Zsolt Farkas of Evolut on why today’s longevity valuations only work if the winners spend the next decade buying everything around them.
It’s the consumer end of longevity where the numbers have stopped making ordinary sense. Look at what the top of this sector is currently worth and then ask what would have to happen for those numbers to make sense. Oura raised at roughly $11 billion last October and is now on a roadshow targeting north of $15 billion. Function Health went from about $191 million to $2.5 billion in seventeen months, then took another $450 million in growth financing this summer.
Selling more rings, or more lab panels, to more people does not get you there. That kind of growth moves in a straight line, and these prices do not. The only way to close the gap is to buy the pieces you are missing, until you own the customer’s whole health relationship instead of one slice of it.
I moderated the exit panel at INNOCOS Zurich last month with three investors who look at this market from completely different seats, and not one of them contradicted that reading. They sharpened it.
Three doors, one building
Nicholas Gnan, a partner at Peers Capital, made the argument that explains why the acquisition logic is so strong. His firm invests pre-seed across three verticals – physical products, digital products and physical spaces – and his view is that over a twenty-year horizon they stop being separate businesses at all. Diagnostics companies, wearables companies and clinic or gym operators are all building toward the same thing: a health operating system.
What differs is the way in. Some bet on the phone, because everyone already has one. Some bet on hardware, because it produces data nobody else holds and a physical relationship software cannot replicate – Gnan was wearing both a Whoop and an Oura while making the point. Some bet on physical space, which creates the strongest emotional attachment and the worst exposure, since margins can move and buildings cannot.
If that is where all three roads lead, then whoever gets there first has to assemble the missing pieces by purchase. Nobody builds diagnostics, wearables, software and clinics from scratch inside a decade.
Run the test backwards
Max Gottschalk runs The Longevity Fund, seeded by Clinique La Prairie. I asked him the bubble question directly and he took it apart before answering. “You’ve got the science and the fiction,” he said – the fiction being the capital moving on the belief that we will reverse aging and reach escape velocity.
He does not think the sector is a bubble. The demographics are real, and so is the demand. His concern is specific companies “fetching valuations beyond normal mathematics,” and the two he named were the two I opened with.
What makes that more than caution is his method. “We need to be able to understand who is a potential buyer,” he said, along with what similar companies have actually been paid and what margin this one can reach. Founder projections are a starting position, not a forecast.
Arnaud Autret of L’Oréal BOLD gives you the buyer’s half of the same test. Corporates build, partner, license or acquire depending on how close a technology sits to what they already do. Underneath all four, he said, “it’s more about buying time than buying specific assets.”
So the question is not only who would buy you, but how many years owning you would save them. A company that shortens a strategic’s roadmap is on the list. One that only adds revenue is not.
What the science is actually worth
Science on its own is worth less than most founders assume. Autret’s point is that it creates value when it changes the business – a higher price, something competitors cannot copy, a market that was closed. Without one of those, it sits on the books as a cost. His advice to companies with strong research and a weak consumer business was to license or partner rather than build.
That is hard to hear after five years in the lab, and I think he is right. Founders here keep treating the evidence as the product. It is closer to a tool, and it is only worth what it moves.
Gnan put it more bluntly. Investors do not really set the price at all. “It’s the purchasing power of the customer that you can talk to that decides the value of the business.”
The fastest way to lose a buyer
If the decade ahead is an acquisition decade, the question becomes which companies are still standing when the buyers arrive. I asked Autret and Gottschalk what loses their interest fastest, and they answered the same thing separately: Claims the science cannot support.
Autret reads the papers, which founders sometimes assume a consumer investor will not. When the claims and the evidence diverge, it is not a problem to fix next quarter. “It’s just like it’s over.” Gottschalk gave the commercial translation – marketing can buy you into a market, but not a second purchase. He pointed to beauty brands that reached billion-dollar valuations on marketing alone and then lost almost all of it, and said the risk is worst in categories built on ingredients anyone can buy, where the evidence is anecdotal.
Overclaiming, in other words, is how you remove yourself from the acquisition list before it is written.
The question to build against
So the useful question for a founder is no longer what to build. It is who is likely to need to own this in five years, and whether what you are building fits inside the system they are assembling.
Gnan spends real time talking to potential acquirers to understand what would make a company interesting to them. You can answer that now, years before it matters. The alternative is turning up to an exit conversation with something nobody needs.
About Zsolt Farkas
Zsolt Farkas has spent 12+ years in growth and has seen 100+ companies up close, first as an operator and now from the board side. He is the founder of Evolut, a growth partner that has helped 50+ beauty, supplement and longevity brands scale across Europe and the US using its OMNIPRESENCE method. He also serves on the Board of Advisors at longevity supplement brand BRONN. He is a visiting lecturer at the Geneva College of Longevity Science, a BeautyMatter Awards judge, and a contributor to BeautyMatter and Glamour, and speaks regularly at INNOCOS longevity summits.
