Superpower Raises $30M Series A Led by Forerunner

0:00The word superpower has a certain connotation to it. Once you realize there's a whole parallel world of a better way to do medicine, you can't unsee it. $30 million Series A, could you tell more about the round? Every person in America will have an AI doctor in their pocket. 88 % of people are metabolically unhealthy. This is the healthiest hoodie ever, correct? It's veritably the world's healthiest hoodie garment that has ever been made. I almost lost my life due to poor health incentives. As a result of what happened to me, I have to take these things every 40 minutes. We are genuinely aligning ourselves with people and trying to help them create a sense of control.

0:36And data creates control.

0:41Jacob Peters, welcome to the pod. Molly, stoked to be here. Well, congratulations on your$30 million Series A. This is huge. It's definitely huge. Also, I have to address the elephant in the room. This is extremely awkward. I don't know if you guys are watching online, but we're matching. We're wearing the same sweatshirt. This is the healthiest hoodie ever, correct? It's veritably the world's healthiest hoodie garment that has ever been made. Yes. It's lovely. I love it. Okay. Anyways, back to the fundraise. Okay. $30 million Series A. Could you tell more about the round? Who led it? What are you doing with the money?

1:21Yeah. Yeah. So something that I believe to be true is you build as big as your vision. And 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. And this is already sort of happening today, right? People go to ChatGPT or Google or WebMD before they talk to their doctor. And that's a trend that's only going to accelerate. And superpowers, obviously, as we'll get into building some interesting tools to make this future a little bit possible. So this is a really exciting milestone and important part of the journey because, yeah, once you get past the embryonic stage and you get to a capitalization like this, capital no longer becomes quite as much of a constraint and you have the freedom to execute.

2:19So we're currently hiring eight engineers and building as fast as we can. Love it. So who were the investors involved in this round? How did it come together? So we were fortunate enough to be able to team up with Kirsten Green. Amazing. Yeah, amazing. He was the founder of Forerunner Ventures to join the board and be a part of this round. So Forerunner was the lead investor. Almost all of our existing, basically every single one of our major existing investors doubled down. The round was almost double oversubscribed, which was one and a half times oversubscribed. I don't want to overstate. Okay.

2:59Which is great. And I think just indicative of the excitement behind the tailwinds in this category. And something that I think is particularly exciting about working with Forerunner and Kirsten is their ability to uniquely underwrite the power of brand. I think most investors and even founders are just people building companies. Brand is a very mispriced concept to them. And I think in the limit, in a world where AI and vibe coding is only proliferating and making it easier to replicate products, brand is possibly one of the most powerful moats and defensible aspects of a business. And it, I think, ultimately creates higher LTV and market cap.

3:45right uh good example of this take any commoditized product category gyms you know you have equinox and 24-hour fitness functionally the same underlying commoditized product except one has a much sexier splashier brand like equinox and they have 10x the ability to charge right 30 a month versus 300 a month um you know 3x differential and in market cap of those types of companies uh so brand is a very powerful thing when done right and i think the thing that attracted me and a team to Kirsten and Forbunner the most was just their unique intersection of being a Silicon Valley, native tech-focused investor, but also understanding the power and the resonance of what an iconic consumer brand can become.

4:31So can we talk more about the brand? Because you guys have done that really well. You created a little um like hype storm on the internet and on socials i'm wearing the healthiest hoodie that's ever existed it's incredibly soft and i'm not just saying that um but could you share more about your brand strategy and how you got to that point i think one of my biggest learnings over the past decade in startup world is just the power of eponymous brands right like meaning it is you The name is really what it sounds like. And companies like Robinhood did this exceptionally well a decade ago. They came into the market in a time post-2008, and obviously they're a$40 billion company now, right?

5:19So something has worked. But they came into the market in a time when people were feeling super financially disenfranchised. And the brand literally stands for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. It's all about financial empowerment, right? There's a lot of vibe to Robinhood and the story and the ethos of the company. And they built a tool that helped people take control of their financial life and disintermediate the traditional almost financial advisor or brokerage system. That brand has obviously hit mass market acclaim. And we kind of see there being very similar seeds right now in healthcare, right?

5:58United Healthcare CEO getting shot. People are very frustrated. you can't go more than like seven minutes on social media without seeing something about, you know, the make America healthy again, movement, uh, nanoplastics. Uh, it's just, it's reached a boiling point. Uh, and the, the, the zeitgeist is there. It's like the perfect, ripe primordial soup where we think, uh, a company and a brand to come in that again is eponymous. Uh, that is what it sounds like, like superpower where our whole ethos is to superpower people's health, uh, and help people, you know, use healthcare as a tool to unlock a better level of human performance that they otherwise thought was possible and give them control ultimately.

