Function Health's $499 blood-panel bet: 50,000 members to $2.5B in two years

Direct-to-consumer preventive health: $499/year for 160-plus lab tests drawn at Quest, explained by AI and clinicians, with add-on full-body MRI scans.

That consumers would pay out of pocket for whole-body data — 100-plus biomarkers, twice a year — and the dataset would power medical AI no sick-care system could build.

$53M raised as of June 2024, a16z-led; $298M Series B at $2.5B valuation led by Redpoint (2025-11-19), bringing total to $350M (TechCrunch)

CEO Jonathan Swerdlin, a repeat founder who says Function's own protocol healed him, teamed with Dr. Mark Hyman — founder of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and one of America's best-known wellness physicians. COO Pranitha Patil left Harvard grad school; CTO Mike Nemke went from Green Beret to AI engineer; CPO Seth Weisfield designed AI products at Meta. The beta launched in 2023 and filled to nearly 50,000 members with almost no marketing, per a16z, whose partners wrote that the latent demand stunned even them. Early anecdotes were potent: members who caught stage-3 ovarian cancer, heart-disease risk, early prostate cancer.

The membership compounded: 5 million lab tests by the a16z post, 50 million by late 2025. In May 2025 Function acquired Ezra, a full-body MRI startup founded 2018 that had raised $44M, and used Ezra's FDA-cleared AI (cleared January 2025) to cut scan time from 30 minutes to 22 and price from $1,495 to $499. Function Scans reached 130 locations, targeted 200 by end of 2025, and members could draw labs at 2,000 Quest sites. In November 2025 it closed a $298M Series B led by Redpoint at a $2.5B valuation — participants included NBA players Blake Griffin and Allen Crabbe, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's NFDG, and Roku founder Anthony Wood — and launched its Medical Intelligence Lab to train a doctor-supervised generative model on member data.

Scaling at a $2.5B valuation with $350M raised. Rivals — Superpower, Neko Health, InsideTracker on testing, Prenuvo on scans — are crowding in, and medical experts publicly caution that full-body scans in particular can trigger unnecessary care and anxiety. Function's answer is the data flywheel: more members, more biomarkers, a better-trained model.

Consumer diagnostics had no product owner: labs ordered piecemeal, results in jargon, insurance refusing preventive panels. Owning the whole 160-test panel and its explanation was an open lane.

Quest's existing 2,000 draw sites made the supply side asset-light; Function's real capital went to interpretation software and brand.

Hyman's audience in functional medicine seeded a trust channel that normal health startups pay years to build — the beta filled without marketing.

Each membership deepens the dataset, and the dataset is what makes the AI claims credible; the Series B priced the platform, not the labs.

Buying Ezra answered the category's obvious question — 'what about imaging?' — with a 77% price cut instead of a new R&D pipeline.

Insurance won't pay for data people feel they need. Pricing prevention like a subscription — flat, out of pocket, plain results — turned lab work into a consumer product; the dataset became the moat.

As of November 2025 Function is scaling on its $298M Series B: MRI scans at 130 locations headed for 200, lab draws at 2,000 Quest sites, and the Medical Intelligence Lab building a generative model supervised by chief medical scientist Dr. Dan Sodickson and co-founder Dr. Mark Hyman. Swerdlin positions Function as device-agnostic — labs, EHRs, wearables — against AI coaches lacking individual data. The company says it is HIPAA-compliant and never sells personal data; physicians continue to debate how much preventive scanning a healthy person should buy.