Your Body, Your Baseline: Pranitha Patil on Function Health, Women's Health Data, and Building While Becoming a Mother

The tests exist. The science has been here for decades. The only thing that's ever been missing is access. Pranitha Patil co-founded Function Health because she lived the gap herself. Diagnosed with PCOS at 16, pre-diabetes and high cholesterol in her 20s, she spent years running experiments on her own body, tracking her biomarkers in a spreadsheet before she had the language for what she was actually doing. She was her own baseline because no research existed for South Asian women like her. Function Health now has nearly 500 employees, has delivered over 50 million health results, and 65% of its members are women - which tells you everything about who shows up when you actually give them the information about their own bodies. The membership is $365 a year. One dollar a day. And Pranitha became a first-time mother in the middle of all of it - while the company was scaling, while funding rounds were closing, while everything was happening at once. She's here to talk about what that actually looked like. In this episode: Why health data is a power issue, not just a wellness trend—and what changes when women have access to their own biomarkers How Function Health works: 100+ biomarkers per test, early cancer detection (50 cancer types), and what it means to build a longitudinal health picture over time The women's health gap - the research that doesn't exist and what Pranitha did when told she couldn't be put on statins because no one had studied her yet Building and founding in seasons: how Pranitha and her husband structured their household so one could sprint while the other held the ground On becoming a mother inside a hyper-growth company: what she expected, what blindsided her, and why she thinks founder and mother are more complementary than the world wants you to believe Perimenopause, women's health literacy, and the conversation our mothers never got to have Resilience as a learned skill - what the "soft" 20-year-old version of Pranitha built that the founder version depends on today Use the code: BREADWINNERS50 for $50 off when you sign up for Function Health Join The Breadwinners community: Subscribe on Substack Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners Rate & review wherever you listen — it helps more women find this show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices