The Longevity Land Grab

PART 1: The longevity gold rush

The longevity space is having a moment. Personalities like Bryan Johnson are breaking into the mainstream. Startups like Function Health are normalizing $500/year preventative blood tests. And VCs are piling into the category; last year, investment in longevity tech doubled to $8.5 billion.

But lately we’ve noticed a trend that’s pretty unusual for a buzzy Silicon Valley category:

Longevity’s early winners are launching brand-new offerings through M&A and partnerships.

Function Health, the blood testing platform, added an MRI offering by acquiring Ezra. Oura Ring integrated CGM data by partnering with Dexcom. Fountain Life, the concierge longevity clinic, moved into hospitality by announcing a resort chain with the real estate developer SBE. Superpower, Prenuvo, and InsideTracker have also made aggressive M&A and partnership plays.

In our opinion, there are two reasons behind all this inorganic growth.

Reason #1 is: The entire promise of the longevity space hinges on multi-dimensional health data.

Here’s the ethos of the longevity space in short: “Modern-day healthcare is flawed. Consumer health data is scattered, and doctors work by treating specific sicknesses reactively. The longevity movement takes a different approach. Consumers can use blood tests, gut tests, wearables, body scans, and other tools to holistically assess their health -> receive personalized feedback -> proactively make lifestyle changes, take supplements, get treatments, etc -> and improve their health outcomes.”

But that process works best if you own multiple data points. Let’s say you’re experiencing fatigue. A Function blood panel might show low iron. Your treatment regimen is to take iron pills. But add a Whoop, Levels CGM and Prenuvo MRI. You might see poor sleep quality, glucose crashes, and visceral fat. The treatment regimen changes to a full protocol across diet, sleep, exercise and supplements. That’s a major upgrade in diagnosis and outcome – thanks to connecting more datapoints. That’s the first reason longevity startups are aggressively expanding into new offerings.

Reason #2 is: Now is the time to build in longevity, and it’s a land grab.

In 2025, longevity startups have a clear “why now.”

On the demand front, consumers increasingly understand the subpar state of US healthcare. The US spends more per-capita on healthcare than any other country on Earth, but ranks last among high-income countries in life expectancy, access and preventable deaths. Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and more chronic diseases are on the rise. And, especially post-pandemic, people have less faith in traditional healthcare to fix things. Public trust in the US healthcare system plummeted from 72% in 2020 to 40% in 2024. Meanwhile, health & wellness is at peak zeitgeist. Bryan Johnson went on “The Kardashians” to talk about biohacking. Better-for-you snacks are dominating CPG. Ouras and Whoops are ubiquitous in large cities.

Simultaneously, on the supply front, multiple massive breakthroughs are happening in parallel. AI models are rapidly improving, making it possible to a) synthesize complex health data into actionable insights, and b) replicate and scale clinician-level guidance. Also, high-fidelity sensors (e.g. wearables) and omic testing (e.g. genomic testing), which were once locked in research labs, are much cheaper.

At Will Ventures, we believe generational longevity companies will be started in the next decade. We see a future where consumers can proactively track their biomarkers, sleep, diet and more; receive personalized, actionable insights; make corresponding changes; and drive meaningful health outcomes – all under one roof. The end-goal is improving human lifespan and healthspan. The companies that reach that goal will command no shortage of dollars.

The challenge is knowing which companies will win. Investors have funded all types of longevity startups: virtual clinics like Function and Superpower, in-person clinics like Neko Health and Biograph, wearables like Oura and Ultrahuman, and supplement brands like Elysium and Tally.

Below is our market map of the longevity space.

In this article, we explore: Who will build the next great, generational longevity company?

• In Part 2, we ask which longevity businesses are best-positioned to win long-term
• In Part 3, we share the investment criteria we’d use to evaluate any longevity startup

PART 2: Which longevity businesses are best positioned to win

VCs have mainly backed four categories of consumer longevity startups. Each has an end-goal of owning as much of the data stack and consumer journey as possible. We’ll analyze the pros & cons of each model:

1. Digital clinics
2. In-person clinics
3. Wearables
4. Supplements

Digital Clinics

Digital clinics are probably the hottest consumer longevity category. Last summer, the three-year-old Function Health reported 50K paying members and 200K waitlisted. Fully activated, assuming $500 ARPU, that’s $125M annual revenue. I wouldn’t be surprised if revenue’s doubled since. Another player, Superpower, raised $28M after driving 150K waitlist signups in just six months. Most digital clinics are essentially white label testing, analyzing the results, and providing feedback through an AI-generated report or telemedicine. The largest players have started with genomic testing, but others are focusing on different parts of the omic stack like epigenetics (e.g. TruDiagnostic) and microbiome (e.g. Viome).

