← The Jaeden Schafer Podcast
The Jaeden Schafer Podcast
Function Health Funding Reflects Growing Need for AI Medical Tools
00:08:38
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If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know one of the areas I'm the most excited about is AI in healthcare and all of the opportunities we have to make healthcare more affordable and improve the quality do drug discovery. There's so much more. Save doctors a ton of time so they can do what they need to and of course spend more time with their family. AI enables so much in healthcare and I'm really excited about that. So today on the show I'm talking about a company called For Function Health that has just raised $298 million. This is their Series B that they're doing and they have a $2.5 billion valuation. So a ton of money, a massive valuation. Today on the podcast I want to break down what Function Health is doing, who's putting money into them, why they're different than other players we've seen and some of the things I am the most excited about in AI and healthcare. So let's get into all of that. Before we do, I'd love for you to try out my startup AI box AI if you want to get access to all of the top AI models I talk about on the show without having to go and get subscriptions to a hundred different platforms. AI box lets you get the top 40 different models. Google, Gemini, Anthropics, Claude OpenAI, Groq, things from Nvidia, tons of cool image generators, 11 labs for audio, over 40 models in one place. You can chat with them all in the same thread, compare the responses side by side, and never have to go get another subscription ever again.
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So.
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So it's all on AI Box. AI. I'll leave a link in the description to go and check that out. All right, let's get into the podcast. Today in healthcare, a ton of data is constantly being generated. We have wearable devices like our Apple Watch that is tracking a ton of different biometric data points. We have electronic health records, we have blood tests that are coming out that a lot of people are doing. Some of these things you can order online, do it yourself, get a ton of interesting information, allergy tests.
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This is.
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There's so much of this health information that is out there in health data, but right now, the amount of information is not actually. All of this information is not actually being used in a meaningful way that is helping you improve your health. You might take a test, you might get a result for one specific thing, but there is a lot more that we could be do, so we could be doing. So that's what Function Health is working on. They have a regular lab testing service that's gonna help people track their health. And they want to be able to essentially help you consolidate health data and, and make it usable for a lot of different things. They're gonna feed it to a AI model and you're gonna be able to get a lot of information from it. So with all of that being said, the company recently raised $298 million in their series B. This round was led by Redpoint Ventures. And like I mentioned in the beginning, it's a $2.5 billion valuation. So this is not a small company. They have grown a ton. They also had a lot of big players, like A16Z, Anglais Ventures, Alumni Ventures, NBA athlete Alan Crab, Blake Griffin, Taylor Griffin, a bunch of big players. Daniel Gross's investment firm, and the Roku founder, Anthony Wood, Nat Friedman, all of them are in there. So total, they have raised $350 million. This company is well funded and they're taking on an ambitious era. I think a lot of people, when they think of, like, technology and healthcare, they think of Theranos and the big scam where you do this kind of small blood test. You prick your thumb, and it was supposed to give you, like 100 different blood tests, and of course it ended up not being able to actually do that. And so I think a lot of people are skeptical of tech and healthcare and blood test kind of companies. But this seems to be a new angle and a new company that is doing something really interesting with all of the funding that they've just raised. They unveiled something new, which is called Medical Intelligence Lab. Basically, this is them trying to build a medical intelligence generative AI model. It's gonna be used to provide personalized health insights based on your data. Right? Right. So all of the data that you have coming from your Apple Watch and all of your other different health trackers, they said that it is trained by doctors, which is something unique about this model they've made. And for its customers, they are going to be offering an AI chatbot that can answer any questions based on your health data, and it can tap into any of your previous lab results, any of your previous doctor's notes. It's going to scan and provide a bunch of tailored assistance to you so you can sit there and, and ask questions about your health. It's interesting because just last night I was chatting with ChatGPT. I had a terrible stomachache after eating Olive Garden. Maybe it wasn't Olive Garden's fault. I don't know. I won't point the finger and blame, but I was asking ChatGPT, I'm like, I didn't have any Tums. And I was like, how do I make like, homemade Tums? Like, I don't know, whatever. So I had this like whole medical conversation with ChatGPT, and obviously it wasn't something that was incredibly critical. But you can imagine people have these conversations all the time about all sorts of things, varying degrees of importance, and think of how amazing it would be if, beyond just talking to ChatGPT, in a general sense, there was an AI model that literally knew all of your health metrics. It could see what, you know, your heart rate was. It could see everything alive and everything historic that you had, and it would give you way more tailored results. So this is kind of what they're building. This is what their CEO, Jonathan Swerlin said about it. He said, it's not good enough to be in a world where AI exists and not be applying it to your health. He said you should be able to manage your biology. The objective of Function Health is to apply the best available technology to human health. He also went on to say that their platform is HIPAA compliant, which is important. It fully encrypts your data. It never sells your Personal information. He said, your data and your identity are never for sale. Every bit of your information is fully encrypted and protected. We are committed to keeping you and your data safe. This is another thing that I think is probably one of the biggest oppositions or, you know, obstacles that they will have as they're trying to roll this out. People are afraid that if you give your health information to a company, it could leak it. And If I'm being 100% honest, it even, you know, if they're like, well, it's encrypted and it's HIPAA compliant and all this kind of stuff. I think a lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth. Left over from companies like 23andMe, different companies that take your DNA test and have had, you know, data leaks or basically all of your DNA information was leaked or they go bankrupt or they get acquired by sh. Chinese companies who now have your data. There's a lot that has happened in the health space and so I think there's a lot of areas where people are quite skeptical and so they have a lot of barriers to overcome. It seems like they're doing quite well. But I think this is one of the reasons why you need to be so well funded in this space. Their chief medical scientist is Dr. Dan Sotikinson and he is a co founder, chief medical officer. There's also Dr. Mark Hyman and they're both working together to kind of lead the development of MI Labs and they have a whole team of doctors, of researchers, of engineers and their model that they've built is trained by all those doctors, like I mentioned before, which I think is really important, they really highlight the fact that the doctors are staying very involved in the process of training this data. I think in today's day and age when ChatGPT is an amazing general purpose AI model, if you have access to unique data sets and you have access to unique talent like doctors, that's a really good barrier to entry and a really good moat to be able to create a product that other people can't copy. So obviously there's a bunch of other players in the space, but Function is trying to be different from all the other competitors. There's Superpower, there's NICO Help, there's Inside Tracker. And the thing that Function's doing and they're trying to be a little bit different is they're doing what they're saying is a device agnostic approach, essentially that they're, they're adding their platform integration lab, testing their diagnostics their clinical insights and all of that, so that you can have all of these different, all of these different platforms and bring the data in just to one place. So it's not like it's, you know, you have to have their one specific piece of hardware in order to track all of your information. You can get it from other places. And because of this, the information it's going to give you is a lot more than you get from a typical AI coach or a wellness app. And I will say that you can also get lab tests done at over 2000 quest locations and apparently they made they've completed more than 50 million lab tests since 2023, which is really impressive. So people have been gathering a ton of data and this has all helped them with their AI model, training their doctors and help them create a product that is really useful for people to actually get a good overview of their health. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed the episode and you are interested in everything happening in AI and health and so many other areas, make sure to give us a Follow over on YouTube Linked in the description and and also make sure to leave us a review wherever you get your podcast. Go check out AI box AI I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.