6:36So that's some of the ways that we think about brand and the intention behind the name, which was a very intentional thing. And I guess the backstory on how the name came about, this was actually branded in a pre-ChatGPT era. So I can promise you that this was all just Jacob's brain. So halfway through 2022, I put together this list, again, drawing from this power of like, well, what would an eponymous brain and health care look like? I wrote out like 250 statements and sentences of like things that, you know, we could theoretically do as a company towards this goal of, you know, enhancing people and helping with their health.

7:10And one of those statements was super powering your health. I'm like, oh, that's a really interesting one. Of all the words and the, you know, the, just the brain dumps that we'd gotten on paper, this one really stood out because, you know, the word superpower has a certain connotation to it. It invokes, you know, at least in my mind, feelings of, you know, like images and like a sense of Captain America or, you know, being superpowered. Right. It's a very strong emotionally, you know, connotative term. So I went out and ended up getting lucky with the way we secured some of the social assets in the domain.

7:47OK, what do you mean? Which is quite a story. Because I think another thing I believe is just the power of domains. Yeah. And, you know, having like authority and trust and credibility from day zero. So when I realized the word superpower, superpower was something we wanted to lean into, I went to go see if the domain was available. It was, but then it turns out it was owned by some like Singaporean private equity firm. Superpower.com? Superpower.com. Yeah, it was, no one had owned it. So I inquired, went through this whole rigmarole for months and months, tracked down like a domain holding company, but they had had some contract with another holding company in Singapore.

8:25So they didn't actually own the domain, even though they said they did. So it was just this multi-month long process where I was on the phones, you know, probably sunk way too much time into this, eventually tracked down the domain, put together a deal. And we ended up buying it for actually only a few hundred K. But believe it or not. Yeah. And I've been offered over 2 million for it by a well-funded AI company, which I will not name. Do you also have superpower.ai or is that in your shopping cart? So fun story there. When we got the$2 million offer to sell the domain to this other well-funded AI company about a year ago, I realized, okay, they're probably going to try to rebrand a superpower anyway.

9:05So I went out to try and get superpower.ai and then I also went and filed a trademark for anything superpower and AI related. Really? So I called my my IP attorney on like a Sunday morning and he's, you know, in Nantucket, like, you know, with his family. And he's like, why are you calling me? You know, I don't work on weekends. And I'm like, you know, obviously, you know, that whole world is probably very different than than us. It's a seven day week job. But I get him to, you know, pull up at his computer, go home from the beach and file like a whole, you know, basic trademark request for us that that weekend for all things superpower and AI related.

9:38And I kid you not, the next day on Monday, that company that tried to acquire our domain filed the patent or the trademark for the same concept. But I got there 24 hours before. So eventually, you know, when it gets to approval, we can dispute and we'll win that obviously because we got there first. So that's a lesson in the power of speed. And they ended up rebranding not to Superpower because we turned down their domain requests and, you know, got the AI. but the more interesting part of the story was actually how we cobbled together the universe of the complete universe of social handles so it's kind of like you know uh pokemon right you go from charmander to charmeleon to charizard if you're trying to you know of all your pokemon it's like we went from you know the domain to the twitter handle to the instagram like we wanted to have the complete the complete stack uh gotta catch them all so so uh the twitter handle was a fun one because we got at super power on twitter it was owned by a guy who had written like an energy book 25 years ago something on like clean energy you know pre pre tesla days and so i went on amazon bought his book sent him an email with a screenshot being like hey man i read your book thought it was really great and uh i'd love to buy your domain here's some of the things i want to do with it and he replied back thank you so much for being magnanimous and buying my book you know it's not really selling that well anymore uh and as a thank you because i could totally extort you because it sounds like you know you're going to be capitalizing this company uh i'm going to give you the account for free i'm not going to charge you and he changed the password to go change the world don't be an asshole wow like a 29 character string and i was like okay at that moment like the company is born like that that was the moment i realized um the power of the mission that we are invoking.

11:25It's not just the name, it's the mission of the company. So, you know, we're not just an eponymously branded company that makes you feel something. We also have a story behind the company and a story behind, you know, the hoodie and all the things that we put out into the world, which we'll get into in a second. So it was really that moment that I realized the power of the mission that we were getting behind, where I could have easily, you know, been extorted for$50 ,000, you know, by this guy for his Twitter handle. But he's like, no, I resonate so much with what you're doing. Just take it for free and go change the world.

