Investing In Health and Happiness
Paolo Pio
Paolo has 13 years of experience in the technology industry, with expertise in product development and strategy, international business development, and enterprise sales. He most recently ran Cisco’s Data Center Networking business development team for the region of Asia Pacific. He is an Angel investor and serves in various startup advisory roles, including mentoring at Virgin Startups and TechItalia Lab. Paolo holds an MBA from London Business School where he was recognized for excellence in asset management, and a Cum Laude MS Engineering degree from Politecnico di Torino. He loves hiking, climbing, skiing, and mountains in general. Talk to him about meditation, nutrition, training, and wellbeing if you want to see his eyes light up. Paolo speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish.
Paolo Pio from Joyance Partners explores venture capital investments aimed at enhancing health and
We are focused on making people healthier and happier, looking for ways to add healthy years to our lifespan through the science of the brain and body.
Summary
- Joyance Partners is a venture capital firm specifically focused on investing in startups that promote health and happiness through scientific and technological innovation. - The firm's life science investments include neuroscience, biotech, gut microbiome research, longevity, and Femtech to improve the human lifespan and well-being. - A significant area of focus is next-generation food, including lab-grown mushrooms and pea-protein-based meats that aim to solve global hunger and provide healthier alternatives. - The investment philosophy aligns closely with the biohacking community, prioritizing physical health, nutrition, and mental wellness through science and technology. - Investment strategies target emerging technologies that utilize waste-reduction processes and bio-scientific advancements to enhance how people live and eat.
Article
Investing In Health And Happiness
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Paolo Pio Cast Venture Capital As A Tool For Human Flourishing
On the opening day of **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** in **Helsinki, Finland**, speaker **Paolo Pio** stepped onto the stage with the ease of a technologist and the conviction of a true believer. His presentation, **“Investing In Health & Happiness: Venture Capital In Biohacking & Life Sciences,”** was not simply a survey of market trends. It was an argument that capital, when guided by scientific ambition and moral clarity, could become an instrument for extending life, improving health, and deepening well-being.
Addressing an audience already fluent in the rituals of self-optimization, from ketogenic meals to skipped lunches, Pio immediately found common ground. Yet his message reached beyond the familiar rhythms of the biohacking world. He described a venture philosophy that sought not the next frictionless consumer convenience, but breakthroughs in how human beings think, eat, reproduce, age, and live.
A Career That Moved From Engineering To Investing
Pio’s authority came not from rhetoric alone, but from a career built across technical, operational, and financial worlds. An engineer trained at **Politecnico di Torino**, he began in California at Cisco Systems as a software developer before moving into product management and, later, international business leadership. His work took him across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, Asia, and Australia, shaping a worldview that understood innovation not as a local novelty but as a global force.
That journey eventually led him to **London Business School**, where he deepened his grounding in investment and finance, first through study and then through angel investing. By the time he joined **Joyance Partners**, the venture capital firm at the center of his talk, the transition felt less like a career pivot than an alignment of professional skill and personal calling.
Health, Happiness, And The Logic Of Investment
Joyance Partners, Pio explained, was built around a deceptively simple proposition: to invest in companies that advance **health and happiness**. In a venture ecosystem often seduced by speed, scale, and exit multiples, this focus sounded almost radical in its humanism.
The firm’s portfolio priorities revealed the seriousness beneath the slogan. These were not soft lifestyle bets dressed up in wellness language. They were, in Pio’s framing, life sciences investments with profound implications for the future of medicine and human performance.
He pointed to **neurotech and neuroscience**, fields that promised new understanding of the brain. He highlighted **bioscience and biotechnology**, where innovation was reshaping the science of the body itself. He spoke with particular intensity about the **gut microbiome**, saying, **“The gut microbiome is effectively the second brain in your body, and understanding it is a core part of our mission.”**
In that line, one could hear the larger thesis of the session. Biohacking, at its best, was not vanity masquerading as science. It was a frontier discipline, one that asked how the body’s hidden systems might be understood well enough to be improved.
Longevity, Femtech, And The New Frontiers Of Care
Among the firm’s areas of focus, **longevity** stood out as one of the most culturally resonant. Pio did not frame it in the language of science fiction or immortality. Instead, he spoke in practical, humane terms about adding **healthy years** to the human lifespan. The aspiration was not merely to live longer, but to live better for longer.
That same seriousness informed his remarks on **fertility and femtech**, an area too often underserved by traditional venture capital despite its obvious significance. Pio was direct about the firm’s priorities: **“We are really passionate about investing in fertility and femtech because they are essential to improving human health.”**
It was a pointed reminder that innovation in health could not remain narrowly male, narrowly digital, or narrowly cosmetic. If venture capital wished to claim relevance in the future of well-being, it had to engage the full complexity of human life, including women’s health, reproductive technology, and the systems that had long been overlooked by mainstream investors.
Feeding The Future
If one section of Pio’s presentation captured the widening reach of health-focused investing, it was his discussion of **next-generation food**. Here, the language of venture capital met the urgency of planetary need.
He described investments in companies working at the intersection of nutrition, sustainability, and biotechnology. One, based in Germany, was using waste from other industrial processes to grow mushrooms rapidly. Another, from Switzerland, was producing chicken-like meat from **pea protein**, replicating texture in ways that challenged traditional assumptions about food production.
Pio’s ambition for these companies was expansive. **“We look for startups in next generation food that can utilize waste to grow mushrooms and hopefully solve world hunger,”** he said.
It was an audacious statement, but not a careless one. Behind it lay a serious proposition: that food innovation could be about more than novelty for affluent consumers. It could address scarcity, waste, environmental strain, and the quality of what populations eat. In this sense, nutrition became not a niche concern of the wellness class, but a global question of justice and survival.
A Personal Philosophy Behind The Portfolio
What gave the talk its emotional core was the sense that Pio’s investment philosophy was inseparable from his own life. He spoke not as a detached allocator of capital, but as someone animated by fitness, nutrition, meditation, and communal health.
That commitment surfaced most vividly when he described the free bootcamp he founded in London’s Hyde Park, where large groups gathered in the open air to train together. **“I founded a bootcamp because I love seeing people training together in the open air to become healthier and happier,”** he said.
In another setting, such a detail might have felt ornamental. Here, it did not. It illustrated the continuity between his personal practice and professional thesis. The same instinct that drew him to outdoor collective training also drew him to companies trying to transform the biology of health. The human body, in his account, was both a personal project and a shared social challenge.
The Shared Ethos Of Venture Capital And Biohacking
Perhaps the most striking idea in the presentation was Pio’s insistence that venture capital and biohacking shared a common mentality. At first glance, the worlds can appear dissimilar: one speaks in term sheets and cap tables, the other in ketones, circadian rhythms, and biomarkers. Yet Pio argued that both communities were driven by disciplined experimentation, long-term thinking, and a willingness to challenge inherited limits.
**“There is an incredible amount in common between the investment mentality of our firm and the mentality of the biohacking community,”** he said.
It was more than a flattering nod to the audience. It was a careful reframing of the conference itself. Biohacking was not merely a culture of individual optimization. In Pio’s telling, it was also a lens through which to identify technologies capable of transforming public health, nutrition, and longevity at scale.
Beyond The Stage, A Broader Question
By the end of his presentation at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** on **Friday, 1 November 2019**, Pio had done something subtler than pitch sectors or celebrate portfolio themes. He had raised a deeper question about what investment was for.
If capital could chase convenience, it could also chase cures. If it could inflate appetites, it could also nourish bodies. If it could reward distraction, it could also fund attention, resilience, fertility, and longer healthy lives.
In Helsinki, Paolo Pio presented a vision of venture capital not as a spectator to the future of health, but as one of its architects. In that vision, the most meaningful returns were measured not only in financial gain, but in stronger bodies, clearer minds, and lives lived with more vitality than before.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki