Next Frontier of Biohacking & Digital Wellbeing
Trialog
Alexandra Bause is a partner at Apollo Ventures, an early stage life science company builder and investment fund for interventions that improve health by targeting the biological processes that contribute to age-related functional decline and disease. She is a licensed pharmacist and completed her PhD studies at Harvard Medical School investigating the molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular aging and could be modulated to increase health span.
Ekaterina Gianelli is an investor at Inventure, the Nordic technology fund, where she works with digital health, consumer internet and enterprise software companies. Previously, Ekaterina has been operationally involved in scaling Fjord, the design & innovation consultancy (acquired by Accenture Interactive in 2013), and an adtech startup Kiosked. Drawing on her experiences, Ekaterina actively bridges the gap between design, business, and technology.
Tanya Marvin-Horowitz is the co-founder & Managing Partner of CapA, a US-based Series A fund focused on supporting new leaders of innovation between the Nordics, Israel and the USA. She is also a Partner with Butterfly VC, a pre-Seed fund investing in deep-tech companies in the Nordics. A seasoned M&A banker from NYC, Tanya followed her passion in 2013 to work with tech entrepreneurs and now based in Stockholm, she is perfectly positioned to help budding startup teams gear up for the international market. In addition to being a collegiate tennis player, Tanya has a dual degree in Mathematics and Marketing.
Margus Uudam is a founder and partner at Karma Ventures – A round focused VC fund for Europe. Backed by Skype engineering co-founders, EIF and other institutional investors, Karma Ventures is focusing on technology creators across many verticals. Margus has 10 years of experience as a head of VC investments at Ambient Sound Investments (Skype engineering co-founders multi-family office) where he managed a global venture portfolio of 30 companies.
Formerly Margus has been CEO or senior manager in public and private sector. He has gained experience in public sector as Deputy Secretary General in Ministry of Finance, being responsible for state budget, tax policy and economic policy in Estonia. Also he has been responsible as CEO for turnaround of Estonian Energy Distribution Network and contributed to the growth of Baltics leading HR company Fontes.
This talk gathered leading investors to explore the next wave of health tech
It is interesting that we try to fix so many things, building technologies layer on layer on top to fix it. But quite often we don't look at the root cause, what actually creates it.
Summary
- Investors prioritize personalized healthcare and biotechnology targeting healthy longevity, specifically focusing on mechanisms like the mtor pathway and senolytics. - The next health tech wave involves home diagnostics and seamless data capture to make medical insights more accessible without frequent doctor visits. - While impact-driven "moonshots" motivate investment, startups must demonstrate a clear understanding of reimbursement structures and regulatory hurdles like the FDA. - Success in biohacking hardware requires overcoming adoption barriers through better design, consumer education, and solving urgent unmet needs rather than just tracking data. - Startup failures often stem from poor execution, team misalignment, or the inability to establish a profitable business model before investment capital is exhausted.
Article
Investor Insights: Next Frontier Of Biohacking & Digital Wellbeing
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Investors Sketched A Future Where Health Moved From The Clinic To The Background Of Everyday Life
On 18 May 2018, at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm** in **Stockholm, Sweden**, a panel titled **Next Frontier of Biohacking & Digital Wellbeing** offered a rare glimpse into the minds of the people who decide which health technologies get the chance to change the world and which vanish before they ever leave the prototype stage.
The session, led by **Trialog**, gathered four investors whose backgrounds stretched across biotech, digital health, deep tech and venture capital: **Alexandra Bause of Apollo Ventures**, **Ekaterina Gianelli of Inventure**, **Tanya Marvin-Horowitz of CapA and Butterfly VC**, and **Margus Uudam of Karma Ventures**, as listed for the event. Their discussion was not a hymn to futurism for its own sake. It was a sharper, more sobering account of how longevity science, home diagnostics, neurotechnology and personalized care might scale, and why so many promising ideas still fail.
