Eight years ago, orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Cup attended a medical conference that changed his professional life.
He co-founded a company from a private practice doctor who built a critical care hospital and sold the company. It gave him interest in both sides of healthcare: the medication and business side, he told TechCrunch.
There he went to an annual conference hosted by renowned physician scientist Dr. Daniel Craft to learn about new technologies that can improve results while reducing costs. Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the Xprize Foundation, was on the stage that year with Dr. Bob Hariri, a pioneer and co-founder of several health technology stem cells, including Genomics Company Human Longevity. They discussed genomics, microbiota, and new technologies that are not part of mainstream medicine.
Inspired, Cup returned to his hometown in Naples, Florida, to “start what we called the Longevity Performance Center. The idea was to do early detection and then optimize people's health,” he said.
In March 2020, Diamandis (pictured above) and his partner Tony Robbins visited after hearing about Kapp's center. They had a stem cell startup called Fountain Therapeutics. The conversation quickly turned into a merger, and by October of that year, both companies had become fountains.
Kapp remained CEOs, both Diamandis and Robbins, as co-founders and executives.
Today, his board of directors also includes Hariri as an advisor. Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture Industries, is an investor. A wealthy Indian business mogul BK Modi is also an investor.
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Fountain Life says it has raised a $18 million Series B led by EOS Ventures from TechCrunch alone, and is taking part from most of the existing members of the board. Fountain previously raised a $80 million Series A, bringing a total of about $108 million, Kap said.
Longevity as a subject of serious research by the medical community is a new field. When Kapp (pictured below) first set up his centre, he said, “We didn't know exactly what longevity means.” However, more research has been underway over the past four to five years.
The first principle of longevity is, “Don't die of stupidity,” he said. Therefore, four fountain life centres today focus on preventive screening, looking for diseases and chronic diseases at the earliest stages that tend to be asymptomatic. Blood tests and body scans collected data on more than 100 biomarkers, from liver fat to “microbiota concentrations,” he said.
The second principal is optimization, meaning improving these markers with scientifically validated treatments, he said. The third principal is to treat the disease or achieve optimization by “using modern regenerative therapy under the FDA exam.”
Screening tests could, for example, discover small intestinal bacteria overgrowth (SIBO), which could lead to certain cancers without treatment, he said. The solution is to restore the balance of the microbiota in a specific prescribed microbiota if caught early.
Dr. William Capimage Credit: Fountain Life
For Fountain members, the tests are repeated quarterly, allowing patients to track the results and ask questions from an AI-powered app called Zori.
But it's expensive, Kap admitted. The full subscription is $30,000 a year, and $10,000 covers only the testing process and AI, but not ongoing testing or medical support.
Still, Kapp remembers two stories that told him that the film was on the right track. The wife of a Robbins fan purchased her husband's membership, and the test caught early stage asymptomatic kidney cancer. My husband is now cancer.
When global hotelier Sam Nazarian explored a partnership with the Fountain and set up a longevity centre in a luxury hotel, Nazarian tested the Fountain and found a cerebral aneurysm. They treated it well, Nazarian said publicly.
Cup says the new funding will allow the company to open more centres. In addition to Naples, they opened facilities in Orlando, Dallas and Westchester, New York. The Houston center will open in December. The Los Angeles and Miami centers are planned for the second quarter of 2026.
He wants to solve the affordable problem by working on “practice development” where Fountain trains medical facilities on its methodology. Kap says this will reduce the costs for access as technology and expertise become more widely available.
Fountains aren't just doctor-led longevity testing startups. The well-known functional health doctor, Mark Heiman, has a company called Function Health. It offers a package of approximately 160 blood tests and offers a $500 annual membership (with an additional fee for additional blood tests) with follow-up tests every 3-6 months. Similarly, the platform analyzes and tracks test results, but does not perform full-body scans. It also does not provide direct access to doctors.
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