Where Capital Meets Longevity: Insights Ahead of the LONGEVITY INVESTORS CONFERENCE in Gstaad
- Jul 27
- 6 min read
"The field has moved fast. Not long ago longevity was treated as a curiosity; now it's a real investment category, on track to reach $67B by 2035. That shift is the thing worth paying attention to. The good companies aren't selling immortality. They're going after healthspan, treating aging as a root cause, and measuring themselves against clinical results."
THE HORIZONS X Garri Zmudze
Executive Summary
The Personal Thesis: Driven by family diagnoses in 2015, LongeVC was built to back early-stage diagnostics, personalized medicine, and root-cause geroscience, deploying a $120M Fund II across more than 25 companies.
The Investment Data: Rigorous scientific validation—such as peer-reviewed AI-driven target discovery and clear clinical endpoints—separates durable asset classes from marketing narratives.
The Gstaad Catalyst: As longevity scales toward institutional portfolios, closed-door roundtables and intimate networks at the Longevity Investors Conference in Gstaad remain the ultimate testing ground for serious capital.
The Signal
Why Longevity Became an Investable Frontier
For me, the topic of longevity became acutely personal in 2015, when within a single year, both of my parents were diagnosed with age-related illness: my father with bladder cancer, my mother with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. This pretty much defined my aspirations in the field of longevity, and five years later, I co-founded LongeVC to put capital behind the earliest-stage longevity and biotech companies—the ones going after early diagnostics, personalized medicine, and the biology that drives age-related disease in the first place.
This is a very focused fund. We invest at pre-seed, seed, and Series A, and we're deploying Fund II ($120M), all of it aimed at extending healthy human lifespan. We've backed more than 25 companies, including Rubedo Life Sciences, Unnatural Products, and Deep Longevity (later acquired by Regent Pacific, which is trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).
I've also invested personally, as an angel, in companies like Insilico Medicine (which went public this year), and I sit on the executive board of the Sheba Longevity Center, where a lot of this work is actually reaching patients.
The field has moved fast. Not long ago, longevity was treated as a curiosity; now it's a real investment category, on track to reach $67B by 2035. That shift is the thing worth paying attention to. Cure. recently named LongeVC one of the top longevity VCs, and Business Insider has covered our work too, but I read that kind of recognition less as a personal milestone and more as a sign of how seriously the space is now taken.
Lists and coverage only count for so much, though. If you want serious capital to come into longevity, the work has to meet real drug-development standards. The good companies aren't selling immortality. They're going after healthspan, treating aging as a root cause, and measuring themselves against clinical results. That's the part that matters to me.
By the way, in 2024 I also co-founded AniVC, a separate pet-focused fund, with the same aspiration of contributing to longevity progress, but via pet longevity, where regulatory timelines are shorter and the science can move faster. The fund is also investing in a broad range of consumer topics related to pets’ health and wellbeing. As a dog owner myself, I care about it deeply.
The Alpha
Separating Scientific Breakthroughs from Investment Narratives
So how do I decide what to back? Mostly it comes down to the science and the IP, and whether there's a real mechanism behind the story.
Insilico is a good example. Its software found a new target—a kinase called TNIK—by going through biology data rather than picking from a known list, and then designed the drug itself. That drug, rentosertib, is now in a Phase III trial for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that usually kills people within two to four years and has no cure.
What convinced me wasn't the AI angle. It was that the target, the chemistry, the preclinical work, and the clinical data have all been peer-reviewed in Nature Biotechnology, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and Nature Medicine. Since 2021, the company has put forward 31 preclinical candidates, and 13 already have IND clearance. That's a track record, not a pitch.
I'll say what I usually say, though: AI isn't an industry-wide force yet. A few of our companies are genuinely good at it, Insilico and Rubedo among them, but they're still the exception. The promise is real. It just isn't everywhere yet.
