According to TechCrunch, Function Health just raised a massive $298 million Series B round at a $2.5 billion valuation led by Redpoint Ventures. The funding brings their total raised to $350 million with participation from a16z, Battery Ventures, and even NBA players Blake Griffin and Allen Crabbe. Alongside the funding, they unveiled Medical Intelligence Lab, a generative AI model trained by doctors to provide personalized health insights. The company has 75 U.S. locations with plans to reach nearly 200 by year’s end and claims to have completed over 50 million lab tests since 2023. CEO Jonathan Swerdlin emphasized their HIPAA-compliant, device-agnostic approach that integrates lab testing with AI coaching.
The AI doctor will see you now
Here’s the thing – we’ve seen this movie before. The promise of AI revolutionizing healthcare isn’t new, but throwing nearly $300 million at the problem certainly turns heads. Function’s pitch is compelling: take all that scattered health data from wearables, lab tests, and doctor visits and feed it to an AI that actually gives you actionable insights. But I can’t help wondering – is this solving a real problem or just creating another data dashboard that overwhelms people?
The medical AI space is getting crowded with players like Superpower and InsideTracker, but Function’s betting big on being device-agnostic and combining actual lab testing with their AI model. That’s smart – lab results give them concrete biological data rather than just step counts and heart rate variability. Still, training AI models with doctors sounds great until you realize how much variation exists in medical opinions. Whose medical truth are we getting here?
The privacy paradox
Swerdlin was quick to emphasize their HIPAA compliance and encryption standards, which you’d hope for with sensitive health data. But let’s be real – we’ve seen too many “we’ll never sell your data” promises get walked back when business gets tough. When you’re sitting on millions of detailed health profiles, that data becomes incredibly valuable for research, pharma companies, insurers… basically everyone in healthcare wants a piece.
And that 50 million lab tests number since 2023? That’s either incredibly impressive scaling or raises questions about data quality. Are we talking about comprehensive panels or quick finger-prick tests? The difference matters when you’re building medical AI that people might actually rely on for health decisions.
The billion-dollar question
So can Function actually deliver? They’ve got the funding and the ambition, but healthcare is littered with startups that promised to disrupt the system only to discover that changing healthcare is… hard. Really hard. Regulatory hurdles, physician skepticism, and the simple fact that people’s health behaviors are stubbornly resistant to change.
The device-agnostic approach is clever though – instead of fighting the Apple Watch vs. Fitbit wars, they’re trying to be the Switzerland of health data. And having actual physical locations for testing gives them a leg up over purely digital competitors. But at what point does this become just another expensive subscription service for the wellness-obsessed? Can they actually move the needle on population health outcomes, or is this another toy for biohackers?
Look, the vision is exciting – a personalized AI health assistant that actually understands your biology. But we’re still in the early days of seeing whether these models can provide genuinely useful medical guidance rather than generic wellness advice. The $2.5 billion valuation suggests investors think they’ve cracked the code. I’m cautiously optimistic but keeping my skeptic’s hat firmly in place.
