Following the money in health innovation: funding trends, market signals and where capital is flowing across AI, longevity and digital health.
17 articles
The longevity vocabulary ladder (prevention, healthspan, hotspan, sexspan, peakspan) is a live map of where the money moves. Each -span is born at the top of the market as a scarcity product, while AI platforms like Midi democratise the knowledge layer beneath it, so abundance and scarcity stack instead of alternating.
Revolut and Alan are running the same challenger playbook on banking and health insurance, and the revealing part is how incumbents respond. Genuine safety objections and margin defence wear the same suit, and this edition offers a test to tell them apart before 'patient safety' becomes healthcare's favourite blocking tactic.
Dubai's Law No. 17 of 2026 created a Longevity Authority chaired by the emirate's economy chief, not a health minister, turning a decade-old 'region as regulated test centre' thesis into live policy. The piece asks why Europe still files ageing under cost while the Gulf builds it into a sovereign export industry.
Whoop and Oura spent 2026 walking from wearable brand to health platform down mirror-image paths: Oura buying clinical-data integration, Whoop capitalising into Medicare reimbursement and running its own care. The device is now the marketing layer; the real moat is whoever owns the cleanest pipe between consumer wearables and clinical systems, and Europe is missing the reimbursement pathway both are exploiting in the US.
Sixty percent of UK workers now rank private health insurance as their most valued workplace benefit, ahead of extra holiday. That single inversion breaks the century-old logic of employee benefits, and makes most of the 2026 perks stack retention-irrelevant for the people companies most want to keep.
Q1 2026 marked a convergence in longevity: $3.74B raised, 173 AI-discovered drugs in trials, the first FDA-approved mitochondrial therapy, and a 71% jump in global events. The sector's bottleneck is no longer discovery; it's whether clinical practice can absorb what's coming.
Most healthcare innovation is stuck inside clinical walls. But what if the next revolution comes from concrete, not code? Wellness real estate is emerging as a major player in healthcare's transformation, where the spaces we inhabit quietly reshape our health.
The wearables industry just shifted from counting steps to predicting strokes. While most organisations debate digital transformation, tech giants are quietly building the infrastructure to turn your biological data into the next platform economy.
The same consumers who won't pay €18/month for digital therapeutics just spent €267 on an Oura ring. Meanwhile, traditional digital health funding has dropped 75% since 2021, while wellness companies secured €6.5 billion across 318 startups.There's a story hidden in these numbers about why some healthcare innovations thrive while others struggle to survive.
Imagine the hospital's imaging suite reimagined as a monthly subscription that sits quietly in a spare room at home. Subscription diagnostics could do to healthcare what Netflix did to entertainment, shifting from centralised, high-cost infrastructure to accessible, AI-powered personal health, and rewriting the economics of asset utilisation along the way.
Innovation often happens at the intersections we least expect, like sports, entertainment, and reproductive biology. Could transforming a live sperm race into a spectator sport unlock new funding streams, spark critical public conversations, and redefine how we engage with health research?
Belgium's ultra-endurance champions are making headlines globally. Could the country's fertile tech ecosystem be a contributing factor? An exploration of Belgium's growing sportstech landscape.
Taylor Swift's wellness messaging raises an intriguing question: could celebrity influence actually drive measurable public health outcomes? An exploration of how celebrities are reshaping health culture.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare and business, a new class of drugs is making waves that extend far beyond the…
The convergence of technology and finance is reshaping industries, and the intersection of fintech and healthcare is a transformative frontier for life sciences.
The rise of GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Mounjaro, Zepbound, etc.) is inadvertently boosting the stock prices of fast food chains. This paradox…
Remember my prediction a decade ago about big tech revolutionising healthcare? Lower costs, better experiences: it all seemed inevitable. But where are the Amazons and Googles clinics today?
