's Lindy. People have been taking it forever. Methylene Blue is in the timeline. Pretty methylene Blue. I'm I'm uh I'm 50/50 on but but what's your take, Jacob? I got one for you. Oral BPC57. I've been on oral BPC57.

This is the Wolverine peptide tip. It's from the Wolverine protocol. Yeah. Okay. Five. Um, no, this is this is what it's sort of is it semi like there there's interesting thing right now where there's like substances that are banned by various like sports organizations and leagues that as a CEO you can just take, right?

So like if a pro alete is like wanting to take something but can't because it's very effective but it's so effective it's maybe made illegal. Uh the world of sports, why not? If you're a CEO or a capital allocator, why not get on some PPC 157? Um, in Silicon Valley, performance-enhancing drugs are encouraged.

Yep, that's true. Yeah, it's an interesting time right now.

I mean it feels like these sort of like uh psychedelics like you know have long been a part of Silicon Valley culture but I think that um performance drugs not just exogenous testosterone but I think they will just become more and more popular where it's going to move beyond okay founders are on you know maybe they're on caffeine or nicotine um and creatine but on onto like really optimizing you know peptides in the way that you know you mentioned it people like you know Bezos are are probably doing to some degree better sleep.

Yeah, makes makes a ton of sense. Um but uh anyways, great to have you on, Jacob. Very very exciting. Congratulations. Anything else? Anything you want to plug before uh before we end, gentlemen?

I uh I appreciate the the time, but maybe before I leave, I'll give uh you both a quick sneak preview of our AI doctor product that uh we're launching very shortly. So Jordy, if you have any questions for the algorithm, maybe how to boost that testosterone. There we go. What's the Yeah.

How much BPC57 can I take before I explode? What is the LD50 of BPC 157? Cuz I'm going to the max. I want to look exactly like Wolverine. John has John has the highest natural tea levels of I think. Uh yeah, but imagine how much higher they could be if I was on the Wolverine stack.

That's if John if John 2x his tea, it would be potentially world record. So uh I mean obviously foundation model plugged into that but then also built on top of your own data so you can query your own lab results and get customized uh recommendations. Is that the idea? Exactly.

So as soon as it as soon as it like makes a firm recommendation kicks you over to to a doctor before it starts violating FDA rules basically. Exactly.

The way to think about it is the world's best doctors will spend hours and hours with you on whiteboards connecting all the dots in your health, but that computation doesn't scale at a at a higher price point. So, we're democratizing it. That's awesome. Love to see it. Love it. Awesome, Jacob.

Congrats to you and the whole team. Cheers. Well, speaking of AI, we're uh having Logan Kilpatrick from Google on. There we go. Talk about excited for this one. A lot of different stuff. Logan has been on a tear. He has great poster. Um, and as soon as he he is here, we will bring him into the studio.

But maybe in the meantime, we'll tell you about Bezel. Go to getbzzle. com. Your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you. Seriously, any watch. And I mean, while we're also on it, we did not get a chance to talk about. Go toleep. com/tbpn. Uh, get a pod4 Ultra.

It has a 5-year warranty for 30- night risk-free trial, free returns, and free shipping. and in and we will go back to the show now. Let's bring Logan into the