The big unlock of digital clinics is the 10x better user experience. If you wanted to test 100+ biomarkers through traditional healthcare, you’d have to visit your doctor, get them to bill insurance, and probably not even get clear feedback on all your results. (E.g. it’s possible that you heard about Lp(a) levels linked to heart disease on Peter Attia’s podcast, but your doctor isn’t familiar with it). However, products like Function let you visit any one of 2,000+ Quest outposts, get your blood drawn, and receive insights through a sleek digital report. All for $500/year. That isn’t affordable for all Americans but still cheaper than other longevity products we’ll discuss later. Digital clinics are simply convenient – and that’s allowed clinics like Function to build their customer base and brand quickly.

Two major trends are propelling digital clinics. One is the growth of telemedicine; some startups like Lifeforce are leaning into virtual clinician care. But the more novel trend is AI-powered care. LLMs, trained with the right datasets, will soon be able to provide clinician-level care. Already, Reddit’s filled with stories like this one – of someone researching symptoms on ChatGPT and discovering something that doctors missed. Superpower is leaning heavily into their concierge chatbot. Last week, their new product lead wrote a great substack about why he left medicine to try to build an AI doctor.

All that said, the existential question for digital clinics is: How effective can AI doctors be? For every person who was helped by Dr ChatGPT, there are probably dozens who got told false information. If you comb through Reddit/Biohackers, you’ll see a lot of people complain that their Function reports feel too AI-generated and lack actionable insights. The bottleneck probably isn’t model quality. Rather, it’s the ability to get hands on the right medical datasets and build consumer trust.

Another question is how instructive a blood panel or saliva test can be. Many people are going to sign up for the novelty. But once that wears off, years 2 & 3 retention could become a problem. At the end of the day, if digital clinics cannot drive real health outcomes, they’ll struggle to retain customers. Digital clinics might have built impressive waitlists and headline ARR numbers to date, but their durability is still to be seen.

Lastly, it’s worth asking how large the moat is for a digital clinic. Superpower was founded after Function but quickly built a waitlist half the size of Function’s customer base. The barriers for entry for a new digital clinic are (reductively) establishing a partnership with Labcorp or Quest and then building an AI chatbot, which is proving easier and easier. Maybe the winning companies will build healthier gross margins as they add more add-ons and gain more pricing power. But at the end of the day, if the barriers to entry are low, more digital clinics will emerge and compete away already slim margins.

Example of a Function Health report

In-person clinics

While digital clinics win on scalability, in-person clinics win on depth of care.

In the US, there are ~800 concierge longevity clinics. Several have raised VC funding, including Remedy Place, Biograph and Next Health. Note: There’s no single definition of a longevity clinic – largely because most blur the line between healthcare, wellness and aesthetic medicine. Arguably female-focused medspas like Ever/body and male-focused TRT mills like Gameday Men’s Health could be considered longevity clinics.

But the throughline between all the emerging in-person clinics is the following: They offer a luxury, high-touch, and comprehensive brick-and-mortar experience. Members visit a clinic, do comprehensive testing, get feedback from a clinician, and receive a mix of therapies on-site. Members pay anywhere from $10K-$50K/year upfront, not including additional a la carte treatments. Most clinics have opened in wealthy markets like New York, San Francisco and South Florida.

There’s a lot to like about this model. Firstly, in-person clinics are hands-down the most likely to drive real health outcomes today. Clinics combine multiple tests and regimens under one roof – with human clinician guidance. Furthermore, these clinics are one-stop-shops and can upsell throughout the customer journey. Lastly, when consumers visit a brick-and-mortar site, they’re likely to build brand affinity and stickiness.

On a related note: An interesting segment to watch - similar to in-person clinics - are gyms. Last year, Equinox launched Optimize by Equinox, a $40K/year service that includes a series of blood, V02 Max, strength and other tests – combined with a personalized health program. The challenge is Equinox’s core competencies are 1) building four-wall experiences, and 2) marketing. Not healthcare or software. Equinox has notoriously struggled with software like its digital fitness app and its exercise bikes. However, gyms already tap into a meaningful share of consumers’ wallets, and people visit them multiple times a week, so gyms could become interesting players.

All that said, the in-person clinic model also has challenges. First, clinics are prohibitively expensive. As a result, most clinic members are wealthy individuals, ages 45-60, and customer acquisition costs are exorbitant. In order to reach the masses, clinics will need to significantly scale down price (which would require insurance integration).

Second, brick-and-mortar clinics are high CapEx. They take more time and capital to scale than most VC investments. Modern Age, which raised $33M and opened a flagship New York Flatiron clinic in 2022, shut its doors in 2024 because it ran out of runway.

Lastly, many of the tests and treatments done by these clinics are controversial within the medical community. For example, there’s widespread doubt that preventative full-body MRIs improve health outcomes, and a lot of pushback against unproven stem cell treatments. (Here’s Andrew Huberman recently talking about the dangers of stem cells).

Wearables

Wearable companies are another interesting segment to watch. Oura doesn’t just want to sell a ring. It now offers a meal logging tool, an AI advisor chatbot, and integrations with Dexom’s glucose monitor and menstrual cycle apps like Flo. Ultrahuman, an India-based Oura competitor, is also expanding its product offerings. It cross-sells its ring with a CGM and a Home product that monitors things like air quality and temperature.

Wearable companies have a few advantages. First, they’ve reached far greater scale than digital or in-person longevity clinics. 44% of Americans owned a wearable health tracking device as of 2023 (up from 21% in 2019). Winners like Oura – which has sold 2.5M+ rings – have strong national brands and balance sheets to grow in other verticals. Second, people are accustomed to checking their wearables every single day. Many Oura owners check their sleep score first thing in the morning. Third, wearable companies have pretty large barriers to entry, as both hardware, software and supply chain businesses. It’s harder to build a new Oura than a new Function. Fourth, and arguably most important, wearables collect health data every single day. Whereas a clinic might collect your vitals twice a year, wearables know your sleep, HRV and other biometrics every day. That’s critical data that only they own.

One challenge is wearable companies definitively are not healthcare companies. Skeptics argue that most consumer-grade sensors aren’t yet diagnostic-grade, even if they’re directionally accurate. And most physicians still view wearables as lifestyle devices, not healthcare tools. Last week, the FDA sent Whoop a warning letter saying it’s marketing a new blood pressure feature without proper approvals. Another challenge is device abandonment. Consumers often buy wearables for the novelty, stop using them, and watch them collect dust. About one-third of Americans stop using their wearables within the first six months.

Supplements

The last market segment we’ll mention are supplements. Startups like Elysium Health and NOVOS have raised VC funding to sell pill stacks made of ingredients like NAD+ boosters, spermidine and urolithin A. These ingredients and others are often tied to aging in academic research and loosely backed by preclinical data – but rarely have definitive clinical results. Some companies like Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint and Peter Attia’s Tally Health bundle supplements with age testing kits.

Supplements’ main advantage is that they’re supremely easy for consumers. About three-quarters of Americans consume dietary supplements. Especially with DTC, many Americans are accustomed to keeping their Athletic Greens subscription on automatic reorder and taking it every day – even if the effect is more placebo than anything. It’s much lower effort to take supplements than going to the gym or changing your diet. And consumers have willingness to pay because of the (real or perceived) effect on health. Another positive is supplements are a high gross margin business (often 70-90%).

The question is how effective supplements actually are. Most compounds cited in longevity stacks are linked to promising animal data, but aren’t supported by large-scale, long-term human trials. The whole category lives in a gray zone between validated science and wishful thinking. In fact, in recent years the FDA’s cracked downon NMN, a popular anti-aging supplement. If any one pill is going to hit venture-scale, it will likely come from one of the deep BioTech companies raising billions to fund decade-long drug development cycles, targeting aging at the cellular level. For example, in 2022 Altos Labs emerged from stealth with $3B in funding and a wildly ambitious plan to reverse aging. If one of these drugs works, then we’ll probably see rapid society-wide adoption, similar to GLP-1s.