The other thing I watch is how deals cross borders. Insilico recently signed with SK Biopharmaceuticals—worth up to $2.5B—where Insilico designs the candidates and SK, which already sells its own drug in the US, takes them through late-stage development.
And the timing helps everyone. Somewhere between $236B and $300B in annual drug revenue loses patent protection between 2025 and 2030, and big pharma spent roughly $65B to $70B buying biotech last year to refill its pipeline. That money has to land somewhere. I'd rather it go to firms that can tell real biology from a good story.
The Catalyst
Why Gstaad Brings Capital and Science Together
Which is why I go to the Longevity Investors Conference (LIC) in Gstaad every year, and why I am also an ambassador of the event. It's worth the trip because it stays focused on the practical side of investing in this space, and because of who shows up.
I'll be there again this September with my partner Anna Skaya. Nir Barzilai, who advises us, will be there off the back of the TAME trial, which could be the first to treat aging itself as a condition. Evelyne Bischof is doing the real clinical work at Sheba. Steve Horvath is still the person setting the standard for how we measure aging, with his epigenetic clocks. And around them you get people like Dave Asprey, Michael Ringel, Collin Ewald, and Jordan Shlain. You don't often get that many serious people in one place.
In practice, there are really only two conferences I prioritize each year: LIC is where I go for the investor conversations, and ARDD (the Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting) is where I go for the science.
The Friction
Testing Ideas Against Scientific Reality
The best part isn't the stage, though. It's the closed-door roundtables. That's where investors actually pull the science apart and work out what holds up and what's just noise.
The sector raised about $3.74B across 49 deals in the first quarter of 2026, up 56% from a year earlier. That's good momentum, but momentum is exactly when you need to ask hard questions:
What's the mechanism?
What's the endpoint?
Compared to what?
The companies that come through that kind of questioning are the ones I want to back. Rubedo is a good example. Its lead drug clears out senescent cells—the old, worn-out cells that should die off but instead stick around and drive a lot of age-related disease—while leaving healthy cells alone. Early Phase 1b/2a results showed a 46% drop in precancerous skin lesions in four weeks, against 11% with no treatment, with almost no side effects and nobody dropping out. That's the kind of result that survives a room full of skeptics.
The Network
Where Relationships Accelerate the Longevity Economy
The last thing, and the one conferences don't advertise, is simply being near the right people.
Gstaad works because everyone worth talking to is in the same few rooms. A coffee at Le Grand Bellevue can move something further than a month of scheduled calls, because everyone there is serious and there for the same reason.
"I think the next ten years in longevity will look like the early days of the personal computer: a few real breakthroughs that open up whole new industries. The people who build them tend to be in rooms like this one.
That's why I keep coming back. If you're building something ambitious here, or just trying to work out how to get exposure to it, find me in Gstaad. Let's talk.
Our Collaborator
Garri Zmudze is a longevity investor and the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of LongeVC, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies advancing longevity biotechnology, preventive medicine, and human healthspan. He has backed more than 25 longevity and biotech companies, including ventures focused on AI-driven drug discovery, diagnostics, and novel therapeutics. Garri is also a Co-Founder of AniVC, a venture fund focused on pet health and longevity innovation, and serves on the Executive Board of the Sheba Longevity Center. Through his work in venture investing, he focuses on identifying science-driven companies that can translate breakthrough research into meaningful impact on human health and aging. __________________________________________________________________________________
THE HORIZONS life × Longevity Investors Conference
At THE HORIZONS life, we view longevity not merely as a scientific discipline, but as a sovereign asset class and an emerging economic sector reshaping healthcare, hospitality, real estate, human performance, and global capital strategy.
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As part of this partnership, members of THE HORIZONS life community receive priority consideration for participation at the Longevity Investors Conference 2026, with applications reviewed ahead of the general queue.
If you are interested in joining the 120 globally selected participants gathering in Gstaad this September, ✉️ Direct Liaison: horizons@thehorizons.life
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