If there was a single theme running through the conversation, it was this: the next wave of biohacking would not be defined by gadgets alone. It would be shaped by the far harder work of aligning biology, design, regulation, reimbursement and human behavior.
The New Gold Rush Was Personalized Health
The investors made clear that healthcare had been moving away from one-size-fits-all medicine and toward something more intimate, more continuous and more data-rich.
For **Ekaterina Gianelli**, that future was rooted in seamless personalization. “We need to make healthcare more personalized and capture data in a way that runs seamlessly in the background,” she said, pointing toward a world where devices no longer merely tracked us, but quietly built a living map of our health.
That vision extended beyond fitness wearables. It suggested an entire infrastructure in which sleep, nutrition, stress, blood markers and behavior could be captured outside hospitals and interpreted in ways that made interventions more precise and more timely.
**Alexandra Bause**, whose work at Apollo Ventures focused on biotechnology for healthy longevity, pushed this idea further into the molecular realm. Personalized healthcare, in her account, would depend on integrating layers of biological information: genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and the microbiome. Only then, she argued, could medicine truly understand why one person responded to an intervention while another did not.
This was the frontier beyond generic wellness advice. It was a future in which health recommendations, treatments and preventative strategies were tailored to the individual body rather than the statistical average.
Longevity Therapeutics Drew Serious Attention
If Silicon Valley once chased scale at any cost, this panel suggested that some investors had begun chasing time itself.
Bause described Apollo Ventures’ focus on the biology of aging, with investments aimed at interventions that could extend health span by addressing age-related decline at its roots. Among the areas she highlighted were **rapamycin analogs**, tied to the **mTOR pathway**, and **senolytics**, designed to target senescent cells that accumulate with age and contribute to disease.
These were not lifestyle products with glossy branding. They were high-risk, high-promise attempts to intervene in the mechanisms of aging itself.
Yet even here, the panel resisted fantasy. Bause was clear that such therapeutics would take time. Safety and efficacy still had to be proven. Regulation remained unavoidable. In the meantime, biohacking was cast less as a miracle cure than as a bridge, a set of practices like sleep optimization, nutrition, activity tracking and intermittent fasting that might help people preserve health long enough to benefit from more advanced therapies later.
The Real Prize Was Home-Based Diagnostics
One of the strongest investment signals from the discussion was the shift away from healthcare as something accessed only in appointments and waiting rooms.
**Tanya Marvin-Horowitz** pointed to the rise of health technologies that placed diagnostic capacity directly into consumers’ hands. In her telling, the next big movement was not just tracking steps or sleep but enabling meaningful monitoring at home, reducing dependence on clinical visits and easing the friction of an overloaded healthcare system.
That mattered both for convenience and for access. If patients could gather critical information from home rather than wait for specialist appointments, healthcare could become more preventative and less episodic. The investor view was that this was not merely a consumer trend. It was a structural transformation.
Marvin-Horowitz also highlighted the complementary opportunity inside clinical settings, where AI-driven monitoring could help physicians identify which patients were at greatest risk, such as those vulnerable to cardiac events. The future of digital wellbeing, then, was not anti-medical. It was hybrid: consumer-facing where possible, clinically integrated where necessary.
The Hype Around Brain Tech Came With A Warning
Few areas captured the panel’s imagination as vividly as neurotechnology.
Marvin-Horowitz described investment activity in neuroscience-based headset technologies aimed at improving focus and calm, including applications for children with ADHD. The appeal was obvious. Cognitive strain, distraction and stress had become defining conditions of modern life. Any hardware that could sharpen concentration or regulate mood promised an enormous market.
But the panel was equally candid about the barriers.
Gianelli said she would invest in the broader area of brain performance, but stressed that success depended on far more than technical novelty. Market education, trust, scientific credibility and strong marketing would all be essential. A product might work brilliantly in theory and still fail to find users.
Bause identified the deeper obstacle: adoption. A device worn on the head might be effective, but would people actually use it in daily life, at work, in public, under the gaze of others? In health tech, form factor can become fate.
The exchange revealed a truth often obscured in startup mythology. Innovation does not win because it is impressive. It wins because ordinary people can absorb it into ordinary life.
Investors Wanted Impact, But Not Naivety
One of the most telling moments in the session came when the panel was pressed on motive. What came first: changing the world or making money?
Bause answered with unusual directness. In her view, impact drove the investment thesis. “If you focus on achieving a massive positive impact, the money will naturally follow because that is where people want to put their funding.”
It was an idealistic statement, but not an empty one. The point was not that markets would reward every noble effort. Rather, it was that the most consequential breakthroughs in longevity and health could create both enormous societal value and enormous financial value.
Gianelli offered a more operational version of the same argument. “The key to success is making services truly customer-centric; if you can achieve high user adoption, the monetization will follow.”
Still, the panel never indulged the fantasy that good intentions were enough. Marvin-Horowitz reminded the room that venture funds live within fixed timelines. If a startup needed years of FDA navigation before reaching market, investors had to factor that into the shrinking window for returns. Healthcare may reward patience, but funds still run on clocks.
The ideal founder, in this view, was not just visionary but disciplined enough to understand reimbursement, regulation and business model design from the outset.
Regulation And Reimbursement Remained The Hard Wall
Again and again, the conversation returned to the practical systems that determine whether healthcare innovation can survive contact with reality.
Gianelli stressed the importance of founders understanding how the healthcare system actually pays for services. Reimbursement structures, payment pathways and integration into existing infrastructure were not details to solve later. They were central to whether a company could become a business at all.
Marvin-Horowitz echoed that caution from the standpoint of US regulation. A technology that faced four or five years of FDA delay was not simply slowed down. It could become structurally difficult for early investors to support, however elegant its science.
This was one of the clearest lessons of the session: in health tech, disruption rarely means bypassing the system entirely. More often, it means understanding the system deeply enough to enter it, survive it and only then reshape it.
Why Good Startups Still Failed
For all the optimism in the room, the panel reserved some of its sharpest clarity for failure.
Marvin-Horowitz pointed first to execution. Startups missed milestones, lacked critical capabilities on the team or failed to navigate inevitable pivots. Gianelli focused on business model uncertainty, warning that many companies ran out of time before discovering a stable path to revenue. Bause, speaking from the therapeutics side, added the most unforgiving risk of all: a product that simply failed on safety or efficacy.
There was no romance in these answers. Failure, they suggested, was usually not caused by a lack of ambition. It came from misalignment between idea and market, product and adoption, technology and timing, science and solvency.
That realism made the panel more compelling, not less. It refused the easy script in which every bold founder is one funding round away from transforming humanity.
A More Mature Vision Of Biohacking Emerged
What emerged from **Next Frontier of Biohacking & Digital Wellbeing** was a more mature definition of biohacking itself.
This was no longer just the culture of supplements, sleep scores and self-experimentation, though those remained part of the picture. It was becoming an investment category shaped by molecular aging research, home diagnostics, AI-assisted risk monitoring, neurofeedback hardware and cross-omic analysis. But just as importantly, it was becoming a test of whether health innovation could move beyond enthusiasm into durable infrastructure.
Trialog opened the session with a line that lingered over the rest of the discussion: “Dreams come true not because you are smarter, but because something inside you keeps hoping and you show up for the opportunity.”
By the end of the panel, that sentiment had been recast in venture terms. Hope mattered. So did showing up. But in biohacking and digital wellbeing, opportunity belonged not just to those with the boldest dream, but to those able to reconcile moonshot ambition with the unforgiving mechanics of the real world.
In Stockholm that evening, the investors did not promise easy victories. What they offered instead was something rarer: a clear-eyed map of where the future of health might be built, and why building it would be so hard.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm