Pranitha Patil, an Indian American Harvard dropout, has built a $2.5 billion AI-powered company that “paints a real picture of your health,” according to media reports. Her company, Function, which she co-founded with CEO Jonathan Swerdlin, chief medical officer Dr. Mark Hyman, chief design officer Seth Weisfeld and general counsel Dan Swerdlin, provides access to more than 160 lab tests, advanced MRI and CT imaging, and AI-powered insights to help members understand what their results mean and what actions to take next. The membership costs $365 annually, compared with roughly $15,000 for comparable testing purchased independently, according to the company.
Patil said she was diagnosed with PCOS and prediabetes earlier in life and wanted a health care system that could identify warning signs before they developed into more serious problems.
“The healthcare system is set up so that you only go once you only go once you have a problem,” she said. “Had I seen these signs way earlier, these markers being elevated, I would’ve done something about it,” she told Entrepreneur.
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Patil also said she was at Harvard, studying for a master’s degree in design engineering, when she came up with the idea of developing a comprehensive preventive health platform.
“Initially, I thought a product like it must already exist somewhere in the world, but I couldn’t find it. Then I met my co-founder and CEO, Jonathan Swerdlin, and was like, “This product needs to exist.” It was a no-brainer; there wasn’t a lot of hesitation,” she said.
“I connected with the rest of the co-founding team and had a lot of confidence in the people I’d be working with and the passion behind what we were building. I ended up dropping out of the Harvard program early to bring the company to life. Everything clicked. As co-founders, we have different backgrounds, but we were all driven by giving people the opportunity to own their health. That mission hasn’t changed in the five and a half years since Function’s founding,” Patil said.
Patil said that Function wanted to start with lab testing using urine and blood samples, but also had plans for much more. She said the most difficult part was “convincing investors of the bigger vision when it wasn’t here yet.”
Patil also said the company’s goal is to reach 8 billion people as quickly as possible, with AI being deployed to help achieve that goal.
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“We’re in our act two as a company. For act one to be successful, we had to lay the foundation with the labs. The lab piece had to be accurate and correct, and get as many people in the door as possible multiple times a year. That behavior shift happened. Now, people are excited about seeing how their labs have changed, or their biological age has come down. But we always knew there was more to build,” Patil said.
She also said Function made acquisitions to scale the company, adding imaging, supplement intelligence through SuppCo and home blood draws with Getlabs. She said it would have taken too long to build everything in-house.
“When I think about the future, I’m reimagining everything we’ve known about how we interact with our health. This is a new set of expectations and a new set of information. Historically, this has been so severely disconnected, and you’re playing insane Tetris trying to figure out one thing about yourself. I am so excited about a world, whether that’s in three to five years or 10 years, or even sooner, where people can detect a problem before it becomes an actual problem, take action and have a strong relationship with their health. We deserve that. If we can make it that much easier for people, then we’ve done something right,” Patil said.