The co-founder and CEO of Function Health has spent fifteen years building companies that hand power back to the individual. This one is the biggest bet yet.
Jonathan Swerdlin, co-founder & CEO of Function Health.
Jonathan Swerdlin runs Function Health, an Austin company that lets members order comprehensive lab testing directly and read AI-generated reports on the results. Since its public launch in 2023 it has grown to hundreds of thousands of paying members, raised a $298 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation, and drawn a cap table that runs from Andreessen Horowitz to Matt Damon. In October 2025, Goldman Sachs named Swerdlin one of its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of the year.
What makes the story worth telling is not the valuation. It is the pattern. Swerdlin has built one company after another around a single idea: take out whoever is standing between a person and the thing they want. An ad-free video app. A direct-to-consumer brand. And now lab work that a member can order without a gatekeeper. The product keeps changing. The instinct does not.
He has been at this since 2008, when he started investing on his own and, over the years, advised or backed more than 100 companies. Function is the one he has decided to run himself, full time, as chief executive - and the one he talks about with the most personal stake.
"It turns out being healthy is not that complicated," he told the a16z podcast in 2024. "To maintain your health is actually fairly simple once you're on top of it." Simple, it turns out, is hard to build. He is trying anyway.
"My choice to take health into my own hands is much of the internal fire that keeps me getting up in the morning and building Function." Jonathan Swerdlin, on the Raising Health podcast, 2024
Function is a membership platform. That word matters to Swerdlin. He and his co-founders did not set out to open clinics or hire armies of physicians. They set out to build a product that could reach many people at once, then partner with medicine rather than replace it.
His co-founder is Dr. Mark Hyman, a well-known figure in preventive medicine who has said he wishes he could see millions of patients. Function was their shared answer to that wish: not a bigger practice, but a platform. Swerdlin runs the company and the business; Hyman anchors the medical side. The other founders - Pranitha Patil, Mike Nemke, Seth Weisfeld, and Daniel Swerdlin - filled out the team.
The company's growth has been steep. A $3 million seed in 2022 gave way to a $53 million Series A in 2024 at a $191 million valuation, and then the $298 million Series B in 2025 that lifted it to $2.5 billion. Along the way Function landed on TIME's list of the most influential companies. In 2025 and 2026 the company leaned into AI, rolling out a "medical intelligence" model to help members interpret their own data.
Figures drawn from public reporting and Function Health filings. Bars scaled for illustration.
As chairman, Swerdlin helped scale the direct-to-consumer brand from its early days past $40 million in sales - his first big lesson in selling directly to the customer.
He co-founded and led an ad-free video and peer-to-peer payments app, backed by Mark Cuban. His pitch was blunt: online advertising, he argued, was "the biggest scam on the internet."
Co-founded in 2016, the firm was built around what he called a more human model of venture capital. Through it and his own investing he has backed names from Seed to xAI.
"It turns out being healthy is not that complicated. To maintain your health is actually fairly simple once you're on top of it."
"My choice to take health into my own hands is much of the internal fire that keeps me getting up in the morning and building Function."
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His co-founder Dr. Mark Hyman put the mission plainly: "I wish I could see millions of patients. We are building Function to give you the keys to own your health."
He studied finance, entrepreneurship, and computer science together at the University of Maryland's Smith School - roughly the three hats he still wears.
Function's investors include Matt Damon, Kevin Hart, Pedro Pascal, Zac Efron, and Colin Kaepernick alongside the venture firms.
An old instructor bio listed his interests as dogs, bicycles, dance parties, and Brooklyn living - a long way from the buttoned-up executive photo.