#27 Jacob Peters | Co-founder of Superpower

Rebuilding Healthcare Like a Startup | Inside Superpower with Co-Founder Jacob Peters

TL;DR: After nearly losing his life to Crohn’s and spending months in a hospital bed, serial founder Jacob Peters realized just how broken reactive, profit-driven healthcare really is. Now, as co-founder of Superpower, he’s helping build a “healthcare super app” that combines 100+ lab tests, AI diagnostics, and concierge care into one membership — designed to catch problems early and optimize performance, not just patch you up when you’re already sick. Superpower has raised a $30M Series A and is on pace toward 100,000 members as it scales a prevention-first model.

‍

When the Healthcare System Almost Killed Him

Four years ago, Jacob Peters was stuck in a hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai in LA for roughly half a year — the casualty of a system that rewards interventions more than outcomes.

He’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s colitis, a form of IBD. Like most patients, he was essentially offered two doors:

• Door 1: High-dose biologic drugs to suppress his immune system
• Door 2: Surgery to cut out inflamed sections of his intestines

What he wasn’t offered: a real root-cause workup.

Hospitals like Cedars are part of a broader pattern in U.S. healthcare: giant systems where 80–90% of revenue comes from surgeries and pharmaceuticals, all vertically integrated into their own pharmacies, infusion centers, and ORs. That economic setup makes it very hard to incentivize prevention, lifestyle intervention, and upstream diagnostics.

After eventually recovering, Jacob got exposed to what wealthy insiders pay six figures for: concierge doctors who systematically test and tune everything — nutrients, hormones, inflammatory markers, cardiovascular risk — and then coach you through fixing it. That contrast became the seed for Superpower:

If this level of care exists for the few… why can’t technology make it available to the many?

‍

From JP Morgan to Commsor to Launch House… to a Health Crisis

Jacob didn’t come from medicine — and that’s kind of the point.

• He started at J.P. Morgan as a data scientist, where he launched an internal innovation incubator, keynoted a global data science symposium of 6,000+ people, and won a firm-wide hackathon recognized by CEO Jamie Dimon.
• He co-founded Commsor, a community-management platform that raised ~$68M and helped define the “community-led growth” category.
• He later co-founded Launch House, backing early-stage founders with capital, community, and playbook-level support.

Behind the LinkedIn wins, his health was sliding: poor diet, broken sleep, nonstop stress, and unaddressed symptoms that eventually culminated in that Crohn’s diagnosis and months in the hospital.

The experience broke his trust in traditional, reactive care — and set up his pivot into health-tech.

‍

What Superpower Actually Is

Superpower is pitched as “the world’s first healthcare super app and AI doctor.”

In practice, it does three big things:

1. Become your health system of record
   • Pulls in your historical medical records from doctors and hospitals you’ve seen over the years.
   • Adds a deep lab panel covering 100+ biomarkers across 21 core health categories — including nutrients, hormones, cardiovascular risk markers, inflammation, and more.
   • Goes far beyond what a typical “annual” covered by insurance will look at.
2. Make sense of the data (with an “AI doctor” under the hood)
   • Their AI models synthesize labs + history into a personalized health plan.
   • The goal isn’t just “are you in range?” — it’s pattern detection, early risk spotting, and proactive suggestions rather than waiting for catastrophic events.
3. Turn insights into one-click action
   • A curated marketplace of diagnostics, supplements, and medications.
   • 24/7 access to a concierge care team via chat for questions, prescriptions, and plan adjustments.

The membership includes 100+ lab tests a year and aims to detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions, all bundled at a price point deliberately modeled on familiar consumer subscriptions (think: closer to Amazon Prime or Spotify than a five-figure concierge clinic).

The language inside the product reflects that philosophy: you’re a member, not a patient.

“Become a member so you don’t have to become a patient.”

Superpower isn’t at 100,000 members yet, but they’re on pace toward that mark as they scale their onboarding, testing, and care infrastructure.

