“Why do I need to die? I really enjoy experiencing life,” Filippo Nigro said. He launched his longevity startup, You(th), to pursue that goal.
“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 where technology could extend human lifespans faster than people age. In theory, humans could continue living indefinitely. Nigro identifies two factors needed to make this a reality. One involves biotech breakthroughs in gene reprogramming. The other involves a scalable platform that can measure health and predict potential risks.
Nigro is working on the second piece with his company, You(th). The platform combines smartphone cameras and microphones with clinically validated AI models. Users can screen for more than 50 biomarkers
Nigro wants to give people a better understanding of their overall well-being. His mission reflects a broader trend. Specialized “longevity clinics,” which offer advanced health screenings for patients, have quadrupled in number since 2020.
Startups like You(th) are trying to make these services more accessible. They use AI and data from smartphones and wearables to help people track their well-being, The Infinite Loop by Nebius reports. But these startups face another challenge as they scale. They must build infrastructure capable of handling potentially limitless data. They also face questions about the ethics of pursuing extreme longevity.
AI Is Fueling the Race Against Aging
Nigro co-founded You(th) in 2023 after discovering research on smartphone-based health screening. The research showed that cameras and microphones could detect biomarkers linked to cardiovascular health, 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.
Testing these biomarkers with everyday consumer technology is impressive. But You(th) still faces a challenge. It must convince the market that its product works.
“The biggest barrier to product-market fit is trust, because you are making sci-fi reality,” said Nigro.
You(th) initially launched as a customer-facing app. It now operates under a B2B2C model. The company partners with clinics and insurance providers seeking to engage customers in 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.”
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“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.”
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Can AI Help Us Live Longer?
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.
Written by: Tim Smith for The Infinite Loop by Nebius
This story was produced by The Infinite Loop by Nebius and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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