Nuraxi shows off its SuperAger-powered longevity platform and LLM capabilities at Middle East financial conference.

Last week during the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Saudia Arabia, a mysterious longevity AI company called Nuraxi delivered behind closed doors demonstrations of its technology to delegates from the region. Leveraging data from an ongoing study of SuperAgers, Nuraxi says it has created a longevity-focused large language model (LLM) designed to help companies, clinics, governments and beyond offer longevity services at scale.

Longevity.Technology: With countries like Singapore starting to talk about the concept of “Blue Zone 3.0,” there is a growing global interest in how new technologies can help support a societal shift towards longevity. Nuraxi, founded by Italian entrepreneur and Stanford alumnus Stefano Benedikter, claims to be able to “integrate longevity at the highest level, at a country level.” While the company is yet to officially emerge from stealth, we caught up exclusively with Benedikter to find out more.

Benedikter grew up on the island of Sardinia, one of the so-called “Blue Zones” – a handful of geographical areas around the world where the population lives a considerably longer, healthier, and happier life. With the initial idea of building a longevity food business, Benedikter has over time engaged with the scientists and researchers that have been studying Blue Zones since the 1990s.

“But I learned that to impact longevity at a holistic level, food is probably only about 20-25%, your genetics is maybe 10-15%, and the rest is everything else,” he says. “And a lot of it is quite hard to measure: who you are with, what you do, your alignment with your life, and how that impacts all your variables.”

A holistic approach to longevity

With the aim of addressing building a technology company to address longevity more holistically, Benedikter spoke with Professir Mintu Turakhia, founder of the Stanford Center for Digital Health back in in 2019. Turakhia initially advised him that the time was not right for such a venture, due to technology limitations at the time.

“However, we met again at the beginning of this year, and Mintu said the moment is now,” says Benedikter. “Wearables have progressed to such a ubiquitous level, and AI models have evolved to a degree that is not comparable to even six months ago.”

Nuraxi was founded to take the idea forward, leveraging new technology both to expand human understanding of Blue Zone science, but also to allow the world to benefit from it.

Building a longevity LLM

Nuraxi is using longitudinal data collected from SuperAgers (people over the age of 80 with the mental and physical ability of people decades younger) to build a longevity focused LLM, which aims to assess an individual’s rate of aging to a high degree of accuracy.

“We are developing an LLM with longevity prediction capabilities, which means we can work with consumer companies, clinics, insurance companies, governments,” says Benedikter. “Our technology will allow pretty much anybody to become a longevity specialist, whether you’re a dentist, orthopedic clinic, or Walgreens, you can become a longevity specialist. We are able to deploy customised websites and apps for any type of practitioner, all powered by our engine in terms of data collection and predictive abilities.”

Key to Nuraxi’s AI model is the concept of “adaptive accuracy,” which means that the algorithm can work with almost any amount of data.

“Whether you have entire biomarker data sets, including DNA mapping and so on, then we can provide a very high accuracy analysis,” says Benedikter. “But even if you only have very limited data sets, the data from an Apple Watch for example, then we can still work with that. Any data is better than nothing, and we are convinced that our LLM can provide insight for outputs and feedback based on pretty much any data that you can give to us.”

“Our plan is also to transition data ownership to blockchain, so that every single person who comes into our platform actually retains control over their data.”

Blending business and research

Benedikter says that Nuraxi aims to progress its business on two key fronts.

“One is working with universities and scientists to drive longevity research, while the second track is doing business with organizations that want to implement longevity science,” he says. “We want to help shift the definition of longevity, which a lot of people interpret purely as life extension, to medicine 3.0, holistic health, preventative care, however you want to call it.”

In addition to its work in the Middle East, Nuraxi is also focused on expansion into Africa.

“We started in the Middle East because the culture is a lot more towards preventative medicine and the region is potentially poised to lead innovation in this sector,” says Benedikter. “But we aim to expand quickly throughout the Middle East and Africa, which is the most underrepresented data population in the world.

Benedikter explains that Nuraxi’s business model will be similar to a licensing/franchise approach that he has successfully implemented for brands including Pizza Hut and Vodafone.

“We’re building a technology that can be deployed on a license, a hub and spoke model essentially,” he says. “We want to become the technology backbone provider for longevity. More specifically, we want to impact a billion people in five years. And I think the only way to do that is to roll out with a powerful licensing model.”