Function Health: Can It Win the Race to Build the Second Front Door to Healthcare?

The winners won’t just sell tests or GLP-1s. They’ll tell patients what’s wrong and help them fix it.

1/ TLDR: Americans are building a shadow health system outside insurance. One side starts with diagnostics: Function, Oura, Whoop, Superpower. The other starts with treatment: Hims, Ro, Remedy. Both are racing toward the same destination: a consumer health platform that can diagnose, interpret, treat, and keep people adherent. Function owns the diagnostic wedge. The question is whether it can cross into action before treatment-first companies cross into testing.

2/ The TAM is staggering. GLP-1s, supplements, and peptides are on track to be $400 billion globally by 2030 (Source: Goldman Sachs on GLP-1s, Grand View Research on supplements). Maveron’s Consumer 2026 Report shows health and wellness with the largest intent gap of any category we surveyed. At a more macro level, how much would you pay for another 30 more years of “healthy” life? Fifty percent of your net worth? Eighty percent?

3/ The new wellness stack has four parts: diagnostics, AI interpretation, recommendations, and ongoing care. Diagnostic-first companies are racing treatment-first companies to own all four. There won’t be one winner. There will be two or three.

4/ Each has one thing to overcome. Function, Oura and Whoop have to build or partner their way into treatment. Hims and Ro have to fix mediocre customer love. Remedy has to build brand awareness. Whoever solves their gap first becomes one of the winners.

5/ Customer love is how we judge a brand’s license to grow its share of wallet. Under this measure, Oura is the consensus winner with 4.9 stars on 240,000 iOS ratings and the default answer when anyone asks what wearable to buy. Function is the fastest-rising love story, 4.9 stars on 19,000 iOS ratings and Hyman’s 4 million Instagram followers pre-selling the “your doctor missed something” promise. Remedy is the sleeper at 4.6 stars on 12,100 Trustpilot reviews, beating Ro (3.7 stars, 3,400 reviews) and crushing Hims (3.0 stars, 8,300 reviews) on both volume and quality, driven by synchronous visits with real RNs on Zoom. Hims and Ro were built on SEO, performance marketing, and category timing. Great customer love is what enables them to 10x+ from here.

6/ Function is the case study I’m looking at first. It raised a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation in November 2025, and has ~500K members as of Feb 2026. That’s $180M+ in membership revenue alone at $365 a head, before $499 MRI scans, $349 Heart & Lungs CT, and any supplement sales. It has run 50+ million lab tests since 2023.

7/ The founder edge is marketing, not medicine. Hyman brings the audience: bestselling books, a podcast, a Cleveland Clinic pedigree, ~4 million Instagram followers, and a built-in following of people who already think sick care is missing the point. Function is unusually good at the one thing consumer healthcare almost never gets right.

8/ The acquisitions tell you where Function thinks the moat lives. May 2025: Ezra for a 22-minute $499 full-body MRI. November 2025: Medical Intelligence Lab. April 2026: Getlabs for at-home phlebotomy. May 2026: SuppCo with TrustScores on 35,000+ supplements. Imaging, interpretation, distribution, supplements. Notice what’s missing. Prescription treatment.

9/ Here’s the thing about diagnostics: the test is the easy part. Function gives you 160+ data points. Your ApoB is high. Your fasting insulin is creeping. Your Vitamin D is on the floor. Now what?

10/ If the answer is “book a primary or urgent care visit,” Function shoves the customer back through the first front door. Sick care wins. If the answer is, “Here’s the supplement stack, the prescription, the protocol, the retest in 90 days,” Function owns the relationship. SuppCo is step one but not the whole answer. My colleague Simran Suri wrote about this recently. The first wave of longevity solved for discovery and diagnosis. The real unlock is adherence. What happens after someone gets the result? Does the advice stick? Do behaviors change?

11/ Oura is also figuring this out. Oura acquired Galen AI in April 2026, connecting the ring to medical records across 800+ institutions, and launched Health Panels through Quest in September 2025. They keep adding diagnostic capability, but still no treatment. Superpower started as a $199/year biomarker company and pivoted its homepage to “Peptides by Superpower.” GLP-1s will be a $100B category by 2030 and that’s just a single peptide. The money is in what you do after the test.

12/ The treatment-first crowd is racing the other way. Hims & Hers ($2.35B in 2025 revenue, +59% YoY) launched Labs by Hims & Hers in November 2025 at $199 to $499 a year, with CEO Andrew Dudum telling the WSJ he expects it to be a $1B business. Ro added labs, GLP-1s, nutrition coaching, and direct Novo Nordisk integration for the Wegovy oral pill in January 2026. Remedy Meds (disclosure: I’m a Maveron GP and we’re investors) bought Thirty Madison to add Nurx, Keeps, and Cove to its core GLP-1 offering. A member who walks in for GLP-1 doesn’t leave when she hits her goal weight. She converts to hair loss, hormones, sleep, fertility, derm.

13/ Point is: both sides are converging on the same customer. Whoever owns the most of the four parts captures the most lifetime value.

14/ Regulation is the great unknown risk. Peptide compounding pharmacies are under scrutiny. The FTC is a threat on supplement claims. AI clinical interpretation creates liability. A change in presidential administration brings a whole new set of priorities and risks. The companies that win will have built a real medical and regulatory lobbying operation.

15/ Function’s specific risk. They’re great at telling you what’s wrong. They’re unproven at making you fix it. The bear case isn’t acquisition. It’s that lab values don’t change behavior in healthy people. Function becomes a one-time-purchase brand. The “your doctor missed something” hook lands in year one and breaks in year three when ApoB is still high and the supplement stack didn’t move it. Function plateaus, and Hyman’s audience moves to the next buzzy wellness startup.

16/ The bull case. Hyman’s audience and brand love give Function a sustainable marketing advantage. The member who pays $365 for labs is one click from $200/month in supplements, $300/month in peptides or GLP-1s, and a $499 annual MRI. If Function executes the integration, the LTV math is excellent. If not, Hims or Ro buys them in 2028 for the brand, dataset, and funnel.

17/ The bigger picture: the shadow system has nothing to do with employer plans or legacy healthcare. It markets through podcasts and Instagram. Sticky members, high-gross margins, the most exciting consumer category of the next decade. Most VCs are underwriting the old front door and missing this one.

Four predictions for the next 18 months. Function announces a GLP-1 or peptide partnership. Oura and Whoop both buy or partner with treatment platforms. Hims, Ro and Remedy use their scale to beat new peptide-only competitors as peptides regulations ease. Adherence-focused players generate 2x the LTV of pure diagnostic players.

Tell me where I’m wrong. @jstoffer on X.