When Pranitha Patil walked into Harvard’s design engineering program, she carried more than textbooks. She carried lab reports that read like warning sirens: PCOS, prediabetes, genetically high cholesterol, an HbA1c hovering around 6%. As a young South Asian woman, she kept hearing the same unsatisfying message from the healthcare system: manage it yourself, or accept a diminished quality of life.

She started tracking her own blood work, trying to decode what each marker meant and what to do next. The pattern that emerged was as troubling as her results. Medicine was reactive, not preventive. You waited until something broke, then hoped the system could fix it. Patil became convinced that if she had seen these risk signals earlier, in a way she could understand and act on, her health trajectory might have been very different.

At Harvard, that frustration turned into a design challenge: what would a truly comprehensive preventive health platform look like? She assumed someone had already built it. No one had. That realization collided with a meeting that would change her life: entrepreneur Jonathan Swerdlin, who shared her conviction that people should own their health data and decisions, not just receive them.

Patil made a choice that startled classmates and professors. She left Harvard early to build Function, a membership-based preventive health platform that now offers more than 160 lab tests, advanced MRI and CT imaging, and AI-driven insights at a fraction of traditional costs. She joined forces with Swerdlin, physician and functional medicine leader Dr. Mark Hyman, designer Seth Weisfeld and attorney Dan Swerdlin to turn a personal pain point into an ambitious company.

Their thesis was simple but radical: give people continuous, high-fidelity data about their bodies, then use artificial intelligence to translate that information into clear, personalized action. Function’s private AI chat helps members interpret results, understand risks and build step-by-step plans. Behind the scenes, a medical intelligence lab stitches together labs, imaging, wearables and medical records into a longitudinal portrait of each member’s health.

Investors initially struggled to see beyond “just lab testing.” Patil and her co-founders pitched something larger: a new infrastructure for preventive health, where AI doesn’t replace clinicians but amplifies them, and where early detection becomes the norm rather than the exception. That vision powered their early funding rounds and propelled Function to a multibillion-dollar valuation.

Today, Patil talks less about disruption and more about responsibility. Once people gain access to this level of data, she argues, there is no going back. The real test is whether technology can make health not only more measurable, but more humane, accessible and actionable for everyone.