Eight years ago, orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Kapp attended a medical conference that changed his professional life.
He had gone from a private-practice doctor to co-founding a company that built critical care hospitals to then selling that company. It gave him an interest for both sides of healthcare: the medicine and business sides, he told TechCrunch.
So he went to the annual conference hosted by famed physician-scientist Dr. Daniel Kraft to learn about new tech that could improve results while lowering costs. Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, was on stage that year with Dr. Bob Hariri, a stem-cell pioneer and co-founder of several health techs like genomics company Human Longevity, Kapp said. They discussed genomics, microbiomics, and new tech that wasn’t part of mainstream medicine.
Inspired, Kapp went back to his home town of Naples, Florida, and “started a thing called Longevity Performance Center. The idea was to do early detection and then optimization of people’s health,” he said.
In March 2020, Diamandis (pictured above) and his buddy Tony Robbins heard of Kapp’s center and visited. They had a stem cell startup called Fountain Therapeutics. Conversation soon turned toward a merger, and by October that year, the two companies became Fountain Life.
