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For the techno-optimized, nearly everything in life can be improved with the help of engineering. Bots can auto-swipe on Tinder and flirt with matches on your behalf. AI avatars can attend Zoom meetings so that you don’t have to. Almost nothing is off limits, including the flesh. For that, there are peptides.

Scientifically, peptides are short-chain amino acids, or little chemical messengers that tell cells what to do. Culturally, they are vials of injectable drugs that have taken Silicon Valley and Hollywood hostage. Over the last year, scores of people in both ends of California have begun dosing themselves with compounds ordered from overseas labs, comparing their “stacks” like sneakerheads comparing limited drops. There are peptides for better sleep, better memory, increased muscle growth, tanner skin, or higher libido. As a category, peptides are almost incomparably viral. “I’ve never seen any product grow this fast by word of mouth, or that people swear by to the same extent,” says Max Marchione, the cofounder and CEO of Superpower, a consumer health startup in San Francisco.

Marchione — a muscular, tan, and energetic 25-year-old — has emerged as a peptide poster child. On X, he evangelizes about them, and regularly receives DMs from people asking how to get them. Some peptides, like GLP-1s for weight loss, are legal and commercially available. Most other peptides exist in a regulatory gray zone, neither banned nor approved by the FDA. To get them, one has to order a vial from a compounding pharmacy, often in China; ignore the warnings that the substance is “for research use only” and “not for human consumption”; mix the powdered substance with sterile water; then self-dose and self-inject with an insulin needle. Among many people in tech, the subversiveness carries a certain status.

Last fall, as Marchione began to notice “many, many people” in San Francisco getting peptide-pilled, he saw a business opportunity. Superpower sells members access to comprehensive annual lab testing, which tracks hundreds of biomarkers. It is built on the premise that the quantified body is an improvable body. If Marchione’s customers were already measuring their health, why not offer them the tools to improve it?

By now, one in eight Americans has tried a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Mounjaro. The total GLP-1 market is expected to be a $100 billion category by 2030, contributing as much as 1% of the American economy. “And that’s just a single peptide,” says Marchione. Someday, peptides could be one of the biggest consumer categories of all time. “We want to be the company that owns that.”

In January, Superpower began offering members access to peptides that are legal in the United States. This includes GLP-1 medications, SS-31 (for more energy), sermorelin (for anti-aging), and tesamorelin (for body recomposition). Marchione expects this list to grow as federal oversight loosens: In late February, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that the FDA would remove restrictions on 14 different peptides, as part of a broader agenda to make every American “the CEO of his own health.”

“When a peptide is legal,” Marchione says, “we are going to sell it.”

Marchione’s frustration hardened into a thesis: Modern medicine exists to treat disease, but has little interest in optimizing well-being.

Superpower isn’t the only company springing into the market. Numerous telehealth startups offer prescriptions for legal peptides, sold for hundreds of dollars a month. In 2024, Hims & Hers Health, Inc. acquired a peptide manufacturing facility in California — an early signal that what began as a fringe experiment might soon professionalize. Concierge physicians now offer bespoke peptide “stacks,” supervising protocols the way personal trainers once supervised macros. On an episode of “The a16z Show” in March, the Stanford neuroscientist and wellness influencer Andrew Huberman suggested that soon, personalized peptide protocols will be as normal as taking vitamins. “All of that stuff is going to be commonplace,” he said, “the same way that people are not afraid of vitamin D.” Superpower plans to stand out in the market by developing proprietary peptide products, as as well as funding research studies that can be used to lobby the FDA for more approvals.

Like all wellness trends, peptides began with the early adopters. But the future of peptides involves making money from the mainstream. If enough people start using them — to sleep better, work longer, and look younger — the question may shift from whether people need these drugs to why those who can afford them wouldn’t take them. And when that happens, Superpower hopes that upgrading will be as simple as adding on another subscription service, ordered directly through its platform.

On a Friday morning in late January, I met Marchione in the Superpower office, which sits in a 26-floor Art Deco building in downtown San Francisco. I’d heard the company lured its employees into the office on Fridays by offering injections of NAD+, a longevity-booster popular with the Hollywood set, during all-hands meetings. Those meetings had been moved to Thursdays, and so the floor was mostly empty.