‍

A Different Arc for Healthcare

Zooming out, the bet Superpower is making lines up with the macro data:

• Between 1975–2020, ~80% of lives preserved across five major cancers came from prevention and early detection, not treatment.
• Preventive care can reduce serious health risks by up to 40%, according to WHO and CDC analyses.
• Yet only ~8% of Americans get routine preventive screenings.

Superpower is trying to flip that equation by:

• Giving people continuous context on what’s happening under the hood
• Pairing human clinicians with AI so 24/7, text-based care actually scales
• Making full-body diagnostics a routine annual event, not a luxury reserved for the ultra-wealthy

In April 2025, the company announced a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, with backing from a wild mix of investors: NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, DJ Steve Aoki, actress Vanessa Hudgens, and funds like Day One, Susa Ventures, Long Journey, Winklevoss Capital, and more.

The ambition is clear: take the six-figure, concierge-style playbook to mass scale — with software and AI doing the heavy lifting.

‍

Culture, Velocity, and “The World’s Healthiest Office”

On the company-building side, Jacob’s tech DNA shows.

• He and his co-founders hold a brutal talent bar — many hires are ex-founders or early employees from breakout startups.
• They’ve compressed eight-week roadmaps into 14-day “Shipmas” sprints by aggressively deleting requirements and embracing first-principles thinking (straight out of the Elon/Snowflake/Frank Slootman playbook).
• The team jokes they work out of “the world’s healthiest office,” stocked with filtered water, nutritious food, and an environment designed to keep the builders as optimized as the members they serve.

That intensity is balanced with a core cultural principle: “Superpower your health” — inside the company as much as for its members. His own experience with burnout and illness is now baked into how they build.

‍

Jacob’s Flow Stack | From Trampolines to Red Light Pods

No Playbook episode is complete without a Flow Stack breakdown. Here’s what’s currently in Jacob’s mix:

Movement & daily baselines

• A mini-trampoline / rebounder first thing in the morning to wake up his lymphatic system and circulation.
• Regular movement and an emphasis on staying out of pure “fight-or-flight” by checking in on how his nervous system actually feels, not just how his calendar looks.

Fuel & experimentation

• Weekly batches of grass-fed beef gelatin + apple juice — essentially a collagen-rich jello — to backfill amino acids like glycine that are often missing in modern, muscle-meat-heavy diets.
• A prescription antiviral protocol (e.g., valacyclovir, tenofovir) under medical supervision to tamp down latent viral reactivations that were quietly taxing his immune system and energy for years.

He only realized how depleted he’d been once he started treating the viral load and felt ~20% better than his “old normal.”

Sleep & recovery

• Eye mask + earplugs every night as his simple, low-tech sleep stack.
• A full-body red light bed, used naked for full-skin exposure, as a mitochondrial and recovery tool.
• A micro-dose of prescription mirtazapine (under a doctor’s care) as a histamine-blocking aid to smooth sleep when histamine and mast-cell issues flare.

(Important note: anything prescription in his stack is not a recommendation — just a window into how deeply he’s personalizing his protocol with clinicians.)

Focus & cognition

• A focus blend from Gorilla Mind featuring Alpha GPC, saffron, L-tyrosine, and other cognitive support ingredients to keep long work blocks sharp.

Why This Matters for Athletes and High Performers

If you live in the overlap of sports, fitness, and business, Superpower’s worldview should sound familiar:

• Don’t wait for catastrophic failure — track and adjust early.
• Treat the body as an integrated system, not a set of isolated parts.
• Use data + coaching to keep your performance ceiling high and your risk profile low.

Where WHOOP, Oura, and Garmin gave us better signals from the wrist, finger, or chest, companies like Superpower are trying to wire the rest of your life — labs, meds, lifestyle, coaching, and eventually devices like Somnee — into a single, proactive operating system for health.

And Jacob’s story is the cautionary tale + blueprint baked into one:
Ignore your metrics long enough and you’ll end up in the system he’s now trying to replace.