Max Berthelot, Baptiste Debever, and Max Guerois found each other through longevity communities in Paris, comparing notes on lab results and protocols. Max Berthelot had spent years quietly running his own "n-of-1" experiments, ordering tests, tracking biomarkers in spreadsheets, and trying to make sense of what any of it meant for his long-term health. Baptiste started searching for answers after a close relative passed away due to a late diagnosis.

What they shared was a deep frustration with the status quo. In a country with universal coverage, it was still nearly impossible to get a complete, comprehensible view of one's health without stitching together a dozen point solutions across a fragmented care journey, or spending thousands of euros at private longevity clinics. So they built the product they wished existed.

At General Catalyst, we're building towards a health assurance future—one that is proactive, affordable, and accessible to keep people well and bend the cost curve. Today, we're leading Lucis's seed round to support their mission to empower every European to extend their healthspan.

From Lifespan to Healthspan

At the start of the 20th century, the average European could expect to live just over 40 years. By 1960, that number had risen to around 69, and today life expectancy averages about 81 years. The goal isn’t simply to live longer, but to live better for longer. While we’ve increased our lifespans, our healthspans—the years we live in good health, free from serious illness—have not kept pace.

Consider cardiovascular disease, which accounts for about 45% of all deaths in Europe. The average age for a first heart attack is 65 for men and 72 for women, meaning many Europeans develop the condition that will ultimately end their healthspan around the age they retire. For all our medical advances, we’ve prolonged life without proportionally extending health.

This gap stems from a healthcare system built to treat illness rather than maintain wellness. While Europe has many of the most advanced healthcare organizations in the world, care remains reactive, beginning after symptoms appear, long after early intervention could have changed the outcome.

Meanwhile, consumers are taking matters into their own hands. From Whoop to Oura, Neko Health to Eight Sleep, a new category of proactive health is emerging alongside traditional healthcare. People want agency over how they feel, not just how long they live. Wearables track the surface like sleep, activity, and recovery. The predictive signals remain hidden in blood work that's hard to access and harder to interpret. Lucis bridges this gap.

Clinical Precision Meets Consumer Simplicity

Lucis turns comprehensive blood tests into an ongoing stream of intelligent, preventive actions for everyday health–making biomarker monitoring as routine as brushing your teeth.

The platform starts with comprehensive blood testing through a network of 400+ certified labs across France, the UK, and Portugal. Where traditional lab work ends with cryptic reports, Lucis begins: it transforms biomarker data into clear health scores tracking cardiovascular, hormonal, metabolic, and inflammatory health. Users receive personalized protocols covering nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and exercise, with integrations to wearables for a continuous view of health that lives quietly in your pocket.

Through the community they nurtured before writing a single line of code, the founders have organically grown Lucis into one of the fastest-scaling preventive health platforms in Europe.

This is the kind of consumer trust we rarely see—and it is what excites us to partner with Lucis from day one.

We sat down with Max Berthelot to learn more about his vision for Europe’s healthspan infrastructure. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What conventional thinking are you challenging, and why?

We're challenging the assumption that healthcare starts when something goes wrong. The conventional model is reactive, built around treating disease, not maintaining health. Lucis believe prevention should be the default, not the exception. We're building the infrastructure for a proactive health system: one that helps people understand their biology, track change, and act early, with medical integrity, without medical complexity, and with guidance that is personalized to the individual and contextualized to their life.

What's surprised you most about building in this space?

How deeply people crave clarity—clear, personalized guidance that fits their goals and the budget they're willing to invest. Most users don't want another wearable or another app—they want to understand what's going on inside their body and what to do next. The surprise has been how fast trust builds when you explain health data simply and honestly. Transparency, not technology, is often what drives retention.

What have been your most important lessons around execution so far?

Velocity beats perfection. We ship daily code, content, partnerships and learn in real time. The most powerful lesson has been that clarity compounds: clear priorities, clear communication, clear ownership. Every teammate at Lucis acts like an owner. We write things down, challenge each other, and iterate relentlessly. That's how we've scaled with a small team while maintaining compliance, speed, and creativity.

What's your approach to building team culture early on?

Culture is our strategy. We hire for energy, humility, and radical ownership, not résumés. We spend time together in Paris, because alignment happens in person. Everyone, from engineers to ops, tests the product, tracks their own biomarkers, and lives the mission. We're not a remote-first team; we're a together-first movement. Lucis feels like a lab, a startup, and a gym at once: we build, test, recover, and repeat.

What impact do you want this company to have on the world?

We want Lucis to make prevention mainstream, to help millions of people take control of their health before it's too late. The ultimate goal goes beyond longer life to better awareness. A society that understands its biology will make better decisions, both personally and collectively.