This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, if you check out the Bloomberg original series The Future with Hannah Fry, you may have come across an episode that looked into how a scientific revolution has begun, one that may bring the fantasy of immortality a little closer to reality, at least by a few decades. Anyway, researchers the world over are closing in on discoveries that may help humans live longer, perhaps
well into their one hundreds. So we have lots of conversations and lots of questions about wellness and living longer and lifespans in general. In the meantime, investors, including Primetime Partners, are finding ways to bet on the world's aging population. So with us in our studio is Abby Miller Levy. She's co founder marging partner of the early stage venture capital firm focused on the trillion dollar global aging sector.
There's a lot going on. The firm is Primetime Partners, co founded, by the way, with longtime venture capitalist Alan Patrick ofv Welcome. Thank you so much, coming a little bit so we can hear you, because we want to make sure it's absolutely talk to us a little bit about the aging space and how you guys think about it as investors, because there is a lot going on. But it could be you know, housing for people aging, it could be healthcare, So how do you think about it?
Absolutely, there are so many parts of how we think about the longevity sector. And if you think about it this way, if you ask ARP, for example, they do surveys all the time of older adults and they say,
what do you care about? And they care about their health, they care about financial independence, and they care about having meaningful experiences, and so that means basically, in my mind, gravity means all of health care, all of retirement and wealth management, all of consumer and media, and as well as housing and real estate, and so it's quite a
broad industry. As investors, we're focused on the early stage and we age tech as it's now called, had about two point three trillion dollars of investments, sorry, billion dollars of invests just in twenty one and twenty two. It's really an emerging space. I liken it to where climate tech was twenty years ago. Everybody understood that climate change was not everyone, there was a widespread there was a
lot of data. Yes, there was a lot of data that said climate change is happening and we need to address it as a society. This seismic shift in our age demographic that this is not new information. The fact that twenty five percent of the US population will be over the age of sixty five by twenty fifty thirty percent in Japan, this is not new information. The question is how do we adapt to it, the same way that the climate tech industry and has had to adapt to
this new reality. So that's how we really think about it. There's a lot of opportunity, but we have to in some ways prompt and nudge and push on the urgency of the topic.
Well, there are a lot of problems then to be solved, right, because especially if people are retiring at sixty five seventy and they've on the financial side of it, they're ready for maybe another twenty years, possibly thirty, But what the data is showing is that they could go for another fifty years. Right, So absolutely, I guess there are problems that need to be solved in terms of how they
finance it. The healthcare bill is going to be off the charts, right, and then for meaningful experiences where they going to.
Do absolutely well. You know, one of the most pressing problems is that fifty percent of Americans don't have retirement savings.
That's what I think about. How if you're living longer, yay, yes, if you don't have the money to support yourself, not so great.
Well, I think there's a few things. One is, you know, our individual choices. You know, average retirement age right now is sixty two. That hasn't changed much in the past few years. We are going to need to work longer, but that was incredibly young exactly. Then you have forty more years of basically acid dcumulation versus A cumulation, and so that is a major choice we have to make. And are also given agism in the workplace and things
like that. We need to really work on workforce longevity, but also real changes in forcing retirement savings and so really excited that the government do that. Well. A couple of things. The Secure Act two point zero was the first time that by twenty twenty five, employers who offer four to one k's are going to have auto enrollment.
In other words, instead of saying to someone at twenty, hey, would you like to save now, do just do it, and there have been studies done by Bank of America that show basically that increases participation by five x. And so what Oftentimes, in my role as an investor in the space, friends and family always ask me, you know, Abby, what's the secret to longevity? As if I know some secret pill. And by the way, there's a huge biotech
industry focus on this. I always say, and they're very just kind of it's not as sexy an answer, but I say, max out your four to one k that's the secret to longevity, because if you don't have financial longevity, you will not have a lesser chance of having a decent health span. And we are starting to see that people in their twenty and thirties right now are investing at higher rates in their four to one k's than before. And in fact, one of our portfolio companies is called Penelope.
What they do is they allow solopreneurs and micro business owners to offer four to one k's at reasonable prices, because as a small business owner or even a gig economy worker, you should be able to have your own four to one k and as a self employed person, so we really see that as an opportunity in terms of retirement savings to think about that. The other interesting part of the industry is really going to be around acid dcumulation. Most of our financial services sector is focused
on accumulation. If you think about decumulation, this is everything from now that you have these four to one k's most people they're sitting in. First of all, most people have an average of seven retirement accounts. If you have retirement accounts, because every time you move employers or out of work and do a roth IRA or an IRA, then you have all these accounts and they are these small sums of money sitting typically in passive investment accounts.
So another business we really like is a business called Retireble that basically allows you to put them all together and then look at, actually, how do we invest or think about even drawing a paycheck our retirement saving so you're really thinking about it differently. And also, of course
home equity. You know, the majority of older adults eighty seven percent own their have home equity, and so how do you think about that as a bank account, and really without the punitive products that may have existed or this you know, sense of it is, it has only emergency funding. How do you really think about it actively as funding.
You do say early stage that you guys go into, where are you seeing the most kind of company creation? Is it in the financial products? Is it in how we live? Is it how we experience? Is it healthcare?
It's absolutely in healthcare. Yeah, so two thirds of our investing is in healthcare, and healthcare, you know, is still the largest, you know, one of the largest contributors of our society. And older adults consume two thirds of all health care spent. So there's really incentives on everybody side.
The government that pays for sixty five percent of older Americans health care, the health plans, insures, and you know, pharmac everybody is incentive to figure out how we take better care of older adults.
So how do you So what do you invest in? I'm curious the kind of companies that are come up on your radar and you say, okay, this is something of interest.
Absolutely Honestly, you follow the money, and where the money is is basically in figuring out how to reduce the cost of care and how to make care more accessible. If I had to bucket it into two buckets. Again, we don't do pharm our biotech, So that's something that's not in our purview, but within our purview, it's reducing cost of care. So, for example, anything that would prevent an older adult from hospitalization. A hospitalization can cost a
health plan anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. So reducing hospitalizations might be nutrition, might be, medication adherents might be fall prevention might be even things such as updating your home to make sure that there's safety within the home. So we've invested in several solutions that sell into health plans to say, hey, let's prevent these hospitalizations that have clinical results and data to show we can prevent hospitalizations.
So that's one example on the accessibility front. I mean, I'm sure most of the listeners here recognize that COVID changed everything in terms of telemedicine.
Right.
Telemedicine wasn't a was very infrequently a reimbursable experience before COVID, but it was basically built into our healthcare system now as a way to deliver care. So we've invested in many businesses that frankly make telemedicine more accessible from an infrastructure layer, a company called open Loop, and then about a third of our investments use telemedicine as a delivery
and accessibility mechanism. And we're looking at other businesses, you know, and I know everyone's very focused on AI, you know, within healthcare. What's really interesting is you think about the word care. Healthcare, particularly for older adults, has always been a service business. There's a human involved. And where does AI do a wonderful job? It does a wonderful job of making human interactions faster, easier, and more personalized.
We talk about this. I don't know if this is where you're going. And forgive me if I'm like off in a crazy way, but just this whole idea of older people who are who are lonely, this idea of creating a robot or something that can I know, Matt, you're looking at me like I'm crazy, but I've seen it firsthand and it's devastating. And whether there can be in interactions. I know you think.
I don't think that's crazy. I did a story on that like twenty years ago. My thing is, I wonder how high valuations are right now, because I'm sure a lot of people want to get into this space. It's an incredible demographic, right.
Sure, Well, I just got about twenty seconds important.
So robots we're less excited about. We're excited about technology enabling meetups, live, you know, experiences. It's really human to human. But on valuations, just like everybody else, valuations have come down back to i'd say, you know, twenty nineteen levels on many companies. But because we invest early stage, early stage has largely been protected from the valuation perspective. I think the one thing that has changed is people are focused on profitability and making their money last.
We have to run, come back soon. We'll do all right, Abby Miller Levy. She's a co founder managing partner at Primetime Partners. Here in Studio