11:51I hope you gave him some advisor shares or something. I should email him back and get him a free membership. Yeah, and a hoodie. Yeah, and a hoodie. That's great. Give back. Stay tuned for part two. And then the Instagram was the craziest part, maybe the craziest part of the lore here of completing the package in the brand universe. So the owner of at superpower on Instagram was the founder of the Kuwaiti equivalent of DoorDash. So I ended up calling a bunch of his restaurants, using some social engineering to track down his personal WhatsApp number to get him on a thread. And he was just like not interested whatsoever to sell.

12:36He's like, I like my username. I don't need the money. uh basically go screw yourself in a nice way um so what what we ended up having to do over the course of the the next two years was you know continue to massage that that relationship and i eventually got a um a colleague of ours a member of our team who was in dubai at the time to fly to kuwait whoa whoa whoa you have a team member in dubai that went to kuwait yes yeah he was visiting in Dubai from the US over the holidays to see some family. And we get him to hop on a flight to Kuwait to go meet this guy for lunch. So we coordinate a lunch meeting.

13:18And in the meeting, again, it shows you the power of the mission. Anytime you're able to make a face-to-face connection and relationship, it obviously changes the game versus just some faceless WhatsApp connect. So we got him bought into this idea that him helping us complete the brand universe is a powerful stepping stone to improving humanity. And, you know, as soon as someone feels like they're part of the story, it changes the negotiating landscape. So we ended up, you know, figuring out the right financial arrangement that was workable and getting him to offer to work on the handle with us.

13:52So we ended up securing the full brand universe. And I guess all it took was probably, you know, 50 hours of negotiations and tactics across these three different things, you know, know, the domains of the Twitter and the Instagram, a trip to Dubai, uh, purchasing a book, uh, negotiating with a Singaporean private equity firm. And, and we, uh, we got it done. That is commitment, relentless execution and long-term vision. Very impressive. Yeah. And fun fact, my dad was in the U S military and used to serve, um, he, he served in Operation Desert Storm, uh, before I was born in Kuwait. So it was a fun story for him to to tell him that, you know, we we made things full circle and got the domain from from a Kuwaiti.

14:36Going global. Going global. Let's talk about the hoodie. Let's talk about the hoodie. I want to talk about the hoodie. Can you just explain this? Because I think it was a very strategic and interesting. I love merch. Merch is great. We just had Arielle Zuckerberg on. She also loves merch. merch is really important but you created like a social wave with the hoodie and you strategically did it with certain people i'm very happy i got early access to it thank you very much i got a couple people to buy it because i'm just so influential but could you just share more about it molly you're an influencer um okay so the something we think a lot about internally is this idea of concavity versus convexity, right?

15:22So a concave curve, you know, the first part of the parabola, it basically, you know, the idea of concavity basically states that if you make something, you know, nine out of 10 versus eight out of 10, you're going to get diminishing marginal returns from additional unit of time. So we didn't want this to just be another merch drop. In fact, I don't even consider it merch. I consider it like an extension of the soul of the company and an opportunity to, you know, give people a sense of identity when they are, you know, joining the superpower, the superpower community. So with that in mind, we actually started with the narrative and the story before we even got into the physical, the physical product.

16:05And there's this bigger idea of just how, you know, the institutions that be everything from like, you know, pharmaceutical industry and incentives to the other problems in the food supply chain, agriculture, big chemical, you know, are very relevant and topical for people right now. And it's not quite yet as prevalent in our understanding of clothing. So we started this narrative like, you know, clothing might be making us sick. You know, the clothing industry is broken. And here is just a, you know, a complete antithesis to that. It's literally like the healthiest hoodie ever made. And you might think, you know, hoodies, which are nice and snugly and comfortable, you know, are good for the soul, but they might actually be perniciously you know impacting you if they have a lot of toxic micro dyes yeah yeah exactly um polyester these things they basically leached you know nanoplastics that literally get inhaled as you you know move the fabric um so it's it's just not so not not so grateful so we started with a story so we didn't actually sell um a hoodie uh or drop a hoodie as much as we dropped a story and and a vibe uh and something that you know people could associate as part of their their their their identity and tell a story about right it's not just hey i'm wearing this hoodie and it says a brand on it it's no there's a story behind this this hoodie so we're selling we're really we're selling a story and that's what uh enhanced the the the the virality of it every detail of superpower is super intentional and also quite intense like i think that's very commendable and very interesting not many companies have that kind of commitment to it um or convexity or convexity to the brand and the brand is important the story is important you guys are dedicated to the story i know the start of superpower is actually a very personal story for you i don't know if you feel comfortable sharing about it but i'd love to learn more about your personal story and journey and how it led to founding the company so before um before i get into the story and you'll see why we're doing this um as a result of what happened to me i have to take these things like every 40 minutes or every few hours it's an electrolyte shot i'm gonna make you share one with me here really yeah i love taking it okay it's called quinton okay we sell them on the superpower marketplace uh yeah um and it's spanish seawater okay so the way this works is you break open one end of it it's glass ampule try to have to yourself okay you hit it really hard yeah yeah um and if you spin it upside down, the water's not going to fall out because gravity will do its thing.

18:38But it's from an aquifer in Spain and pretty much untouched by humans, so no contamination or toxins. And there's a plankton and algae population in this water body that has resulted in the water being very trace mineral rich and nutrient dense. So the trace mineral content in this electrolyte shot actually very closely mimics the natural trace mineral composition found in our blood albumin. so more or less what that means is like it's really good for you it's very hydrating um you know uh mineral rich and you can even use it as like saline like i've gotten ivs this stuff really before yeah expensive it's a little expensive you know these things cost like a dollar or so an ampule but um if you break the other end and put your mouth you'll get like an immediate electrolyte boost i'm not that strong

19:31there you go a little salty definitely very salty very salty but very hydrating very refreshing yeah very refreshing it complements the liquid death there we go it complements the liquid death um and uh the reason i have to take this is because i actually don't have a large intestine which in the primary function of the large intestine um you know is uh number one to like hold your stool but then Number two is in your bacterial population, but it's also to regulate electrolytes. So, you know, not to be too graphic, but we run a healthcare company, obviously. But it's the reason why your stool is supposed to be a little hard is because your body is actually pulling water out to rehydrate the rest of your body and calibrate your electrolyte balance.

20:15So I'm sort of like missing that entire process within my body because I almost lost my life due to just a handful of intricate poor health incentives and healthcare failures, which ultimately is what catalyzed the company. So this is something that I have to do as a personal practice to maintain my hydration and my sanity. And it's not that fringe. A lot of Olympic athletes in triathlon and marathon runners will do this stuff rather than carrying around a big flask of water. They'll just have a few electrolyte vials with them to rehydrate. Yeah, much more efficient. Yeah. So in my case, I'll be brief with the story, but the TLDR was, you know, prior life I started a multi-hundred million dollar software company in my early 20s.

21:03And I made the classic mistake of putting the pursuit ahead of Health Foundation, which is something that I think far too many entrepreneurial and ambitious people do because you just don't know any better. Right. And in my case, I wasn't sleeping properly. I kind of lack the tools to take control and know what was happening in my body, number one, but also number two, like deal with hard things. Now I have like a much different perspective on stress and the ability to reframe. And I've done a lot of work on, I guess, like the subconscious patterns that rerun my life in order to deflect and better calibrate myself when stressors do emerge because building a company is just like the ultimate herculean task so that was something i i lacked in it obviously caught up to me got stuck in the hospital for many months uh had to get a handful of of of surgeries and uh obviously lost part of my stomach and the the the core reason for this comes down to health system incentives so in america close to 85 percent of health system revenue comes from two sources do you know what those are tell us pharmaceuticals and surgery So most health systems and hospitals have vertically integrated infusion centers, pharmacies, so they're capturing margin on the pharmaceutical side of things.

22:24And then they also have surgical centers where they perform surgery. Like if you have gallstones, the main protocol is typically get your gallbladder removed, right, which is a nice, you know, probably$100 ,000 billable event plus all the post-op care and follow-up visits. versus, you know, recommending something that might be a little bit more of a, you know, holistic root cause approach to understand, well, why are there gallstones forming in your gallbladder? Instead of just, you know, saying, well, let's cut it out as a solution. So again, this is an example of where the incentives are misaligned.

22:59So in my case, you know, with a hyper-inflamed colon dealing with autoimmune disorder, Crohn's disease was my diagnosis. because never once was there an attempt to understand the root drivers of what results in disease. And this is one of the flaws of the myopic specialized system we have today, where everything in medicine is relegated to organ system specialists, or doctors who have to go through a lot of advanced training to become a cardiac expert, or an endocrinologist, um you know or a gastroenterologist versus taking a step back and looking at the whole system holistically and figuring out well uh you know where are things going haywire systemically or cellularly versus you know just looking at your aspect of health in an asylum in my case you know because i hit to hammer everything's a nail the gastroenterology team that i was being seen by they were effectively you know willfully ignorant to uh things that were happening other parts of my body because all they look at is that one, uh, you know, organ system or, or, or aspect of you.

