Key Takeaways
- Max Marchione struggled for years to get a real diagnosis, an experience that led him to found Superpower, now valued at more than $500 million.
- For $199 a year, members get a full blood panel, an AI health protocol and care team access.
- Superpower’s next offering is peptides, a category drawing both regulatory momentum and caution.
When Max Marchione was a teenager, it took him four hours to fall asleep most nights. He saw more than 20 specialists to figure out why, and each one diagnosed him differently. He had surgeries. He was told to medicate for life. At one point he wore four different devices at once.
The cure finally came from a “genius doctor” who he says “spent three hours with me just asking questions and had the IQ and expertise to connect the dots.” The doctor started with a routine blood test showing slightly elevated liver enzymes, a result other doctors had blown off, and traced it back to mercury and mold exposure.
Ever since, Marchione, now 26, has been obsessed with figuring out a way for everyone to get access to the same quality of care he did. After a stint at Goldman Sachs and building four small companies, in 2023, he sat down to choose one problem to work on for the next 30 to 50 years. It had to be personally meaningful, it had to matter for the world and it had to be big enough to eventually support a company worth at least $100 billion.
He landed on Superpower, a health super app that has signed up tens of thousands of members since its commercial launch in the fall of 2025 and is now valued at more than $500 million. “Our statement from the start has been: what is concierge medicine for the 99.99%?” he says.
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What $199 gets you
The app pulls together blood work, genomic data, gut microbiome testing, wearable data and self-reported symptoms into one profile, then uses AI to look for patterns. “How do we get to the root cause? How do we create a truth-seeking AI?” Marchione says. Membership runs $199 a year in most states, which covers a yearly blood draw testing more than 100 biomarkers, a personalized health protocol, and ongoing access to the AI assistant and concierge support. Additional testing and prescriptions, including peptides, are billed separately. Anything requiring a diagnosis or prescription still goes through a licensed doctor on Superpower’s medical team, not the AI. Members who need specialist care Superpower doesn’t handle, like cancer treatment, are referred out.
Related: How Two Friends With No Experience Built Neuro Into a $100 Million Plus Brand
Getting to a $500 million valuation
Building a company that spans an AI research lab, a consumer app, a B2B business and now a pharmaceutical supply chain comes with myriad challenges. “Everything’s hard, and that also means everything’s not hard,” says Marchione. “If the default of doing anything great in any industry is that it’s hard, then when stuff comes up, it’s like, cool, this is just part and parcel of what’s meant to happen.”
He says there are two things that determine whether any startup works: whether the idea is right, and whether the talent is. He estimates he spends 30 to 50 hours a week on recruiting alone. About a third of Superpower’s team are former founders. Why? “We like finding people who have been on the edge of greatness but didn’t get there,” Marchione says. “They tend to be more proactive.”
Investors are bullish. Superpower has raised more than $50 million from VC firms. It also has high-profile backers, including Shaan Puri, Logan Paul, World Cup star Kylian Mbappé, and NBA great Giannis Antetokounmpo, who signed on as a global brand ambassador.
Related: What This Founder Thinks Most Supplement Brands Get Wrong—and How He Fixed It With David Beckham
The peptide play
The next phase of Superpower’s roadmap is peptides, the class of compounds that includes GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. The company has already acquired peptide IP and is positioning itself to move fast once the FDA clears more of the category for legal compounding. That could be happening soon: a federal advisory panel just voted 8-6 to recommend easing restrictions on peptides like BPC-157 and TB-500, a signal the category may open up further. This is music to Marchione’s ears. “I believe peptides are gonna change more people’s lives than any other modality of medicine we have ever seen,” he says.
Not everyone is convinced. Some experts have concerns that the peptide market is an unregulated “Wild West.” Marchione concedes that peptides like BPC-157 still need more testing to confirm claims about their effects on autoimmune disease, chronic pain and gut health. “We don’t know for sure if it does any of these things yet,” he says. “But it’s hard to ignore that anecdotal evidence when you see just how much of it there is.”
Then there are people who are skeptical of AI making health suggestions. A Florida pastor is currently suing OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT gave him dangerous medical advice, reportedly the first lawsuit of its kind. Marchione points to the 17,000 to 20,000 yearly malpractice cases against human doctors. “So you’re telling me there are more consults with ChatGPT than a doctor by a factor of 10,” he says, “but there’s one case of someone suing? Wow, the AI’s doing a really good job.”
Still, Marchione draws a firm line around what Superpower’s own AI is allowed to do. “It’s not providing medical advice, it’s not putting a medical stamp on anything,” he says. “It’s saying, here’s information, and then people are making the decision. I love this idea of giving people autonomy.”
Key Takeaways
- Max Marchione struggled for years to get a real diagnosis, an experience that led him to found Superpower, now valued at more than $500 million.
- For $199 a year, members get a full blood panel, an AI health protocol and care team access.
- Superpower’s next offering is peptides, a category drawing both regulatory momentum and caution.
When Max Marchione was a teenager, it took him four hours to fall asleep most nights. He saw more than 20 specialists to figure out why, and each one diagnosed him differently. He had surgeries. He was told to medicate for life. At one point he wore four different devices at once.
The cure finally came from a “genius doctor” who he says “spent three hours with me just asking questions and had the IQ and expertise to connect the dots.” The doctor started with a routine blood test showing slightly elevated liver enzymes, a result other doctors had blown off, and traced it back to mercury and mold exposure.
Ever since, Marchione, now 26, has been obsessed with figuring out a way for everyone to get access to the same quality of care he did. After a stint at Goldman Sachs and building four small companies, in 2023, he sat down to choose one problem to work on for the next 30 to 50 years. It had to be personally meaningful, it had to matter for the world and it had to be big enough to eventually support a company worth at least $100 billion.
