Circulate Health raised $12M in Seed Funding led by Khosla Ventures
A longevity startup called Circulate Health is offering therapeutic plasma exchange as a potential anti-aging procedure and it’s collecting data from paying customers.
In a significant move for the longevity industry, Circulate Health has secured $12 million in Seed funding. The round was led by the high-profile venture firm Khosla Ventures, with participation from Seaside Ventures and CSC Ventures. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its clinic network and accelerate development efforts for its core offering: using TPE to lower biological age and reduce the risk of age-related disease.
The Company & The Investors
The longevity startup: Circulate Health is led by CEO Dr. Brad Younggren and co-founded by Dr. Eric Verdin of the Buck Institute. The company delivers a complete TPE solution: equipment, trained staff, and protocols; to longevity and wellness clinics
Expertise: A cornerstone of Circulate’s development is the expertise of Dr. Dobri Kiprov, who serves as the company’s Chief Medical Officer. Widely recognized as one of the pioneers of therapeutic plasma exchange, Dr. Kiprov has spent decades advancing TPE as a safe, standardized medical procedure.
The Lead Investor: The involvement of Khosla Ventures, a top-tier firm known for backing high-risk, high-reward "moonshot" companies, is a major endorsement of Circulate's novel business model.
The Syndicate: The round is supported by Seaside Ventures, which focuses on health and wellness, and CSC Ventures, which brings expertise in scaling tech companies.
Therapeutic Plasma Exchange: The Technology
Therapeutic Plasma Exchange (TPE) is a procedure in which a patient’s blood is drawn, plasma is separated and discarded, and the blood cells are returned along with a replacement solution (such as albumin). Unlike “young blood” transfusions that primarily focus on adding rejuvenating factors, TPE’s primary action is removal: extracting pro-inflammatory proteins, autoantibodies, and other molecules that accumulate over time and contribute to age-related decline.
In many protocols, including Circulate’s published clinical study with the Buck Institute, TPE is followed by intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusion, which serves for replenishes protective antibodies that were lost in the “cleansing” process, and further modulates immune function.
The company’s data suggest that this combination can significantly impact biological aging. In their study, participants receiving TPE and IVIG experienced an average reduction of 2.6 years in measured biological age, with individuals who had higher burdens of inflammatory markers benefiting the most.
This emerging evidence positions TPE as a promising intervention for people who want to proactively address aging-related risks.
Why It Matters for Longevity
This investment signals a potential shift in how longevity interventions can come to market. Instead of the traditional biotech model: Spending years and billions of dollars to develop a new molecule before earning revenue; Circulate is pursuing a data-first approach, generating evidence while building a profitable business.
Why can Circulate do this when most longevity startups can’t?
Because most longevity therapeutics involve entirely new drugs or biologics, which require extensive safety trials before any human use. In contrast, Circulate is repurposing an FDA-approved therapy (TPE) that has been safely used for decades to treat autoimmune and neurological diseases.
This means:
The safety profile is well established.
The procedure can be legally offered in clinical settings.
The company can enroll paying customers immediately.
TPE has been around for long, what exactly makes Circulate different and why are investors backing them now?
The key distinction is that Circulate is among the first to systematically repurpose TPE for use in otherwise healthy or pre-symptomatic individuals, applying it proactively as a strategy to:
Lower biological age
Reduce pro-inflammatory factors
Potentially delay or prevent chronic diseases of aging
In this way, Circulate is doing for TPE what the TAME trial is doing for metformin:
taking a therapy traditionally used for another indication and rigorously testing whether it can be applied to the biology of aging itself.
By building a data-first business model, Circulate can:
Offer an existing therapy with established safety to consumers who want credible anti-aging interventions
Gather real-world evidence and longitudinal biomarker data at scale
Refine their protocols faster than traditional biotech, which must wait years before touching a human patient
This combination—repurposing an approved therapy, targeting the growing longevity market, and generating robust data—is why investors believe Circulate could pioneer a new category of preventive health optimization.
Much like prolonged fasting depletes pathological and pro-inflammatory proteins in circulation, then replenishes healthier factors during refeeding, TPE combined with IVIG operates on a similar principle: first remove the bad, then restore the good. However, while fasting engages regenerative processes across multiple tissues, TPE’s effects are primarily concentrated in the bloodstream.
What’s Next
With $12 million in fresh funding, Circulate Health is poised to scale rapidly and explore new applications:
Microplastic and toxin removal: New studies will evaluate whether TPE can clear pollutants such as microplastics, mercury, and PFAS from the bloodstream.
Aggressive clinic expansion: The company plans to more than double its footprint, growing from 24 to over 50 partner clinics, including its first international locations.
Brain health research: Early signals suggest TPE may also impact neuroinflammation and cognitive function, an area the team is eager to investigate further
The Bigger Picture
While TPE could be considered one of the first credible anti-aging interventions available to consumers, it represents only the first level in a broader strategy: cleansing the bloodstream to slow the accumulation of damage.
It is an important step but it will likely not be enough on its own to fully halt or reverse aging. Nevertheless, it already offers early proof that targeted interventions can measurably reduce biological age markers.
If this approach is widely adopted around the world, it will make the GeroHypothesis—that aging is a modifiable biological process—tangible to millions of people.
By showing that we can systematically keep people biologically younger for longer, it will pave the way for the next frontier: demonstrating that aging itself can eventually be slowed, stopped, or reversed.
This shift in mindset: seeing aging as something we can intervene in rather than simply accept; will attract the talent, capital, and public awareness needed to unlock the field’s full potential. Already, governments like Singapore have begun redesigning their healthcare systems to prioritize prevention over reaction, recognizing that aging populations with rising chronic disease burdens cannot be sustainably managed with reactive care alone. In such a proactive healthcare model, therapies like TPE could play a key role—helping people stay healthier for longer and reducing strain on public resources.
If this trend continues, it may mark the beginning of a global movement: one where societies invest in interventions earlier, aiming to compress morbidity and fundamentally rethink what it means to grow older.