Village Capital is a global leader in impact investing, helping early-stage startups access the capital they need to grow. Since 2009, it has supported more than 2,100 startups across more than 70 countries, whose founders have gone on to raise more than $9.6 billion in follow-on funding. Through its Future of Aging program, delivered in partnership with Next50 and MetLife Foundation, Village Capital is supporting 30 early-stage startups developing solutions that make aging more affordable, accessible, and equitable—strengthening the social, economic, and community conditions that enable people to age with dignity, agency, and connection.

In this interview, Martin Alexis, Program Manager at Village Capital, and Cali Simmons, Senior Investment Analyst, share what they are seeing across the Future of Aging cohort—from entrepreneurs challenging conventional narratives around aging to the financing gaps that can prevent promising solutions from reaching scale.

Martin leads the design and delivery of the Future of Aging program, working closely with entrepreneurs building innovative solutions for healthier, more equitable aging. Cali supports founders as they strengthen their growth and capital strategies, helping translate early traction into compelling investment opportunities.

1. Village Capital’s Future of Aging Program is supporting entrepreneurs in scaling innovations that improve affordability, accessibility, and equity in the aging process. Why was it important for Village Capital to develop an accelerator with an explicit focus on longevity and aging?

We saw longevity as an issue that goes far beyond healthcare. How well people age is shaped by whether they can afford care and housing, access nutritious food, remain financially secure, stay socially connected, and continue participating in their communities and economies. These non-medical drivers account for roughly 70% of overall health outcomes and strongly influence how people experience aging.

Those systems are becoming increasingly important as the US population ages. By 2030, roughly one in five Americans will be 65 or older. But the systems do not work equally for everyone. Inequities accumulate over a lifetime, meaning people enter older age with very different levels of health, wealth, support, and access.

For Village Capital, that creates both an urgent challenge and an opportunity for entrepreneurship. Founders are developing practical solutions to make care more affordable, strengthen financial security, reduce isolation, help people age in place, and improve access to essential services. The Future of Aging program is designed to help those businesses grow so that more people, regardless of income or background, have the opportunity to prosper.

2. Entrepreneurs often follow market signals shaped by how society values problems. What narratives about longevity and aging are constraining innovation, and where do you see founders successfully challenging those narratives?

One of the most limiting narratives is that aging is primarily a period of decline and dependency: something to manage rather than a stage of life in which people continue to contribute economically, socially, and within their communities. That framing influences what gets built and what gets funded. It can narrow innovation toward treating illness or managing decline rather than strengthening the conditions that help people remain healthy, independent, financially secure, and connected.

The entrepreneurs we work with are challenging that narrative in very practical ways. Zolidar is helping small business owners transition ownership to employees, creating a pathway to retirement security while preserving businesses and jobs in their communities. This challenges the idea that aging means stepping away from economic life, showing instead how transitions later in life can create opportunities for individuals and communities.

These founders are showing that longevity is not simply about adding years to life. It is about building systems that allow people to retain agency, participate in their communities and economies, and live those years well.

Another limiting narrative is that older adults are unable or unwilling to use technology. In reality, the issue is often less about age and more about whether a product is accessible, intuitive, trustworthy, and clearly valuable to the person using it. Good design should account for changing needs as people age, but it should not start from the assumption that older adults cannot engage with technology.

We see founders in the Future of Aging program challenging that assumption as well. Helpful Village uses a fully online platform to strengthen community networks and help older adults remain connected and independent. Groupr uses social commerce to help older adults coordinate purchases and save on groceries. These founders are showing that older adults can engage with digital tools when those tools are accessible, relevant, and tied to a clear benefit in their daily lives.

3. When you look across the cohort in the Future of Aging Program and in the broader pipeline, where is entrepreneurial energy concentrated around longevity?

What is striking is how distributed the innovation is. We are not seeing one single “longevity sector.” We are seeing entrepreneurs address the interconnected systems and social determinants of health that shape how people experience aging.

Across this cohort, entrepreneurial energy spans nutrition and food access, affordable in-home care, social connection, care navigation, rehabilitation, financial security, and support for family caregivers. FareRx, for example, uses medically tailored groceries and nutrition services to help older adults manage chronic conditions. Imperium Care is developing a more affordable model for in-home care. Quiltt helps senior living communities identify social isolation earlier, and OneVillage helps employees and caregivers navigate healthcare, benefits, and aging support for complex care needs.

Yet across this broad range of solutions, caregiving emerged as a recurring theme in the broader pipeline. Perhaps this is due to the scale of this need—an estimated 63 million Americans, nearly one in four adults—serve as family caregivers today. We saw founders tackling this challenge from several angles. Many leveraged AI and digital tools to ease the burden on family caregivers, from coordinating appointments and day-to-day care tasks to navigating healthcare services, managing care-related finances, and facilitating communication across families and care teams.

This diversity reinforces something we see across Village Capital’s work more broadly: complex social and economic challenges don’t have a single solution. Entrepreneurs are closest to specific unmet needs in their communities, and collectively they can show us where existing systems are failing, and where new models are emerging.

4. What gaps exist between what founders are building to support longevity and what capital is funding?

There is a mismatch between the businesses solving important longevity challenges and the types of businesses traditional venture capital is designed to fund. Many longevity solutions operate in complex markets. They may sell into healthcare systems, health plans, senior living communities, care providers, employers, or public and community institutions. They may require pilots, partnerships, or longer customer adoption cycles before they can scale. And some can become strong, sustainable businesses without following the hypergrowth trajectory that conventional venture capital expects. That does not make them less investable. It means the capital needs to fit the business.

At Village Capital, we think this is part of a much broader capital-market challenge. Rather than asking every entrepreneur to reshape their company to fit a predetermined financing model, we need to start with the business: how it grows, what its cash flows look like, what milestones it needs to reach, and what kind of capital can help it get there.

That could mean equity for some companies, but for others it may mean grants, patient capital, flexible debt, revenue-based financing, or combinations of those instruments. If we want more longevity innovations to reach the people who need them, expanding the supply of capital alone is not enough. We also need to make that capital more fit-for-purpose.

5. What do stakeholders need to do to ensure the longevity conversation is inclusive and that solutions provide equitable benefit across communities

We need to start by recognizing that people do not experience aging equally. The ability to live a long, healthy life is shaped over decades by income, housing, employment, access to healthcare and nutritious food, digital connectivity, social networks, and the communities in which people live. That means equity cannot be something we evaluate only after a solution has been built. The people most affected need to help shape what gets built, how it is delivered, and how success is defined.

For investors and funders, that also means looking beyond the businesses and markets that traditional capital already knows how to finance. Promising solutions will emerge from founders closer to underserved communities or from business models that do not look like conventional venture opportunities. It also means recognizing lived experience and professional experience as a form of expertise. Across the cohort, we see founders building from problems they have encountered firsthand. AskSAMIE founder Dr. Brandy Archie is an occupational therapist who saw the barriers older adults face in accessing the right adaptive equipment. TheraMotive founder Dr. Lola Omishore saw how difficult it can be for older adults to adhere to physical therapy when care cannot meet them where they are. And The Care Hack founder Mitul Desai drew on his own experience as a family caregiver and the lack of training and support available when taking on that role. These experiences give founders a deeper understanding of the barriers people face and can lead to solutions grounded in how people actually live and receive care. Investors need evaluation criteria, and capital structures, that recognize the value of that expertise.

We need to think beyond individual outcomes. A strong longevity economy should strengthen local economies as well: creating quality jobs, supporting caregivers, preserving local businesses, expanding access to essential services, and enabling people to remain active participants in their communities. The goal should not simply be for people to live longer. It should be to build the conditions for more people, across more communities, to prosper throughout longer lives.