Why die when you’ve got AI? The startups racing to outrun aging

 

“Why do I need to die? I really enjoy experiencing life,” Filippo Nigro said when asked why he launched his longevity startup You(th).

“It’s actually potentially possible to reverse aging. These are solvable problems according to the law of physics. When I discovered that I said, ‘Okay, even if there is 0.1% probability of reaching longevity escape velocity during my lifetime, then I’m just going to put blood, sweat and tears into trying to solve that.’”

Longevity escape velocity refers to a future when humans can use science and technology to extend their lifespans faster than they age, meaning that, theoretically, they never need to die. Nigro identifies two factors required to make this a reality: biotech breakthroughs in gene reprogramming, and a scalable platform for measuring people’s health that can predict potential risks before they occur.

It’s the second piece of the puzzle that he’s working on with his company You(th), which combines smartphone cameras and microphones with clinically validated AI models to let users screen for more than 50 biomarkers.

Nigro’s mission to give people a better understanding of their overall well-being is part of a broader trend. Specialized “longevity clinics,” which offer advanced health screenings for patients, have quadrupled in number since 2020.

Now startups like You(th) are trying to make the benefits of these elite and expensive services more accessible, using AI and information from smartphones and wearables to let people better track their well-being, The Infinite Loop by Nebius reports. But with a potentially limitless stream of data to work with, there are questions about how to build the infrastructure to support these products as they scale, not to mention whether playing god in the pursuit of living forever is really a good idea.

“Making sci-fi a reality”

Nigro co-founded You(th) in 2023, after coming across research showing that smartphone cameras and microphones could be used to detect biomarkers for conditions ranging from cardiovascular well-being to prediabetes and mental health. The app licenses clinically validated, third-party AI models that allow users to check biomarkers such as their blood pressure and heart rate variability, based on short selfie videos, photos and voice recordings.

“The camera measures how light is reflected on your forehead, on your chin, and so on. And the light is different depending on blood flow, so you can detect: how fast does it flow, how strong does it flow, how often does it flow,” said You(th) co-founder, Johannes Kraus.

The ability to test for these kinds of biomarkers with such widespread consumer technology might be impressive, but You(th) now has a challenge in educating the market that its product actually works.

“The biggest barrier to product-market fit is trust, because you are making sci-fi reality,” said Nigro.

After initially launching as a customer-facing app, You(th) now runs a B2B2C model, partnering with clinics and insurance providers looking for ways to keep their customers more engaged with their own well-being. Beyond getting the You(th) app into more users’ hands, Nigro said that working with established health providers is a helpful way to build confidence in AI’s capabilities: “We’re scaling B2B2C to build trust.”

“Homo Superior”

Another longevity startup using AI to help people understand their own well-being is Dubai-based AVARA, which combines data from wearables with blood test information to deliver personalized nutrition protocols for its users.

“The one thing we do from the moment we’re born to the moment we die is eat food, that’s a guaranteed nonstop. Why is that not personalized?” said co-founder Josh Sharron.

AVARA’s platform draws on a dataset of more than 1,000 peer-reviewed sources from research into how different foods affect different biomarkers, to give users insight into how their diet influences their bodies.

“We hook up the wearable, then we get the data from sleep, your recovery, what your actual habits look like, then we’re able to hyperpersonalize your meals, because we know what you’re lacking in which biomarkers,” Sharron said.

He believes that, by giving people a better understanding of how nutrition affects their well-being, AI can help move humanity into a new, sci-fi-inspired era, where people can relentlessly optimize themselves in pursuit of longer and healthier lives.

“In X-Men they call [the mutants] ‘Homo Superior.’ You’ve got Neanderthals, then Homo sapiens, then the next stage of evolution is [like a] Homo Superior, where we’ve got so much tech and data that we can optimize ourselves in every way that we’re actually pushing the frontier of human evolution,” said Sharron.

Cheating death?

But moving humanity to its next stage of evolution could come with a big token bill. You(th)’s Nigro said that, in the future, users won’t even need to open the app to give it the information it needs to assess their biomarkers, as the company will be able to use “passive” data, gathered from their wider digital footprint.

“You’ll just unlock your phone, take stories on Instagram, send voice messages on WhatsApp, right now I’m speaking with you [on Zoom], generating facial and voice data,” he told The Infinite Loop. “I can basically have a longitudinal assessment about my blood pressure, metabolic health, respiratory health, cognitive health and skin health from that data.”

To make processing all of this data feasible, startups like You(th) are trying to move as much processing as they can to the edge to avoid hefty cloud-inference costs.

“You will need to have quite a sophisticated system. For example, our facial video data is processed on-device; it doesn’t go to the cloud,” said Nigro. “We just need to watch out that the app is not so loaded by adding so many models onto the device that it then takes ages to download the app.”

When asked whether he believes critics of the longevity movement who say that aging is a natural part of life that shouldn’t be pathologized, have a fair point, Nigro responded saying that people will get with the program.

“Society needs to adapt. Right now, it might feel unnatural, but in the early 1900s we were not even flying, so planes were unnatural because people couldn’t fly, and 60 years later we’re flying to the moon,” he said.

But, while Nigro’s motivations to cheat death are on the more extreme end of the scale, AI platforms like You(th) and AVARA might also help those of us who just want to stay healthier for longer. At a time when public health care systems are under increasing strain, the move to a more preventive system that spots potential problems before they arise, rather than treating them reactively, might be no bad thing.

This story was produced by The Infinite Loop by Nebius and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.