24:01So the fuller picture was missed, was missed as to what was driving, you know, the diagnosis in my case, which was probably, you know, some combination of dysbiotic microbiome, too high of a toxin load, uh, a dysregulated central nervous system, uh, you know, mitochondria that were impaired in their functioning, nutrient imbalances, uh, a few genetic mutations that I, you know, gave me a few predisposals, which you can mitigate with the right supplement and lifestyle strategy. And that was never considered. It was only, well, you have this presentation, our intervention that is, you know, FDA approved and considered a standard at the hospital.

24:36When it's going to bill us the most money is this surgery or this, you know, 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 15K a month and you are on them for life typically. So very good business model if we look at it from that perspective. So those were the only solutions afforded to me. And never once were they trying to uncover the root cause of what happened as opposed to when I got out of the hospital and discovered the world of concierge medicine, where if you have capital and you're in the know in America or in the world, you can basically get access to a private medical system or private health system, health system, where you can work with doctors who are not accepting insurance, pay all cash, and they will look at you holistically because they've been trained in what's called like functional medicine or holistic medicine or cellular medicine where they don't just look at again specialties in a silo they consider the unified view of everything that's happening and how all the interconnected problem all the different problems are interconnected to get the root cause of what's ultimately driving your disease and then systematically checking the box on each of those in order to get you back to full health in peak state so that was what happened to me.

25:47And it obviously inspired the company because once you realize there's a whole parallel world out there of a better way to do medicine that is holistic, that isn't reactive, that considers the full picture, that considers the complex interactions among different organ systems and cellular processes that drive in a disease or make you not feel as good as you are, you can't unsee it. And it became very obvious being a technologist and a brand builder that there was an opportunity to basically productize this model and take what the best physicians in the world have figured out and turn it into code, number one.

26:21And number two, wrap it in a brand, in a story, in a mission, in a narrative, in a fight against the incumbent forces and misincentives that be in healthcare to ultimately change the status quo of health in America, eventually the world. Let me go global. Let me go to Kuwait. And that's what birthed the company. Wow. that is well i'm happy that you're doing well and you're healthy um i can't imagine how hard that journey must have been and how frustrating it would be um to have to go through all that and reveal that oh you actually don't have to take the hard route that would cut you open and do all these things but take a holistic route and you're young too like you're fairly young and that is a systematic problem in the u.s being misdiagnosed or being diagnosed early on with with something and getting all of these practices put on you that might actually affect you for a really long time and not know how to treat it or go more natural path, functional path, that kind of thing.

27:26Yeah. Um, and it's, you know, if we just think about it from first principles, you know, the body's a system. Um, so why is medicine not holistic and consider things as system. It really comes down to actually the constraints of, you know, I think two things. One is that the medical paradigm was architected in a world where our understanding of science was much more limited. And if we go back to this idea of, you know, convexity, I think we are now, especially in 2025, at the beginning of the exponential jump of the j-curve where human knowledge about science and how the body works is only exponentially compounding.

28:08Meaning that gap between the understanding of the world when the medical system was created and what we know about science now is only exponentially growing. And that's obviously a really big gap. But number two, it's actually the fact that we are constrained by the limitations of the human brain and our ability to compute. Because what is a doctor really doing if you break their job down into like a, you know, into a really simple view? It's they're computing between a few databases. They're 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 interventions you have in your toolkit.

28:56And you're just triangulating between those three different databases, right? To ultimately help treat the patient. And that's overly simplistic, right? Obviously, there's a lot of circular references and things that get really complicated, but at a very simplistic level, that's like the basic computation of medicine and of healthcare.

29:15That obviously means we're constrained by what humans can compute with. So that is why, We have architected this system where people specialize in each of the different aspects and organ systems or specialties of health and modern medicine today because you can only learn so much. It's really, really tough to be as deep in cardiology as you are in endocrinology or gastroenterology or neurology or any of these other specialties. But 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.

30:01And for us, if it is an informatics problem and, you know, compute is now a solved problem, then theoretically there's an opportunity to build a new medical paradigm from the ground up that does not rely on specialties and does not rely on, you know, a system that was created when our understanding of science was much more nascent and does not rely on, you know, the constraints of the human mind and its ability to compute and only store so much medical information. And that is the kind of wave that we are riding and building upon it. superpower is a paradigm in which AI solves a lot of those problems.

30:34I think that's a great answer for why now. I want to share a couple stats and data points because I'm always shocked by this and I revisit this a couple times every now and again. Okay, so you share a couple of stats in the superpower manifesto that I think are just really glaring. And then I'll share some more from Casey Means because, wow, oh my gosh. So 88 % of people are metabolically unhealthy. Yes. 8 ,000 chemicals exist in the US food supply. That don't exist in Europe. Obesity rates have more than tripled since 1960. Americans put on an average of 168 chemicals on their bodies each day.