Healthspan investing: Finding value in longevity
While billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg, have made big investments in biotech startups aiming to slow or reverse aging, a growing generation of longevity investors are more focused on allowing people to live healthier for longer.
Although average global life expectancy has increased by nearly two decades since the 1960s, we’re now spending more years in poor health than at any time in history. This has led to a growing focus among longevity investors on extending “healthspans” — the number of years people are able to live without chronic and debilitating disease.
This is markedly different to the situation 15 years ago, when the longevity movement was still largely a fringe community intent on transcending biological limits in the quest for immortality, said Marc Bernegger, Founding Partner of Maximon, a longevity company builder.
“You still have this sub-segment that says, ‘if you’re not trying to become immortal, you’re not really tackling the core of longevity,’” said Bernegger, who is also Co-Founder and Chairman of Longevity Investors, a platform for investors to learn about and access the longevity industry. “But you now have respected scientists, researchers and big universities looking into the topic.”
“It’s less about crazy moonshot biotechnology seeking to add 20 years to the human lifespan, and more about trying to optimize health in general,” he added. “That has attracted entrepreneurs to try to capitalize on these developments.”
According to Tina Woods, Executive Director of the International Institute of Longevity and Healthy Longevity Champion for the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing, another factor driving this trend is consumer appetite, with a greater priority given to health and wellness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasing dissatisfaction with a current healthcare model focused on treating chronic diseases rather than preventing them.
“People are realizing that the status quo way of dealing with disease management and health is unsustainable,” she said. “So, they’re taking it more in their own hands to look after themselves. What we’re seeing now is that longevity is really moving upstream in health prevention.”
Addressing healthspan
This calls for an overhaul of the current healthcare system, which is often described as “sickcare.”
As longevity guru Dr. Peter Attia explains in his book Outlive, under the current paradigm, referred to as Medicine 2.0, doctors step in to extend lifespan well past the point at which people’s cognitive and physical capabilities have dipped below the 50% mark (see Figure 1).
Outlive advocates instead for a proactive approach, dubbed Medicine 3.0, where not only would lifespans extend even further, but the inevitable dip below the 50% point would also be mercifully short.
Those proactive measures are largely common sense. Dr. Laurena Law, a General Practitioner and member of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, said “it's about diet, movement and finding ways to reduce toxic exposure.” She added that “by toxins, I don’t mean just chemicals. I mean the environment, the space we live in and the stresses we subject ourselves to, such as smoking, alcohol, processed foods and even relationships.”
Law said that these outside influences, encompassing lifestyle, environment and life circumstances, are believed to determine 80% of individual longevity, with genes accounting for only about 20%.
No magic pill
The search for a “magic pill” to delay or reverse the aging process is still a target for many longevity scientists, but according to Woods, many of the studies are done on animals in labs, “and little of that at the moment is translating to the human model.”
Indeed, no drug or medical treatment has, to date, been shown to conclusively extend maximum potential human lifespan. A recent Wall Street Journal article argued that many startups are building businesses based on still-emerging research and hypotheses.
Woods does still see value in these efforts, however. “It’s a big moonshot, and people looking for it will discover a lot in the process,” she said. “But I think more than anything, it’ll show how complicated the whole underlying aging process is, especially when it comes to designing interventions that will work at the individual level. I think the next frontier of longevity science is actually unravelling the intricacies of what’s happening at an individual level, including how humans uniquely respond and adapt to external stresses and factors in their wider environment across their lifetime.”
Law pointed out that although the scientific community has yet to reach a consensus on defining biological aging, it has identified 14 hallmarks of aging at the cellular level (see Figure 2).
“A lot of what you hear in popular media about companies working on longevity breakthroughs is an oversimplification, because they generally only target one pathway or aspect of aging, but we know that there are so many factors,” said Law.
One thing that is becoming more substantiated by studies and science is the positive impact of social connections on healthspan — contributing to the inclusion of psychosocial isolation in the hallmarks of aging in April 2025.
“From observational studies, we’re seeing that people who live the longest, even if they have a chronic disability or suffer some pain, what improves their quality of life is their social connections,” said Law. “That’s one thing we have undervalued in the past.”
Unspectacular interventions
For Bernegger, many “quite unspectacular” and simple lifestyle changes have a huge impact on longevity.
Too often, however, the media fixates on extreme approaches, such as the costly and controversial longevity routine of centimillionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a regular speaker at Bernegger’s annual longevity conference. At one point, Johnson’s routine included injecting his teenage son’s plasma into his own body.
“Journalists have to sell newspapers or drive article page views, so they don’t cover unspectacular stuff,” said Bernegger. “Many of the patients in our clinic make significant improvements in their relevant health matrix by just changing very simple things — the basics of diet, exercise, optimizing their supplementation and changing some small elements of their daily routines. Bryan Johnson is just far more visible than all the normal, unspectacular biohackers.”
Bernegger described these unspectacular interventions as “the core developments in the field.”
Law echoed that view, saying: “I find it reassuring that research is showing that lifestyle has such a huge part to play for those who are slower agers.”
This also means that a broad array of businesses could make meaningful contributions to improving longevity.
As Woods put it: “It opens up a whole realm of commercial and investor opportunities to create more positive environments that enhance human healthspan, resilience and flourishing: designing technologies to address air pollution, create healthier housing, promote next-generation products and services, improve what we eat and how we maintain our activity levels. This is a much bigger play than the biotech or pharma model that’s typically associated with longevity at the moment.”
These investments can be directed towards large-scale missions, such as reconfiguring city infrastructure to support healthy aging, or empowering older people to remain in the workplace to help them retain a sense of purpose.
On a more modest scale, Bernegger highlighted the potential for breathwork and meditation apps to have a positive impact on mental health. And Law noted that wearable technology and related apps can help provide people with feedback to manage their chronic stress or improve their quality of sleep, which could offer powerful ways to tackle premature aging.
In the future, Bernegger believes that longevity startups will increasingly provide a more holistic approach to improving people’s healthspan, and he is enthusiastic about the sector’s prospects. “It's a huge investment opportunity, because naturally, there's no price tag for any additional happy years of life,” he said.
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