Longevity Investors Conference aims to focus the investment spotlight on developments in anti-aging science.

As Greg Bailey told us last week: “When I was talking to various banks, most of them understand the opportunities, but they’ve been surprised when I showed them what we’re doing and how far along we are. At one bank, even their head of healthcare was shocked.”

Longevity.Technology: While some areas of longevity, such as AgeTech, are already well-established investment categories, many of its most exciting developments are not yet on the radar of institutional investors. If the sector is to reach its predicted multi-trillion dollar value, then a significant amount of effort needs to go into educating the investor community about its potential and its pitfalls.

The organisers of October’s Longevity Investors Conference are aiming to do just that, bringing together some of the world’s wealthiest people to learn about longevity, rejuvenation and beyond, with the goal of helping them make informed investment decisions. The event is run by entrepreneurs and financial experts Marc Bernegger and Dr Tobias Reichmuth. We caught up with Bernegger recently to find out what led to the pair’s latest focus on longevity.

“We both have always had a very close affiliation to emerging technologies and industries before they became mainstream, and that’s why we have both been interested in longevity for six or seven years now,” he says, pointing out that both he and Reichmuth are graduates of the Singularity University’s executive program.

The conference format is essentially based on the pair’s experience in running an exclusive, investor-only crypto finance conference series for the past four years. Hosted in the luxury alpine resort of St. Moritz, the crypto event is timed to coincide with Davos – the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

“We only have very high level people [at the crypto event],” says Bernegger “We don’t share the names, but we already had quite a few billionaires and triple millionaires in St. Moritz attending our events.”

“But, even when you have all this financial power, you’re still limited by aging, and we realised that the target group we already have at our crypto finance conference is also extremely interested in this longevity space,” he adds. “So we thought we had to do something in this field – not just another longevity conference, but something only focused on high level investors. The most relevant, most wealthy people in our network are not yet in the longevity space, so the idea is to bring additional investors and additional money into the space.”

The exclusive Longevity event was also due to have been held in St. Moritz, but has been shifted to an online format due to COVID-19. The promise of bringing new investment to the sector meant that it wasn’t hard to find top-quality presenters, with a speaker list including 3 members of our own Advisory Panel: David Sinclair, Aubrey de Grey, Jim Mellon, Nir Barzilai, Eric Verdin, João Pedro de Magalhães and more.

“Literally everybody wanted to be part of it because they could see that the more investors are involved in longevity, especially big ones that you bring into the field, the better for everyone,” says Bernegger. “That’s why we will be starting on a really high level – we really want to bring people who have perhaps heard or read about longevity and think that it might be something worth investing in, but don’t yet have enough understanding of it to do so.”

As an entrepreneur and investor himself, Bernegger is excited about the investment opportunity in some specific areas of Longevity.

“The moonshots are always nice, but ultimately you need something where you can also earn money in the short term, so I try to focus on businesses where you also have a short term perspective – things like nootropics or vitamin supplements relating to the microbiome, for example,” he says. “I don’t know if the Google of Longevity already exists or is in the making, or if we are still years away from that. But from an investment and entrepreneur’s perspective, you always want to get some immediate traction and effects.”