Yeah. So, this is a prize I'm passionate about. I developed it in partnership with a gentleman, Sergey Young, who heads our bold longevity growth fund, and Dr. Jamie Justice, who's the executive director of the prize. And we wanted to do something in longevity. And the first time I ever had this conversation about a longevity XPRIZE was back in 2005, just after the original Ansari spaceflight prize was won for $10 million. And I got a call from Aubrey de Grey, who's one of the, you know, godfathers of the field, and Peter Thiel asking, you know, how about we do a longevity prize? And we couldn't figure out how do you do a longevity prize without waiting 20 or 30 years to give out the money, which would be extraordinarily expensive and difficult.
Sergey Young put up a half million dollars to study this and said there's going to be a way, we're going to find it. And then I had a conversation with Dr. George Church at Harvard, and George was, listen, you don't want to do a longevity prize because you can't, you know, it's going to be hard to measure that over the long term. What you really want to do is an age reversal or a rejuvenation prize. And the insight he had, which was brilliant, was what people should really care about is after they receive a therapy, how do they feel? Do they feel stronger, more vibrant, younger? And are they functionally stronger, more vibrant, and younger? And so we did the work. I raised $156 million.
It's a $101 million prize purse for the primary prize and then a $10 million bonus prize around muscle. It's 101 million because Chip Wilson, who's the founder of Lululemon, came on as the first major prize sponsor with about $35 million, and just an incredibly generous and beautiful man. Huge respect for him. And in our conversation, he said, 'So Peter, how much is the prize Elon is giving away?' And I said, 'Chip, it's $100 million.' He goes, 'Can we make ours bigger?' I said, 'What do you have in mind?' He said, '101.' I said, 'Okay, you add the extra million dollars, we'll make it 101 million.' And I've told that story countless times. It's worth it just for retelling the story.
A group out of Saudi Arabia called Hevolution, that developed under Royal Decree, gentleman Mahmoud Khan, who's been a friend for 20 years, brilliant physician and scientist, entrepreneur, is the head of Hevolution, and they've been giving billions of dollars to fund health span extension, like how do we make people healthier.
And they came in as a $40 million sponsor. I've contributed millions to the prize, as have other members of my abundance community, and we raised the capital. GSK came on as a major corporate sponsor, very, very thankful to them. Long story short, the prize was launched about 18 months ago, and this is what the prize asks teams to do: in a therapy, delivering a therapy to people age, I think it's like 60 to 80 in that age range. If we give you a therapy for less than a year, so it could be given in a day, a month, or up to a year, can't be given for longer. After the therapy is complete, are we able to demonstrate that your cognitive function, your immune function, and your muscular function is that of a younger individual?
And so the minimum amount you have to reverse functional loss is a decade. The goal is 20 years. So if you reverse functional loss in all three systems by 10 years, you win 60 million. If you reverse it by 15 years, you win 70 million. And if you reverse it by 20 years, you win 81 million. The remaining 20 million is being given out in small prize purses in the interim along the way to incentivize the teams to make progress. So the punchline is today we've had 625 teams enter this competition from, I don't know, 50 countries around the planet, from Singapore and China and France and Australia and the US and Canada, and I mean it's been extraordinary. And they're all taking different approaches, and some of these teams will merge, some will acquire the others, some of them will drop out, but we'll have a winner by 2030.
And you know, at the end of the day, what really matters is functionally, do you have the span of memory, the cognitive capacity you had of yourself 20 years ago? Do you have the immune function to fight cancer and fight infectious disease that you had from 20 years earlier? Do you have the muscular strength to build muscle that you had from earlier? And if you do, this is the first steps towards longevity, right? It's a bridge to a bridge.
