Capital Flow In Health & Wellbeing
Aki Koivistoinen
Aki Koivistoinen is an entrepreneur, strategist and batteries included health transformer, now leading the European arm of StartUp Health. StartUp Health is a global health innovation company and growth platform for entrepreneurs transforming health. StartUp Health has the world’s largest portfolio of digital health companies – over 200 startups spanning 18 different countries – and network of over 40 000 innovators, industry leaders and investors committed to supporting the entrepreneurs re-imagining health and wellness. Prior to StartUp Health Aki was a co-founder of Karyon Ltd, a medical biotech company, developing targeted carrier molecules for imaging and treatment of solid tumors. As a strategist he works in company, industry and government levels in different market areas to build innovation capacity and boost business creation. Aki also serves on the advisory boards of startups he has invested in. StartUp Health is a global health innovation company. The StartUp Health Platform, including its Academy, Network and Innovation Fund, is empowering a global network of entrepreneurs and innovators to transform healthcare. With more than 200 companies, StartUp Health has the world’s largest portfolio of digital health companies from 18 countries and 5 continents. StartUp Health was founded in 2011 by Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes and is chaired by former Time Warner CEO, Jerry Levin. StartUp Health’s notable strategic partners and investors include AARP, Accenture, Allianz, AON, Aurora Health Care, Bayer, California Healthcare Foundation, Steve Case, Cleveland Clinic, Conifer Health Solutions, Mark Cuban, Esther Dyson, Roger Ehrenberg, Brad Feld, GE Ventures, Genentech, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, SAP, SeventySix Capital and Stericycle.
With over $11.5B of capital pouring into the sector globally, 2017 was the most funded year to date, surpassing 2016 by almost $3.5B. We are looking forward to seeing what this capital brings in 2018. Where does the money go? Who are most active investors? Which are geographical hotspots? Selected case studies.
The most critical resource is time, and it’s all about how we use it. Remember to do meaningful things that have a purpose with the people you love, and enjoy your journey in life.
Summary
- The mission to improve global health focuses on ten "moonshots," ranging from curing diseases to nutrition and brain health, where biohacking and entrepreneurship play central roles. - Global health investment has surged since 2010, transitioning from a phase of experimentation to large-scale implementation with major hotspots in the US, Europe, Israel, and China. - Success in the digital health and biohacking sectors requires moving beyond noise to provide real-world evidence and data with clear clinical relevance to ensure long-term value. - Future healthcare solutions must be holistic, integrating genomic, environmental, and lifestyle data to break down information silos and empower better personal and clinical decisions. - Fundraising in health tech is a marathon, with the average time between seed and Series A rounds lasting over 17 months, necessitating constant progress updates to potential investors.
Article
Capital Flow In Health & Wellbeing
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Aki Koivistoinen Charted Where Money, Evidence And Ambition Were Taking The Future Of Health
On 18 May 2018, at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm** in **Stockholm, Sweden**, **Aki Koivistoinen** delivered a presentation that tried to do something rare in the wellness world: separate the romance of disruption from the hard arithmetic of scale.
His talk, **Capital Flow In Health & Wellbeing: Global Investment Trends & Scaling Health Moonshots**, was at once a market briefing, a manifesto and a warning. Health, he argued, had entered a decisive phase. The age of fascination had passed. The age of implementation had begun.
“We are moving from the age of interest and experimentation into the age of implementation and scaling, where digital health and biohacking will change the world,” Koivistoinen said.
That claim might have sounded inflated in another setting. But at a summit built around performance, biology and self-experimentation, it landed with force. Koivistoinen, who led the European arm of StartUp Health, framed health innovation not as a niche industry but as one of the defining economic and moral projects of the coming decades.
A Global Army Of “Health Transformers”
Koivistoinen described StartUp Health as more than an investor network. It was, in his telling, a platform built around entrepreneurs he called “health transformers”, founders pursuing what the organisation had defined as ten health “moonshots”.
Those goals stretched from the monumental to the intimate: reducing the cost of care, improving access, tackling disease, advancing women’s and children’s health, and deepening work in nutrition, fitness, brain health, happiness and mental wellbeing.
The significance of that framework was not only rhetorical. It reflected a shift in how health innovation was being organised. Instead of treating biotech, digital therapeutics, preventive care and consumer wellness as separate silos, Koivistoinen insisted they were converging into a broader system.
Biohacking, in that context, was not a fringe curiosity. It was becoming central to prevention, behaviour change and personalised care.
“When you provide people with the knowledge to change their habits and combine that with the magic of entrepreneurs, that is when the real transformation happens,” he said.
Why The Moment Seemed To Have Arrived
Koivistoinen’s core argument was simple: the conditions that had long delayed healthcare transformation were finally aligning.
Need was the first driver. Healthcare systems were costly, unequal and under pressure to deliver more with less. Prevention, data-guided decision-making and consumer empowerment were no longer optional additions. They were becoming structural necessities.
Technology was the second. Artificial intelligence, sensor-based tracking, genomics and digital platforms had made it possible to combine data from multiple sources and turn complexity into usable insight. The challenge was no longer merely gathering information, but interpreting it well enough to change outcomes.
Then there was regulation. Koivistoinen suggested Europe had gained an edge through open data rules and stronger personal control over information, a contrast he implied could help European innovators move faster in some domains than their American peers.
And finally, capital itself had changed. Large technology companies such as Apple and Amazon were entering health in earnest, drawn by the scale of the opportunity. Investors, meanwhile, were no longer treating digital health as a speculative side bet.
“Entrepreneurs have always been the ones to redefine industries, and we are now in a golden age where knowledge and capital are finally meeting globally,” Koivistoinen said.
The Money Was No Longer Tentative
One of the clearest themes in the presentation was velocity. Health investment, Koivistoinen noted, had risen sharply since 2010. By 2018, quarterly flows were reaching levels that rivalled or exceeded annual figures from earlier in the decade. The implication was unmistakable: digital health had matured from experimental enthusiasm into a serious capital category.
He pointed to major investment hotspots across the United States, with the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston and New York leading the way. In Europe, London and Stockholm stood out, while Israel, especially Tel Aviv, remained a disproportionate force. China, too, loomed in the background as an engine of future disruption.
Yet his reading of the market was not triumphalist. If there was more money in health, there was also more competition, more scrutiny and less patience for weak claims. Wellness language alone would not sustain a company for long.
Fundraising Was A Marathon, Not A Rescue Mission
Here Koivistoinen became most pragmatic. Founders, he said, often approached investors too late, assuming capital could be secured in a matter of weeks. In reality, the average gap between seed funding and a Series A round stood at **17.2 months**. In sectors as regulated and evidence-sensitive as health, that delay was not an anomaly but a structural feature.
The lesson was blunt: fundraising had to begin long before the round formally opened. Progress had to be communicated continuously, not theatrically. Investors and strategic partners needed a running narrative of momentum, not a last-minute plea.
For entrepreneurs accustomed to the folklore of blitzscaling, it was a sobering corrective. In health tech, credibility accumulated slowly. Trust was built quarter by quarter.
Evidence Was The Only Durable Currency
If capital was flowing more freely, Koivistoinen made clear that the market was also learning to distinguish signal from noise.
“There’s a lot of noise in digital health and biohacking,” he suggested, and the answer was “real-world evidence”.
That may have been the most consequential line of the talk. For all the enthusiasm surrounding wearables, behaviour tracking, nutritional optimisation and direct-to-consumer diagnostics, Koivistoinen insisted that long-term success depended on clinical relevance. A product might attract headlines or users quickly, but without convincing data it would struggle to matter to patients, physicians, health systems or public markets.
He pointed to a broader truth about health outcomes: medicine itself explained only part of the picture. Lifestyle, environment and social factors often had greater influence than treatment alone. That was not an argument against clinical rigour. It was an argument for expanding it. If companies wanted to shape real health outcomes, they had to work across the messy territory where biology, behaviour and circumstance met.
The Promise Of A More Holistic Medicine
The most striking part of Koivistoinen’s presentation was his vision of health as an integrated data landscape. Genomics, physiology, sleep, biomarkers, environment, microbiome, lifestyle and personal history should not remain isolated streams, he argued. Their value emerged when they were combined.
He offered the example of genomic testing and the growing interest in linking consumer-generated biological data with clinically meaningful forecasting. This, in his telling, was where biohacking matured into something more serious than self-optimisation: a bridge between personal agency and medical decision-making.
“We really should go back to nature in many ways and combine that wisdom with new technologies to transform health and wellbeing,” he said.
It was a line that captured the summit’s ethos while also transcending it. Koivistoinen was not calling for a retreat from science into nostalgia. He was arguing that the future of medicine might be strongest when high technology learned to work with older understandings of habit, nutrition, rest and environment.
A Bigger Ambition Than Better Gadgets
At the heart of the talk was a refusal to reduce health innovation to product cycles. Koivistoinen kept returning instead to mission, time and scale.
“We can achieve one hundred years of progress in the next twenty-five years by reimagining healthcare through the work of health transformers targeting their own moonshots,” he said.
It was the language of venture-backed optimism, certainly. But beneath it sat a serious proposition. Health systems had spent decades rewarding treatment more than prevention, fragmentation more than integration, and professional authority more than patient agency. The companies now emerging in digital health and wellbeing were attempting, unevenly and imperfectly, to reverse that logic.
Whether they would succeed remained unclear. But Koivistoinen’s argument at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm** was that the era of dabbling had ended. Capital, technology and cultural demand were now moving in the same direction. The founders who mattered would be those capable not only of dreaming in moonshots, but of proving, patiently and publicly, that their ideas worked.
In a field crowded with promises of transformation, that insistence on evidence may have been the most radical claim of all.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm