Apr 22, 2025 · 48m · sourcery
Superpower Raises $30M Series A Led by Forerunner · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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In this episode of Sourcery, host Molly O'Shea interviews Jacob Peters, founder of Superpower, about raising a $30 million Series A funding round, building a defensible health brand, and using AI to reinvent traditional healthcare. Spurred by his own severe personal health crisis, Jacob outlines Superpower's mission to productize whole-body biomarker testing and concierge medicine to address America's metabolic health crisis.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 15.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 3.3 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 1.0 Molly pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 43:28 Dismissing direct competitive comparison
Jacob dismisses the premise of competing with contemporaries like Function or Parsley Health, asserting that their only real competition is the monumental task of rebuilding the healthcare system itself.
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 43:08 Pressing on differentiation against Function and ParsleyMolly directly challenges Jacob to define Superpower's moat and product differentiation against established direct-to-consumer functional medicine competitors.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 22:12 Laying bare the hospital fee-for-service revenue modelJacob educates the audience on why conventional healthcare ignores holistic drivers, citing that 85% of hospital revenues originate from billable surgeries and lifetime pharmaceutical infusions.
Molly holds their own ▶ 31:05 Host rattles off comprehensive metabolic crisis dataMolly takes full control of the conversational momentum by citing rapid-fire statistical evidence on US metabolic decline, chemical exposures, and teen prediabetes rates.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superpower's $30M Series A and Forerunner Investment | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Molly opens with standard conversational prompts about Superpower's $30M Series A round and investor dynamics. Jacob drives the narrative with an extensive thesis on why brand defensibility is mispriced by tech founders and investors. | |
| Brand Building and Securing the Superpower IP | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Jacob recounts the operational lore of securing the Superpower domain, IP trademarks, and social handles across the globe. Molly acts as an engaged audience, reacting with astonishment and brief follow-up prompts. | |
| Designing the World's Healthiest Hoodie | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | The conversation focuses on the strategic storytelling behind the 'healthiest hoodie,' touching on synthetic dyes and nanoplastics. Molly chimes in knowledgeably about microplastics as Jacob elaborates on the brand narrative. | |
| Jacob's Health Crisis and Seawater Electrolyte Demo | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Jacob leads an interactive product demo with Spanish seawater ampoules and explains the biological necessity due to his missing large intestine. Molly participates directly in the demo without challenging the medical premise. | |
| Flaws in Traditional Healthcare and Founding Superpower | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Jacob deconstructs the misaligned financial incentives of hospital revenue models (pharmaceuticals and surgery) versus functional root-cause medicine. Molly validates his personal health journey and reflects on systemic misdiagnosis issues. | |
| Overcoming Human Computation Limits in Healthcare with AI | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jacob frames healthcare as an informatics problem historically constrained by human working memory, now unlocked by foundation models. Molly accepts the framing as a strong rationale for market timing. | |
| Confronting America's Metabolic Health Crisis | 8 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Molly leads this segment by reeling off detailed public health and metabolic crisis statistics from the manifesto and Casey Means. Jacob enthusiastically corroborates her data points and discusses clinical empathy. | |
| Productizing High-End Concierge Medicine and Testing | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Jacob outlines the 3-pillar product strategy designed to automate concierge medicine workflows (system of record, intelligence, and action). Molly prompts for specifics regarding diagnostic panels not included in standard physicals. | |
| User Onboarding, Market Differentiation, and Future Vision | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Molly presses Jacob on how Superpower differentiates itself from competitors like Function and Parsley Health, drawing on her own personal functional health experience. Jacob dismisses conventional competitive obsession and reveals a long-term payvider thesis. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Peters: Consumers will disintermediate traditional healthcare using AI pocket doctors
“In the limit, we think every person in America, and frankly the world, will have an AI doctor in their pocket, and consumers will fully disintermediate the existing healthcare system as it stands.”
Peters: Forerunner's Kirsten Green led Superpower's Series A and joined the board
“So we were fortunate enough to be able to team up with Kirsten Green. Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Who's the founder of Forerunner, Forerunner Ventures to join the board and be a part of this round. So Forerunner was the lead investor.”
Peters: Superpower's Series A was 1.5x oversubscribed
“Which was one and a half times oversubscribed. I don't want to overstate.”
Peters: As AI makes replication easy, brand is the most powerful moat
“In a world where, you know, AI and vibe coding is only proliferating and making it easier to replicate products, brand is possibly one of the most powerful motes and defensible aspects of a business.”
Peters: Superpower purchased superpower.com for a few hundred thousand dollars
“Put together a deal and we ended up buying it for actually only a few hundred K, but believe it or not.”
Peters: Superpower rejected a $2M domain offer from an AI startup
“Yeah, and I've been offered over two million for it by a well-funded AI company, which I will not name.”
Peters: Polyester fabrics leach inhalable nanoplastics during movement
“Polyester, these things, they basically leech, you know, nanoplastics that literally get inhaled as you know, move the fabric.”
Peters: Nearly 85% of US health system revenue comes from drugs and surgery
“In America, close to 85% of health system revenue comes from two sources.
Do you know what those are?
Tell us.
Pharmaceuticals and surgery.”
Peters: Biologic drugs generate roughly $15,000 per patient monthly for life
“TNF alpha immune system modulator, which is like a called a biologic drug. It's a class of biologic drugs that modulate your immune system. They make, they generate like 15 K a month and you are on them for life typically.”
Peters: A doctor's core role is an informatics problem triangulating three databases
“Basically healthcare is, a doctor's job is an informatics problem, right? You're computing between, when you're a doctor and you go see a patient, you're computing between a database of what you know about a patient, what you know about medicine, and what inte…”
Peters: Foundation models eliminate compute constraints in medicine
“With the advancement of foundation models compute is no longer a constraint in medicine, which has opened up this market opportunity in this portal for healthcare to really be built as a product.”
Jacob Peters: 8,000 chemicals in US food supply do not exist in Europe
“8000 chemicals exist in the U.S. Food supply. Jacob Peters: That don't exist in Europe.”
Peters: Superpower founding team has nearly a dozen former venture-backed founders
“Almost close to a dozen of our founding team members. Hannah, who runs design, shout out Hannah. Max, who is my co-founder. Kevin, my other co-founder and our CTO. All former venture backed founders.”
Peters: Superpower's engineering team consists of former YC DevTools engineers
“Our entire engineering team is formerly DevTools, you know, like Y Combin or DevTools engineers as an example, teaming up with the health subject matter experts in the scientific community to build something.”
Peters: High-end concierge whole-body medical analysis costs $50K to $100K
“In a human brain constrained medical paradigm, it costs 50 to a 100,000 dollars to get that level of insight and access and time and intention with a really smart person who's a scarce resource”
Peters: Superpower tests roughly 10 times more labs than annual physicals
“For most people, even the base version of what we built today is exponentially better than anything they've ever had because we test about, like, 10 times more labs than your traditional annual physical, which is very lacking relative to what we should be doin…”
Peters: Healthcare Will Decouple Into Emergency Coverage and Proactive Health Plans
“We're going to see this decoupling where I think you know, people are going to be okay paying for emergency health insurance.
but then there will be different new innovative models to help cover the fact that there are a lot of things that move the needle on…”
Peters: The largest consumer health companies will own fintech and underwriting
“What does the biggest health consumer health company in the world look like?
And it's probably some combination of,
Becoming the fintech layer and owning the, you know, insurance and the underwriting, the ability to actually cover and figure out, you know, t…”
Peters: Superpower Membership Costs a Few Hundred Dollars Annually for Biannual Testing
“So today it's a membership.
So people join Superpower, it's a few hundred dollars a year and they get access to the platform twice a year, full body testing, so that there's, again, never any gaps of understanding in terms of what's, what's ultimately happeni…”