Empirical Health vs Superpower
Empirical Health vs Superpower: Empirical Health is $190 (on-demand (pay per test)), and Superpower is $199 (once per year). Empirical Health costs less, and Empirical Health covers more biomarkers (100 vs 59). One difference beyond the panel: Empirical Health has a physician on its founding team, Superpower does not.
I've tested Empirical Health myself and reviewed Superpower in detail. To build this comparison I pulled each provider's current biomarker list and pricing, then normalized the marker names so the counts line up like for like.
Below I compare the two side by side: pricing and cost per biomarker, the exact tests each panel includes and where they diverge, who founded each company and whether a doctor is on the team, and the apps and any AI each has built.
Empirical Health vs Superpower: pricing
| Empirical Health | Superpower | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $190 | $199 |
| Cadence | On-demand (pay per test) | Once per year |
| Biomarkers | 100 | 59 |
| Cost per biomarker | $1.90 | $3.37 |
Cost per biomarker is the sticker price divided by the number of markers, a rough apples-to-apples figure. It ignores cadence, the app, and any doctor review, which the sections below cover.
Empirical Health vs Superpower: biomarkers compared
Empirical Health's Comprehensive Health Panel covers 100 biomarkers and Superpower's Basic covers 59. They share 40. 60 are unique to Empirical Health and 19 are unique to Superpower.
Only in Empirical Health (60)
- Anion Gap
- ApoB/LDL Ratio
- Apolipoprotein A1
- Apolipoprotein B/A1 Ratio
- Basophils %
- Chloride
- Cortisol
- De Ritis Ratio (AST/ALT)
- Eosinophils %
- Estimated Average Glucose
- Estimated VLDL/HDL Ratio
- Estimated VLDL/LDL Ratio
- Ferritin
- FIB-4 Score
- HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio
- Iron
- Iron Saturation
- LDL/Cholesterol Ratio
- LDL/HDL Ratio
- LDL/Non-HDL Ratio
- Lipoprotein (a)
- Lymphocytes %
- Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin (MCH)
- Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin Concentration (MCHC)
- Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV)
- Mean Platelet Volume (MPV)
- Monocytes %
- Neutrophils %
- Non-HDL/Cholesterol Ratio
- Non-HDL/HDL Ratio
- Red Cell Distribution Width (RDW)
- Remnant Cholesterol
- Total Iron Binding Capacity
- Total Protein
- Triglycerides/HDL Ratio
- Urine Amorphous Sediment
- Urine Appearance
- Urine Bacteria
- Urine Bilirubin
- Urine Blood
- Urine Calcium Oxalate Crystals
- Urine Color
- Urine Glucose
- Urine Granular Casts
- Urine Hyaline Casts
- Urine Ketones
- Urine Leukocyte Esterase
- Urine Nitrite
- Urine pH
- Urine Protein
- Urine Red Blood Cells
- Urine Renal Epithelial Cells
- Urine Specific Gravity
- Urine Squamous Epithelial Cells
- Urine Transitional Epithelial Cells
- Urine Triple Phosphate Crystals
- Urine Uric Acid Crystals
- Urine White Blood Cells
- Urine Yeast
- VLDL Cholesterol
Only in Superpower (19)
- DHEA-Sulfate
- Direct Bilirubin
- ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate)
- Estradiol (E2)
- Fasting Insulin
- Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH)
- Free T3 (Triiodothyronine)
- Free T4 (Thyroxine)
- Gamma-Glutamyl Transferase
- Homocysteine
- IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor 1)
- Indirect Bilirubin
- Luteinizing Hormone (LH)
- Prolactin
- PSA Total
- Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG)
- Thyroid Peroxidase Antibodies
- Total Testosterone
- Uric Acid
Show the 40 biomarkers both include
- Alanine Aminotransferase
- Albumin
- Albumin/Globulin Ratio
- Alkaline Phosphatase
- Apolipoprotein B
- Aspartate Aminotransferase
- Atherogenic Index of Plasma
- Basophils
- BUN (Blood Urea Nitrogen)
- BUN/Creatinine Ratio
- Calcium
- Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
- Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
- Creatinine
- eGFR (Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate)
- Eosinophils
- Folate
- Globulin
- Glucose
- HDL Cholesterol
- Hematocrit
- Hemoglobin
- Hemoglobin A1c
- High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein
- LDL Cholesterol
- Lymphocytes
- Monocytes
- Neutrophils
- Non-HDL Cholesterol
- Platelet Count
- Potassium
- Red Blood Cell Count
- Sodium
- Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone
- Total Bilirubin
- Total Cholesterol
- Triglycerides
- Vitamin B12
- Vitamin D (25-Hydroxy)
- White Blood Cell Count
Empirical Health vs Superpower: founders and team
Empirical Health
Doctor on founding team? Yes
- Founded: 2023
- Funding: ~$500K seed (2023), Y Combinator-backed
- Founders:
- Raquel Rodriguez Martinez, MD, MPP — Co-founderphysician
- Brandon Ballinger — Co-founder & CEO
Physician co-founder Raquel Rodriguez Martinez, MD is a former UCSF medical director. Incorporated as a public benefit corporation.
Superpower
Doctor on founding team? No
- Founded: 2023
- Funding: ~$34M raised; $30M Series A (Apr 2025, led by Forerunner) above a $300M valuation
- Founders:
- Jacob Peters — Co-founder & CEO
- Max Marchione — Co-founder
- Kevin Unkrich — Co-founder & CTO
No physician among the founders. Its longevity physician, Anant Vinjamoori, MD, is an executive (Chief Longevity Officer), not a founder.
Empirical Health vs Superpower: apps and technology
| Empirical Health | Superpower | |
|---|---|---|
| iOS app | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android app | ✓ | — |
| Web app | ✓ | ✓ |
| Trained its own AI model | Trained JETS, a JEPA-based wearable foundation model, on ~3M person-days of multi-device wearable data (presented at NeurIPS 2025) | — |
- Empirical Health: JETS is a genuine from-scratch model (not Apple's on-device framework), so far a NeurIPS 2025 workshop research model rather than a confirmed shipped feature. Native iOS, Android (Wear OS), and web apps.
- Superpower: "Superpower AI" is a retrieval-augmented layer with clinician review over an undisclosed third-party LLM, not a trained model; its "trained on medical literature" wording refers to a retrieval corpus, not model weights. A native Android app isn't confirmed yet.
Empirical Health vs Superpower: which is better?
On the numbers, Empirical Health is the stronger value here: it covers more biomarkers and costs less. Check the biomarker breakdown above before deciding: Empirical Health has 60 markers Superpower doesn't, and Superpower has 19 that Empirical Health skips, so the right choice depends on which of those you actually care about.