As longevity startups mature, investors from Sand Hill Road to sovereign funds are backing moonshots—pushing valuations into the billions and testing the line between hype and hard science.

SAN FRANCISCO / LONDON — In the span of three years, the business of extending healthy human life has leapt from fringe fascination to a mainstream capital market. A handful of longevity startups now command multi‑billion‑dollar valuations or bankrolls, drawing blue‑chip VCs, tech billionaires and even sovereign‑backed foundations into an audacious bet: if aging is the common risk factor behind most diseases, then medicines that slow or reverse it could become the century’s most valuable drugs.

The poster child is Altos Labs, launched in 2022 with a record‑breaking war chest that has since swelled to more than $5.5 billion, according to private‑markets data services. Altos is pursuing cellular rejuvenation—resetting epigenetic programs that drift with age—in hopes of restoring youthful function across tissues. Its sheer scale has given the entire field cover to think bigger: longevity is no longer a cottage industry of supplements and speculative trials; it is big‑science biotech.

The money is following. NewLimit, the epigenetic reprogramming venture co‑founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, closed a $130 million Series B in May, led by Kleiner Perkins. Retro Biosciences, initially seeded with $180 million from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, is in the midst of a $1 billion raise and says it expects to dose the first patient with an experimental ‘brain health’ pill before year‑end. Meanwhile, AI‑enabled drug hunters that frame themselves explicitly around ‘healthspan’—notably Insilico Medicine—have crossed the unicorn threshold, underscoring that the longevity thesis now intersects with one of finance’s hottest stories: generative AI in pharma.

It isn’t just private capital. Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, established to accelerate healthspan research, has signaled an annual budget of up to $1 billion—patient, mission‑driven capital that can underwrite early, translational geroscience where traditional biopharma has historically balked. Prize money is flowing too: the XPrize Healthspan, a $101 million competition running through 2030, aims to rejuvenate muscle, cognition and immunity in older adults—an audacious attempt to move the field beyond single‑organ fixes.

The sector’s momentum shows up in deal data. Analysts tracking the space say longevity financing rebounded sharply in 2024 after a difficult 2023, with total funding reaching roughly $8.5 billion across more than 300 deals. And public markets are taking notice: Recursion Pharmaceuticals—a bellwether for AI‑first drug discovery that many longevity investors watch closely—now trades with a market capitalization around $2 billion following an expansion push that included an Exscientia acquisition agreement last year.

What, exactly, are investors buying? A cluster of bet types has emerged. One is cellular reprogramming: using transient expression of developmental factors or small‑molecule ‘rejuvenators’ to roll back epigenetic age without erasing a cell’s identity. Another is senescence biology: clearing or modulating ‘zombie’ cells that secrete inflammatory factors and are implicated in fibrosis, osteoarthritis and metabolic decline. A third is systemic ‘reset’ strategies, from young‑blood‑inspired plasma exchange to thymus regeneration. Layered across all of it is AI, which promises to compress target discovery and medicinal chemistry cycles.

A surprising flank is veterinary medicine. Loyal, a San Francisco startup, is running pivotal studies in dogs and has notched two ‘reasonable expectation of efficacy’ acknowledgments from the U.S. FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine—first‑of‑their‑kind milestones for longevity drugs in any species. Dogs age fast and share human environments, offering a pragmatic path to test geroscience interventions before scaling to people. And unlike supplements, veterinary drugs must pass rigorous safety and efficacy bars, which could make canine approvals a de‑risking event for human programs.

There are near‑term commercial stories, too. GLP‑1 obesity medicines like semaglutide and tirzepatide aren’t longevity drugs per se, but they reshape cardiometabolic risk—the largest contributor to premature mortality in rich countries—and have reframed the art of the possible. Investors increasingly talk about ‘healthspan stacks’ that combine metabolic drugs, lifestyle programs, and (eventually) geroscience therapeutics to shift population‑level aging curves.

Regulators, however, remain the field’s most stubborn bottleneck. Aging is not classified as a disease in the World Health Organization’s ICD‑11, which means companies must pick specific conditions—fibrosis, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer’s—and run conventional trials with conventional endpoints. The compromise, for now, is an ‘aging‑related’ extension code and a patchwork of surrogate biomarkers, from epigenetic clocks to proteomic signatures. That reality keeps timelines long and forces even deep‑pocketed startups to show discipline about indications and trial design.

Discipline will be needed, because science risk remains existential. Epigenetic reprogramming dazzles in mice, but dose, delivery and safety margins in primates and people are unsolved. Senolytics have produced uneven results across models, and aging biology is deeply intertwined—tweak one pathway and others compensate. Longevity’s last hype cycle in the late 2010s left a scar; today’s investors say the difference is data density and better translational tools, but Phase 2 readouts over the next 24 months will be the real judge.

Still, the contours of a durable market are taking shape. On one side are ‘platform’ companies pursuing therapies that could generalize across age‑linked diseases; on the other, service businesses—clinics, diagnostics, and data platforms—targeting affluent early adopters and corporate wellness budgets. A likely bridge is veterinary: if Loyal or rivals can show longer, healthier dog lives with clean safety, insurers and regulators may prove more receptive to analogous human trials.

Who wins? The edge may go to teams that marry credible biology with scale economics—using AI to cut R&D cycle times, designing adaptive trials around mechanistic biomarkers, and picking indications that both matter and read out quickly. Deep capital alone won’t do it; longevity is a grind of manufacturing, toxicology and clinical ops. But the payoff, if the thesis holds, is vast: bending the incidence curves of the diseases that consume most healthcare spending and push quality of life down after 65.

For now, the signal is unmistakable: the quest to live to 100—and to live well—is no longer a futuristic parlor game. It is a competitive, well‑financed market searching for the first clean efficacy story. When that arrives, the term ‘longevity biotech’ may disappear into the mainstream lexicon of medicine, the way ‘mobile’ stopped being a separate category once every device was a smartphone.

Sources (selected): Financial Times, PitchBook, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Forbes, Longevity.Technology, WHO/ICD‑11 materials, XPrize releases, company blogs and regulatory posts.

References

– Financial Times: “Inside the billion-dollar quest to live beyond 100” (Sep 25, 2025).

– PitchBook profile: Altos Labs total funding (~$5.56B).

– TechCrunch: NewLimit raises $130M Series B (May 6, 2025).

– Financial Times / TechCrunch: Retro Biosciences raising $1B; trial timing (Jan–Sep 2025).

– Forbes / GEN / Crunchbase News: Insilico Medicine achieves unicorn status (Mar–Apr 2025).

– Longevity.Technology: Annual Longevity Investment Report 2024 ($8.49B across 331 deals).

– Reuters / market data: Recursion Pharmaceuticals market cap ~ $2B (Sep 2025).

– Loyal company post: FDA RXE acknowledgments for LOY‑001/LOY‑002 (Feb 26, 2025).

– WHO/ICD‑11 FAQs and prior updates on ‘aging‑related’ extension code (XT9T).

– The Guardian: XPrize Healthspan $101 million prize (May 11, 2025).

– Hevolution Foundation: up to $1B annual budget; funding initiatives (2023–2025 materials).