Buzzy AI health startup Superpower is making another acquisition to power its food-as-medicine push
Consumers increasingly want to take control of their health — including by taking control of what they eat. Buzzy AI startup Superpower just made its second acquisition of the year to capitalize on that interest.
Superpower is building a health AI "super app" that combines biannual lab tests with users' health histories to create personalized lifestyle recommendations. The startup announced $30 million in Series A funding, led by Forerunner, just last month.
Now, Superpower is buying at-home lab testing company Base, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
Base, started by former Amazon engineer Lola Priego, provides at-home blood and saliva tests to help consumers improve habits like their sleep and diet with personalized lifestyle recommendations.
It was Base's diet analysis business that sold Superpower on the deal. Superpower CEO Jacob Peters told BI that the startup bought Base primarily for its wealth of nutritional data, which he said "would save us a lot of clinical R&D" as Superpower digs deeper into food-as-medicine care.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Priego launched Base in 2019, and the company last raised a $3.4 million seed round in 2021 led by Female Founders Fund.
Superpower is far from the only player interested in the nutrition market. Investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into nutrition care startups like Nourish and Fay Nutrition, while movements like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s " Make America Healthy Again" are taking hold.
Those trends, too, are picking up steam with the explosion of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and a growing consumer fascination with longevity, as some look to hack their health and extend their lifespans.
Superpower hits on that longevity care demand, with scores provided on its app measuring users' "biological age" and overall health. The startup even hired its own "chief longevity officer" in September.
Still, Peters said Superpower isn't a longevity startup, adding that he thinks most consumers simply want to get a better hold on their health — "If you superpower your health, you superpower your life."
Superpower is making M&A central to its strategy, an unusual approach for an early-stage startup. Base is its second acquisition of the year; Superpower bought women's health startup Feminade in January.
Peters said he expects to see more consolidation across digital health to combine point solutions tackling small slices of the market. And Superpower itself wants to connect a broad range of offerings into its app so patients can get all of their health needs met in one place.
"This probably won't be our last M&A," Peters laughed.
Reimagining concierge care with AI
Peters launched Superpower in 2023 alongside cofounders Max Marchione and Kevin Unkrich, CTO, born from their personal experiences with a broken healthcare system. Peters, for one, was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder Crohn's disease a few years ago and spent four months in the hospital, undergoing multiple surgeries and racking up seven-figure bills.
"It was a big light bulb moment for me: as a person with health challenges, no one's really coming to save you," he said.
He and the Superpower team set out to create an AI-powered experience inspired by concierge medicine, which typically offers more attentive healthcare at a higher price tag, and making that style of care more widely accessible with technology. Its approach has attracted investors from Susa Ventures to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Superpower's members take biannual lab tests, either at home or at one of Superpower's partner labs, to assess more than 100 blood biomarkers. The Superpower app then pulls in user data from patient medical records, the lab tests, and wearables, and surfaces AI-driven insights based on that data to help its members optimize their health across their nutrition, sleep, and hormones.
Superpower's AI-generated action plans are reviewed by human care teams behind the scenes. Users can message their care teams to get further combined guidance from those human providers and AI.
Many consumer health startups launch to focus on one or a few problems, as Ro and Hims and Hers did with conditions like erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Superpower wants to take a different approach, aiming to be comprehensive from day one, so the startup can be known for its platform rather than for any single offering, Peters said.
That ambition comes with a cost: Superpower's memberships run $500 a year. While lower than what most Americans spend on healthcare in a year, that price point could put the app out of reach for many consumers.
Peters said the Superpower team is thinking hard about how to make its services available to the largest group possible. Superpower launched to sell directly to consumers, but in the future, Peters said the startup may consider contracting with employers to cover the costs of its memberships for employees.
"We want to build a platform that makes it easy to get the world's best healthcare to everyone at very low and accessible costs. That's the north star for us, to put a healthcare super app and AI doctor on everyone's phone," he said.
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