PART 3: Our investment criteria for the longevity space

Each model discussed above has its own pros and cons. But we believe that a common set of criteria can be used to evaluate any longevity startup, regardless of model.

Below are the five questions we’d ask when evaluating any investment in the consumer longevity space.

1. Do they create sticky feedback loops that drive behavior change?

The best longevity platforms will have the same consumer loop: test → intervene → improve → retest. Today, the two stickiest loops are 1) sleep trackers, and 2) CGMs. With Oura, you check your sleep score, see you slept poorly, make adjustments the next night, and improve. With Levels, you eat a meal, see your blood sugar spike, change what you eat the next day, and try again. But feedback loops get harder as testing grows less frequent and interventions more holistic. Take a gut microbiome test. You might receive a set of personalized diet recommendations. But to really assess the intervention, you’d have to track everything you eat and drink over the next 6-12 months. It gets even more difficult if you layer on exercise, stress and other inputs. A major blind spot is that some longevity products track your body’s outputs (e.g. bloodwork), but not inputs. Slight aside, but I’m personally curious to try the OpenAI x Jony Ive consumer device, rumored to be a screenless, audio-based device. A device that tracks environmental inputs just through audio (e.g. detecting you’re at the gym, or hearing what you ordered at a restaurant) could be an effective form factor for inputting behavior.

2. Can they prove real health outcomes that build trust?

Longevity startups can acquire customers by promising health outcomes. But the only way they will retain customers is by delivering meaningful, measurable health outcomes. Otherwise, customers will churn from their $500/year bloodwork or $30K/year clinic membership. Biograph claims that since opening its first clinic, more than 15% of members have reported they have discovered urgent or life-altering health insights – from cancer to cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. I haven’t vetted that number, but if true that’s exactly the result needed to drive customers back. The longevity space is full of salespeople that blur the line between medical professional and social media influencer. It’s also filled with therapies and products that have not been clinically tested. Long-term, the best longevity companies will be the ones that drive real health outcomes.

3. Do they own a proprietary, multi-modal and longitudinal dataset?

AI investors have repeated it to death: data is a critical moat. The most valuable longevity companies will have data that is three things: proprietary (not owned by third parties), multi-modal (across blood, sleep, scans, etc.) and longitudinal (tracked over time). One common misconception is confusing data with the infrastructure that collects it. I’ve heard critics write off Function as a Quest Diagnostics wrapper. Sure, Quest sells biomarker testing for $250-400 and Function marks it up for $500. But the testing infrastructure is a commodity. The real value is in owning the data layer and downstream consumer applications. When one company owns larger data sets, it can spot patterns no one else can. It can connect bloodwork to sleep, or glucose crashes to exercise. That unlocks better recommendations, better outcomes, and a system that gets smarter with every user.

4. Do they have an asymmetric go-to-market advantage?

The best longevity startups won’t win on paid ads; they’ll have unfair marketing advantages. Many of the best-funded startups in the space are led by creators and thought leaders. Bryan Johnson, the space’s best-known influencer with 4M followers, sells white-labeled supplements and testing kits, thanks to his reach. (It’s worth nothing that the other day he tweeted about looking for a CEO & CTO to develop software too). Interestingly, many longevity creators in this space aren’t just entertainers, they’re clinicians. Function’s co-founder Mark Hyman previously ran Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine. He also has ten published books, 1.4M YouTube subs, and appearances on every major health & business podcast. In this substack, I wrote about investing in creator-led CPG brands. Many of the same principles apply here: the creator’s ability to convert product, the creator’s right to win in their market, etc. Another hack that we’ll see more of is marketing a product towards a sub-sect of the market, instead of marketing to the general health-conscious consumer. Take Eternal, Alex Mather’s new startup targeting former elite athletes. It’s not trying to serve everyone. It’s building credibility with one pocket of the market, then expanding from there.

CONCLUSION

To wrap up, here’s what what we believe at Will Ventures:

• Now is the time to build the full-stack longevity platform of the future.
• Each model – from in-person clinics to digital clinics to more – has its own pros & cons.
• But every longevity business will need sticky feedback loops, real health outcomes, a data moat, and an unfair GTM advantage.

If you’re building in the longevity space, we would love to hear your thoughts and get to know you.