Original article from San Francisco Standard
Can’t spend $1 million a year on longevity but still want to live forever? Enter the “affordable” on-demand life-extension consultant.
Late last winter, an assortment of bright orange trading cards, each featuring a realistic sketch of a founder or venture capitalist’s face, started flooding the social media feed of longevity stans. Sean Kelly, managing partner of the Founder Fund, posted a humblebrag to X: “Ultimate health flex in 2024 is having early access to Superpower.”
The cards — think baseball cards but for biohackers — showcased each subject’s name, title, age, biological age, and an array of stats that ranged from testosterone levels to vitamin D counts. For most, the gap between “physical age” and “biological age” was the real health flex.
“People were ‘what is this? Can I join?’ when I posted mine,” said Luba Yudasina, the 30-year-old founder of Paloma, a matchmaking startup. Her biological age clocked in at an enviable 23.15, longevity-speak for 23 years, one month, and five days.
The graphic was courtesy of Superpower, one of the new class of longevity “concierges” that track clients’ health via biomarker blood panels, AI-driven data analysis, and tailored vitamin or peptide cocktails. As with other healthcare concierges, these services fulfill similar tasks to that of general practitioners, but with VIP white glove treatment and personalized service — no starting with drug A and working your way down the list, à la the proletariat.
In the longevity space, the on-demand consultants can answer whether rapamycin might be a good idea, whether you should get an MRI (or not), and if there’s any real science behind the latest magic pill. “If I have questions, I text my Superpower doctor,” Yudasina said. “They respond really quickly.”
Over the past few years, as “longevity science” has crept from the wellness fringe into the medical mainstream, so has interest in life-extending treatments and protocols. “Don’t Die” guru Bryan Johnson famously spends $2 million a year to keep his cells as baby fresh as possible — enlisting everything from blood therapeutic plasma exchanges to stem cell infusions — and luxury longevity clinics like Viavi in London and Continuum in New York have cropped up to provide access to a buffet of tests, treatments, and concierge care for around $28,000 to $130,000 a year.
But for the 99% who can’t drop six figures on anti-aging treatments, there’s a growing number of longevity concierge startups. Their goal: democratize access to high-end wellness solutions with less eye-watering price tags.
Yudasina’s been a beta member of Superpower since summer 2023. Her $499 annual fee covers a blood panel for 65 biomarkers, an hour-long clinician consult, a personalized health protocol, and on-demand concierge care, plus access to discounted additional tests — which include microplastic analysis and a $1,000 cancer screening test — plus member events. “It’s not cheap,” she said. “But for what you get, it’s worth it.”
‘We’re giving our doctors superpowers’
“We’ve created a language model that scales the brains of elite high-end medical care,” said Jacob Peters, cofounder of Superpower, a longevity concierge startup that’s raised $4 million from investors Tyler Winklevoss, Balaji Srinivasan, and Long Journey Ventures, among others. “With our AI, we’re basically giving our doctors superpowers so that they can deliver the highest quality care possible to as many people as possible.”
For Peters, the work is personal. In 2021, the cofounder of Launch House, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed tech incubator, was diagnosed with myocarditis and an autoimmune disorder, announcing on X that he’d been building his company from his hospital bed while “fighting to keep two of my organs.”
“I put the pursuit of success ahead of my health,” Peters told The Standard. Even as he suffered from agonizing cramps, bloody stools, and painful joints, he’d avoided doctors, as he was so focused on scaling Launch House.
Once discharged in September 2021, he dove headlong into the world of longevity health care, dropping $200,000 on cutting-edge tests and treatments from top-shelf concierge doctors. “If I’d had this data, I wouldn’t have ended up in a hospital bed,” Peters said. “My disease was preventable.”
But not everyone has the wherewithal — or wallet — to learn from Peters’ missteps, so he pivoted from incubating other startups to starting up one of his own. “If your health is a 1,000-piece puzzle, your annual physical looks at 14 puzzle pieces,” he said. “We look at hundreds of pieces, and we make that as frictionless as ordering an Uber.”
Superpower’s grand vision? To be a portal where the health-obsessed can gorge on heavy metal urine tests and gut microbiome analyses, identify genetic predispositions, and purchase discounted nutritional supplements, all vetted by in-house research scientists.
“We’re not just building a software platform as much as we’re trying to catalyze a movement,” Peters said. “Good health is becoming a status symbol.” The social media baseball cards were just one manifestation of that new status, he said. Peters claims that 135,000 people are now on Superpower’s waiting list.
For Jesse Levey, the founder of Longevity Health, a Lafayette-based concierge that launched this spring, the pivot from fintech to longevity came out of a need to find answers. The main one being how to live longer doing exactly what he does today. “I want to be able to ski in my 80s. I want to hike in my 90s,” he said. But, he added, “a lot of the longevity advice was conflicting.”
Levey consulted his general practitioner, but they “were really dismissive of longevity protocols,” he said. He wanted more guidance: Should he try stem cells or PRP? Rapamycin or metformin? What would be best for his genetic makeup? But the cost of quality concierge care focused on life extension was astronomical, he said. Dr. Peter Attia, longevity coach to the likes of Elon Musk and Gwyneth Paltrow, is rumored to charge around $160,000 a year for his services.
In March, Levey launched Longevity Health, a virtual clinic that provides longevity care at a more accessible price point. It offers an $899 per month “billionaire bundle,” which includes blood panels, a DEXA scan, V02 max testing, gut testing, a sleep study, a continuous glucose monitor, a private Slack channel for communicating with a nutritionist and physician team, and weekly case reviews. “It’s modeled after what billionaires are doing … but obviously is not Bryan Johnson’s $2 million a year,” Levey said. “Living to 150 isn’t the goal of our program.”
Levey’s average client is in their 30s to 50s, and they find him via LinkedIn and word of mouth, he said. “They’re motivated individuals, often triggered by personal health experiences or concerns,” he said. “But the missing link is personalization.”
Eventually, he plans to offer a $10 per month AI-powered longevity coach (read: chatbot) to make it more accessible to the masses. “It wouldn’t include all the testing, but it would provide insight,” he said. “What we’ve launched first is like the Tesla Roadster model, but I believe we can get down to the Model 3 in cost.”
‘Saturate the tech-insider community’
Other longevity concierge companies include Mito Health, a YCombinator startup, which starts at $399 for a basic blood panel, and Andreessen Horowitz-backed Function Health, which has the superstar chops of Dr. Mark Hyman, the former longevity adviser to the Clintons, and a $53 million Series A with the tagline “what could cost you $15,000 is $499.”
Unsurprisingly, most longevity concierge startups are using the Bay Area as a proving ground — partly because the user base can afford the monthly fees, but also because there’s a shift in how founders and techies view their health. So long to the Soylent dudes, hello to the Blueprint Bros.
“Our plan is to saturate the San Francisco tech-insider community,” said Peters. “You can’t give your best if you don’t feel amazing. Building a company is a Herculean task, but you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your health to get the outcomes you want in life.”
Anna Nazarova, the 28-year-old cofounder of Protocols Hero, a longevity lifestyle aggregator, is fully aware of the elitist roots of life-extension science. “It’s a myth that longevity is affordable to normal people,” she said. “Access to high-quality products — even just food — requires an upper- or middle-class budget.”
To address this, she’s designed Brogevity, currently in beta, an AI personalized longevity program that scans YouTube and podcasts for relevant content and breaks it down into actionable, digestible chunks, delivered via an AI-generated newsletter.
To some extent, these concierges are just slick, AI-pilled packaging for what’s essentially a comprehensive set of blood tests paired with an on-demand doctor. There’s no reason you couldn’t get the same blood work yourself at Quest Labs. You could also access “insights” like those that Longevity Health’s Levey offers yourself, with a helping hand from ChatGPT. But time is money when you’re a busy founder, plus there’s that nagging feeling of what if you didn’t quite get it all right.
For Yudasina, being pricked and prodded by Superpower every six months for the past year and a half has given her peace of mind. She wants to stay as healthy as possible, for as long as possible, avoiding even the kinds of back and joint pains that are afflicting her thirty-something friends.
“I could probably get the same bloodwork done with Sutter Health, but that wouldn’t give me an insight into trends or an explanation of what needs attention,” she said. “I pay a premium for this dashboard, and that’s where the value lies.”
