The wearable buzzes at 7 a.m. with a recovery score. The blood-test dashboard refreshes overnight with new biomarkers. The supplement stack on the kitchen counter has been scanned and rated against a database of 160,000 products. The longevity clinic appointment is on the calendar for Tuesday.
Four data streams, one consumer. None of it runs through insurance.
This is the biohacking economy in operation—distributed across four subscription services that, between them, do everything the legacy system can’t, won’t, or doesn’t catch in time. I went to SXSW expecting to hear founders pitch products. What I found were founders explaining the new architecture of the industry they’re building.
Dr. Darshan Shah, founder of the longevity clinic chain Next Health, was moderating a panel called “Are We All Biohackers Now?” A few minutes in, he asked the room a question. “If half of you here are not wearing some sort of wearable and tracking your data,” he said, “that would be a surprise to me.” The hands went up across the ballroom—WHOOP bands, Apple Watches, Oura rings, the occasional Garmin. Then he put a slide on the screen. Four quadrants, four labels: Clinic, Access, Fuel, Coach. Four boxes—and four founders sitting on the panel, one in each box.
The Clinic was Next Health, Shah’s own chain of about 15 longevity centers, with monthly memberships ranging from $99 to $400. The Access was Function Health, the at-home blood-and-MRI platform that closed a $298 million Series B in November at a $2.5 billion valuation. The Fuel was SuppCo, the supplement-rating service from GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci. The Coach was WHOOP, the wearable company that hit a $10.1 billion valuation on a $575 million Series G earlier this year. Combined, the four had raised more than a billion dollars in venture capital. They weren’t comparing notes. They were assembling a healthcare system in public, vendor by vendor.
The legacy system, by way of comparison, ran $5.3 trillion in 2024—18% of GDP, per CMS— and the curve is bending in the wrong direction. Healthcare spending is growing faster than the economy. Per capita spending is at $15,474 a year. The four founders had decided not to wait.
“We decided we’re not going to wait for health insurance to govern us,” Shah told the room, “because that’s just never going to happen.” The line landed without pushback. Everyone on stage was building outside of insurance by design: memberships, subscriptions, out-of-pocket. The audience nodded.
The Four Pieces
The Clinic—Next Health—does what concierge medicine has always done, rebuilt for the age of the dashboard. Quarterly biomarker testing, IV therapy, peptides, executive physicals, and a doctor with time to look at your numbers. Shah trained as a surgeon, performed 20,000 procedures, ended up 50 pounds overweight on ten medications, and pivoted in 2016. Today, the clinic is the human in the loop—the part of the stack that still requires somebody with an MD to sign off.
The Access—Function Health—layer replaces the annual physical. $365 a year, more than a hundred biomarkers per panel, a polished dashboard, and an Ezra-powered $499 full-body MRI as an add-on. Function announced its Series B alongside the launch of a “Medical Intelligence Lab”—an explicit AI integration play that unifies labs, imaging, wearables, IoT data, and medical records under a single model.
Pranitha Patil, Function’s co-founder, told the room what that means for the doctor’s office. “Your doctor is no longer your first opinion,” she said. “You’re going to use AI. You’re getting an opinion from AI, and then you’re saying, here’s all my biomarkers, here’s what’s out of range.” She wasn’t predicting this. She was describing what Function’s members already do.
The Fuel—SuppCo—is Martocci’s piece, and the most easily overlooked. Americans spend more than $50 billion a year on supplements, an industry the FDA regulates only loosely and that, as Martocci’s data show, ships products that often don’t contain what the label says. SuppCo’s TESTED program buys top-selling supplements anonymously from DTC sites and tests whether the active ingredient is actually in the bottle. Martocci pulled six of the top-selling creatine gummies on Amazon, he told the room, and ran them. “Four out of six had zero or just trace amounts of creatine,” he said. “A total scam.” The platform indexes 160,000 products and rates 500-plus brands. The product is, in essence, a trust score for a category that doesn’t have one.
The Coach—WHOOP—is the daily layer. Heart-rate variability, sleep stages, recovery, and strain. In 2025, WHOOP launched Advanced Labs, an add-on subscription that pulls 65 biomarkers via Quest Diagnostics and pairs them with continuous wearable data. More than 350,000 existing members joined the waitlist before the product shipped. John Sullivan, WHOOP’s CMO, framed the structural change in language most marketers wouldn’t reach for. “We can collect all of this data and take control of our circumstances,” he said, “and now we’re going to our doctors, and we’re asking and expecting more of them than before. It’s interesting how that flipped from the trickle down to this upward pressure from the grassroots.”
The Integration Layer
Four boxes don’t run themselves. Someone has to integrate them. And in the seven months since Shah first sketched the loop, the contest for who plays that role has moved from theoretical to live.
In March, Perplexity launched Perplexity Health, an AI feature that connects directly to Apple Health and to electronic health records from more than 1.7 million care providers. It pulls in Fitbit, Ultrahuman, and Withings. Oura and Function are listed as “coming soon.” OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health earlier this year with Apple Health support. Microsoft launched Copilot Health as part of its Copilot service. Amazon introduced Health AI as an assistant for records, prescriptions, and questions. Apple’s own Health+, an AI-powered coaching subscription expected later this year, is the most aggressive bet—Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported the timeline is firm.
Whichever AI wins the integration layer owns the relationship with the patient—owns the moment when the WHOOP recovery score, the Function panel, the SuppCo stack, and the Next Health visit notes get pulled into one view and queried in plain English. The Function-Perplexity partnership, however casual the announcement may be, is the strongest signal yet that the four-vendor stack and the AI integration layer are converging.
Patil was already describing the result. “We’re never going back to a world where we don’t have access to this information,” she said. “Let that sink in.” She wasn’t selling. She was describing the new floor.
The Curve That Isn’t Bending
“For the first time in history right now,” Shah said. We’re actually seeing less chronic disease year over year.” It’s the kind of line that gets repeated on longevity panels until it sounds like consensus.
The CDC data says the opposite. In a 2025 analysis published in Preventing Chronic Disease, the agency reported that 76.4% of US adults—194 million people — had at least one chronic condition in 2023. Multiple chronic conditions affected 51.4%. Among adults ages 18 to 34, the demographic most likely to be paying $365 a year for Function or to be wearing a WHOOP, the prevalence of one or more chronic conditions rose from 52.5% in 2013 to 59.5% in 2023. Multiple chronic conditions in that group rose from 21.8 to 27.1%.
The disease curve isn’t bending. The new health system being assembled isn’t the consequence of a healthier America. It’s the consequence of the legacy system failing to catch disease early enough, in young enough people, with enough resolution to do anything useful with what it does catch.
WHOOP’s own April 2026 data drives the point home: among “highly active” populations using its Advanced Labs panel, 22% show signs of metabolic dysfunction and nearly 30% have underlying cardiometabolic risk factors, often without prior awareness.
The annual physical has run for a century on a simple bargain: you go in once a year, your doctor measures a couple of dozen markers, and you find out whether anything is broken yet. This four-vendor stack rebuilding that bargain in continuous time, with two orders of magnitude more data, on a subscription model, and in a parallel system that doesn’t need permission from your insurance carrier.