Marchione started Superpower in 2023 after what he describes as chronic health problems (including allergies and prediabetes) that doctors failed to resolve. His frustration with the healthcare system hardened into a thesis: Modern medicine exists to treat disease, but has little interest in optimizing well-being. Superpower was created, in part, to move beyond this model of “sick care” and toward a model of enhancement. For $199 a year, members receive extensive blood testing tracking dozens of biomarkers, which can show early warnings of diseases, nutritional deficiencies, or areas where the body is functioning sub-optimally. To date, the company has raised $42 million.

Beyond its subscription service, Superpower also makes money by connecting members to a marketplace of supplements (and now peptides), personalized to each customer’s health data. In this sense, bloodwork is also a customer acquisition tool: Superpower can reveal deficiencies, then recommend a purchasable protocol to improve them. Peptides cost more than multivitamins — a monthly supply of GHK-Cu, the beauty-related peptide that is not approved by the FDA, can run between $200 and $500, depending on the vendor. The lifetime value of a peptide customer could be many thousands of dollars.

He returned with a syringe and drew up a microdose of retatrutide. I rolled up my sleeve while the CEO pinched the skin of my arm and inserted the needle.

Other telehealth startups will also offer these drugs. To give customers a reason to choose Superpower as their supplier, Marchione is also planning to launch a new division that will sell proprietary products available exclusively through its marketplace. These products include a novel form of semaglutide and a long-lasting version of BPC-157, a compound used to reduce inflammation and improve tissue healing, which Superpower is developing with an Australian biotech company.

The company naturally attracts employees who are interested in optimization, and who may be willing to look beyond the traditional health system to find it. Among them is Shaun Miller, Superpower’s vice president of medical operations, who is in charge of the company’s new line of prescription peptides. Miller, who’s 32, discovered the drugs as a teenager after his father was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer. A relative suggested a trial in Israel, where doctors were researching an experimental peptide treatment. His father did not enroll, but Miller says the experience sent him down a rabbit hole of researching peptides, which never stopped.

When I met Miller, he was monitoring trials of the products that Superpower plans to sell later this year, in anticipation of new FDA regulations. “This administration is a little bit crazy, but we’re all here for it,” Miller said.

On LinkedIn, Miller describes himself as “your peptide guy’s peptide guy.” His own “stack” includes CJC-1295, ipamorelin, tesomerellin, and MOTS-c in the morning, for fat burning and energy; and GHK-Cu, TB-500, and BPC-157 at night, for injury repair and recovery. “And then, of course, like everyone else, I’m experimenting once a week with microdosing retatrutide,” a next-generation weight loss drug developed by Eli Lilly that is not yet FDA approved.

He and other Superpower employees have adopted a culture of casual injections and a willingness to self-experiment. In the office kitchen, Marchione showed me a refrigerator drawer repurposed as peptide storage. Beneath bottles of Muscle Milk and someone’s leftover Indian food, there were dozens of vials labeled “not for human consumption.” One vial contained BPC-157, the tissue-healing drug. Another, containing the copper-derived peptide GHK-Cu, was a frightening shade of bright blue.

Marchione held up an immune-boosting peptide, called thymosin alpha-1. When someone in the office feels sick, he said, they’re welcome to an injection. “That’s just normal now,” he continued. “Someone on our team got sick, and I was really upset. I’m like, ‘Dude, you shouldn’t be sick, you could have just told me, and we could’ve given you an injection.'”

Marchione gestured toward the treasure trove of vials and turned to me. “Do you want any?”

Earlier that morning, I had admitted to him that I felt a certain FOMO about whatever was happening with peptides. I am not a risk-taker by nature, but I worried that while everyone else was upgrading, I would be left behind, taking sick days and waiting for my muscles to repair themselves. My Instagram feed was full of peptide influencers who flaunted six-packs and boasted they had never felt more energetic. In the kitchen, I told him yes, why not?

He returned with a syringe and drew up a microdose of retatrutide. I rolled up my sleeve while the CEO pinched the skin of my arm and inserted the needle.

As this was happening, one of Superpower’s employees wandered into the kitchen.

“What are you injecting over there?” he asked casually.

“Reta,” said Marchione. “Have you done it before?”

“Reta? Yeah,” the employee replied. He had been microdosing since October. “I have a whole, like, 50-peptide protocol these days. I even take actual HGH.”

They discussed the regimen as offhandedly as recounting last night’s basketball game, using terms that went largely over my head. I sat back in my chair and let the peptides begin to course through my bloodstream.

Of all the peptides available on the gray market, retatrutide was the one I kept hearing about. Huberman and other techies had begun posting about it nonstop. Meanwhile, I was getting targeted ads on Instagram from hot female influencers who claimed retatrutide was a fountain of youth, or at least the secret to a bikini body. A few days after I got my own microdose in the Superpower office, I joined a Zoom call with a group of early-stage investors when one of them brought up peptides. He wondered which companies would manage to “capture value” in the category, and asked if anyone on the call was taking them. The chat window lit up:

“#retatrutide”
“Peptide lover”
“👋”
“Retaaaa”
“Got my reti yesterday lol”
“Everyone is skinny and hot in tech future”
“2026 Peptides for everyone”

I began asking retaheads about their motivations. None of these people had taken other weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. None were even particularly overweight. Instead, using retatrutide was a way to lose a little fat while also gaining mental clarity. It made them feel focused and productive, like Adderall. It blocked out thoughts of food, but also video games, alcohol, and pornography. One person called it “discipline in a syringe.”

Julius Ritter, a former Superpower employee who’s now the president of the San Francisco AGI House, says that retatrutide helped him get trim while also allowing him to focus without the distraction of food. “It’s actually wild what the cognitive clarity is that you get from that,” he says. I was reminded of Soylent, another viral product in Silicon Valley that had liberated tech workers from the inconvenience of eating. Ritter had pieced together his protocol from a combination of internet forums and “peptide parties,” where people gathered to share what they know. He hoped to start hosting a peptide club at AGI House to indoctrinate others.

Simone Vincenzi, a machine learning engineer, tells me that he’d heard about retatrutide from bodybuilders, who posted about it constantly on Reddit. “It’s the biggest population of experimenters,” he says, “because they’re not afraid of dying.”

Vincenzi decided to try it to manage his physique. (He clarified that while he works in tech, he is “one of them professionally, but not one of them culturally.”) Suppliers of retatrutide were “very easy to find” online; you could order a 5mg dose for around $60 from a compounding pharmacy in China. You could get the rest of the supplies, like sterile water to reconstitute the powder and insulin needles, on Amazon. Why did Vincenzi think reta had become so viral in Silicon Valley? Simple. “Nobody wants to be fat.”

Taking illicit reta involves some trial-and-error. Ritter found that taking too much made him feel weak and nauseous; he once had a vomiting spell after upping his dosage and eating a big meal. Vincenzi also took a break from reta after he noticed that his resting heart rate had noticeably increased. Both remained advocates of the drug, and willing to continue self-experimenting.

When people live inside volatile systems the body becomes the most intimate place to regain leverage.Mansi Hukmani, a peptide Substacker

Eli Lilly, the drugmaker, has warned that taking retatrutide outside of its clinical trials poses a risk to patient safety. (Retatrutide is expected to be approved by the FDA later this year; for now, it is only legally available through clinical trials.) Compounded or counterfeit versions of retatrutide can “contain the wrong ingredients, contain too much, too little or no active ingredient at all or contain other harmful ingredients.” Lilly has also sued a number of compounding pharmacies and telehealth companies for producing knockoffs of its FDA-approved medications, like the weight loss drug tirzepatide, also known as Mounjaro. It has lost several of those cases, as courts ruled that startups like Willow Health — which sell compounded tirzepatide — did not cause direct financial or reputational harm to the pharma giant. More recently, Lilly has tried to sway public opinion by warning of bacterial contamination and other impurities found in compounded tirzepatide.

These warnings haven’t stopped anyone. “The peptide world is the wild, wild west right now,” says Mansi Hukmani, who writes about peptides and wellness on Substack. While pharma companies warn about unlicensed use of peptides, influencers post about the benefits of using them, along with affiliate links. There are already more than 50 million TikToks tagged with peptides. “The consumer demand is outpacing regulations at an egregious rate.”

Hukmani believes that decreasing trust in health institutions, combined with an uncertain social, political, and economic moment, has driven people to be more experimental. “When people live inside volatile systems the body becomes the most intimate place to regain leverage.”

Last year, RFK Jr. declared that the FDA’s “war on public health” was going to end. That included the suppression of products like raw milk, ivermectin, hyperbaric therapies, psychedelics, and peptides.

“I’m a big fan of peptides,” he told Joe Rogan on his podcast in February. By changing the FDA’s classification of more than a dozen peptides from Category 2 (meaning pharmacies cannot compound them) to Category 1 (meaning pharmacies can compound them in certain cases, for patients with prescriptions), he said consumers who were already taking these drugs would be able to source them more safely. “My hope is that they’re going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.”

“There are risks with buying these gray market products unless you are engaging with a third-party tester,” says Luke Turnock, a researcher at the UK’s University of Lincoln, who studies peptides. “You don’t 100% know that you’ve bought the correct thing.” If you search online, you’ll find plenty of anecdotal reports of people injecting vials that are more or less potent than described. Marlon Peralta, who regularly advocates for peptide use on Substack and X, once bought and injected what he believed was BPC-157, but was actually melanotan II, the tanning peptide that darkens one’s skin.

The FDA classified some Category 1 peptides as Category 2 because of adverse side effects: TB-500, for example, has been linked to tumor growth in rodent studies. CJC-1295, ipamorelin, and tesamorelin have also been associated with growth hormone-related risks. Other peptides just don’t have “sufficient data in humans to inform safety-related considerations,” according to the FDA. There just isn’t enough data about what happens when people take these drugs — or stop taking them.

Marchione believes Superpower can have a role to play in expanding that knowledge. Later this year, he says Superpower will begin conducting clinical trials on peptides like epitalon, pinealon, and BPC-157, through the company’s clinical arm, Superpower Medical Group of California, in an effort to submit evidence to the FDA to approve them. This could have the added benefit of making Superpower the only place consumers could legally access certain drugs. “Right now, there are a lot of people who might need or want access to a compound that’s not legal, and they can’t get in any legal way, except for if they genuinely qualify for it and want to be part of research,” he says. Superpower is in a unique position to identify these people: “We have someone’s blood data, we have their symptoms, their goals, what’s happening with their health. We know who’s eligible for research.”

I ask Marchione if most of Superpower’s customers fit into this category of people, who are as interested in experimentation as he is.

“We have a subset that’s very experimental, but a lot of them are more like your average American,” he says. “That said, your average American is taking reta. Your average American is taking BPC-157. What has become normal has completely changed.”

In the tech industry, people talk a lot about the bifurcations that will occur as a result of artificial intelligence. Some will become incredibly wealthy. Others will be trapped in a “permanent underclass.” I began to worry that something similar would happen with peptides. There would be those who are willing to experiment with their body, and those who are not. Some would become hot, lean, and refreshed, while the rest of us succumb to the usual effects of stress and aging.

Marchione, for his part, is betting this is exactly what will happen. “Imagine everyone in your company is smarter, and sleeping better, and better looking, and more energetic, and fitter. Do you think you’re going to be the one dumb, ugly, tired person? No,” he says. In his view, the rise of peptides is Darwinian, an evolution of our basic human instincts around competition. Once improvement is visible, it becomes imitable. Once it becomes imitable, it becomes competitive. And once it becomes competitive, it becomes compulsory.

“What this means is that all of these technologies will reach an inflection point,” Marchione says. Pretty soon, you might not have a choice.

Arielle Pardes is a reporter in San Francisco covering the business and culture of technology.