In this follow-up interview, we speak with Gabriel Cian about how the 2060 ecosystem has evolved since last year’s Forum, what he learned from the first edition, and how he is thinking about investment, scientific credibility, health optimization, policy, and the future of longevity in Europe.
Last year, we spoke about your path from software entrepreneurship into longevity and your goal of building a broader 2060 ecosystem. One year later, what has changed most in how you think about the mission?
What is the shortest path between two points? In mathematics, we would say it’s a straight line, right?
Yet a river never flows in a straight line from its source to the sea. Why is that?
Let me explain how this applies to the 2060 Foundation—and, more broadly, to the longevity field.
The mission of the 2060 Foundation is to defeat aging before the year 2060. At first glance, the obvious way to achieve this is to invest massively in R&D until we gain a precise understanding of the biology of aging and discover how to slow it down, stop it, or even reverse it. There’s no time to lose. 2060 is only 34 years away—it’s tomorrow. Understanding aging is incredibly difficult, so we should start funding large-scale research immediately, right?
Well, not so fast.
People are not ready for this. Governments are not ready for this. Much of the scientific community is not ready for this. Humanity, as a whole, is not ready for this. Trying to push society directly toward radical life extension meets fierce resistance at every level.
At the same time, however, the world is embracing preventive medicine at an exponential pace. Here, there’s no disruption, no futuristic biotech, no radical treatments—just healthier lifestyles, personalized diagnostics, and targeted supplementation. Nothing too controversial.
People resonate with this message. Governments support it because it can help contain healthcare costs. Investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into the space. Suddenly, longevity medicine seems like common sense.
I think you can see where I’m going with this.
The straight line from today to defeating aging would be to invest massively in R&D. But the resistance is simply too strong. That direct path doesn’t work.
By contrast, helping humanity move through an intermediate phase – embracing preventive medicine before becoming comfortable with the idea of radical life extension – is the path of least resistance. And it works.
Once this global movement toward preventive medicine is fully underway, even a small fraction of the enormous financial resources flowing into it can be redirected toward biotechnology and aging research. Sometimes, 1% of a huge pie is worth far more than 100% of a small one.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past year is this:
In the real world, the shortest path is often not a straight line. It’s the path of least resistance.
What did you learn from the first 2060 Longevity Forum that shaped how you are approaching the 2026 edition?
The biggest insight from last year’s edition of the 2060 Forum was that financial resources are still so scarce in the longevity field that almost every participant had a strong financial incentive to attend.
VC funds were looking for new LPs. Longevity startups were raising capital. Investors were searching for promising investment opportunities. Sponsors were showcasing their products to generate revenue—and some of them were fundraising as well.
In a nutshell, everything revolved around capital.
This realization allowed us to rethink our communication strategy for this year’s edition. By aligning our messaging with the financial objectives of our audience, we were able to make our communication significantly more effective.
Looking back at the 2025 Forum, what were the most concrete outcomes? Were there partnerships, investments, or projects that came directly from people meeting there?
We’ve already received confirmation that several startups secured funding after pitching at last year’s edition of the 2060 Forum. We were thrilled to have played a part in making that happen.
Participants also loved the venue, and many are planning to return this year—this time with their partners and children. Southern France, a beautiful setting, outstanding sports facilities, and a unique blend of keynote speeches, meaningful conversations, swimming, and yoga sessions create an experience that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Another major outcome—although one that is much harder to quantify—has been planting the idea in investors’ minds that longevity may become one of the greatest investment opportunities of our time. Those ideas don’t transform into investments overnight. They take root, mature over time, and eventually reach a tipping point where investors begin allocating significant capital to longevity startups.
But perhaps the most significant outcome of the 2060 Forum has been the creation of the 3060 Fund of Funds. That is where the real epiphany happened.
But more on that later in this interview!
Were there any parts of last year’s event that did not work as well as you hoped, or that you deliberately changed this time?
Well, the most common piece of feedback we received from participants was about the food. It turns out that protein is just as important as vegetables – and all the other longevity-friendly nutrients.
The good news is that this is an easy fix, and we’re taking care of it this year!
The 2026 Forum appears to be larger and more ambitious than the first edition. What is substantively different this year beyond having more speakers or attendees?
For the 2026 edition, we’re aiming to go even further by bringing more investors to the event. We believe we have a responsibility to educate the investment community about the extraordinary opportunities in longevity, so this year we’re placing an even stronger focus on investors.
This should be great news for fundraising startups, as well as for investment funds looking to attract new LPs.
What did you learn from trying to bring scientists, startups, investors, clinicians, and policy advocates into the same room, and how has that shaped the 2026 program?
The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that longevity is not a vertical – it’s a mega-trend growing at an exponential pace, one that is reshaping multiple industries simultaneously: hospitality, healthcare, real estate, longevity clinics, fitness, insurance, tourism, and many others.
Conversations with participants from these different sectors made it clear just how broad and far-reaching the implications of longevity really are.
Another important insight from last year’s edition is that there is still no consensus on which industries, companies, or business models will emerge as the biggest winners. Will it be longevity therapeutics? Longevity clinics? Consumer digital health platforms? Advanced diagnostics? The truth is, nobody knows – and that’s precisely what makes the future so exciting.
This realization has strongly influenced the design of the 2026 program. We’ve placed an even greater emphasis on the diversity of our keynote speakers and on the range of longevity startups we’ll be showcasing on stage. We want investors to discover the broadest possible spectrum of opportunities across the longevity ecosystem.
Longevity conferences can sometimes become echo chambers for people who already agree with each other. How are you trying to include disagreement, skepticism, or more critical perspectives?
I don’t think the 2060 Forum is likely to become an echo chamber, because our mission is to educate investors about longevity as a new investment opportunity—not to promote a single narrative.
We want investors to understand both the opportunities and the risks, as well as the different timelines involved. That’s why we deliberately bring together experts with very different perspectives, who often disagree with one another.
For example, we’ll have:
- Medical doctors who practice longevity medicine and place greater confidence in interventions that are already available than in long-term biotechnology projects.
- Scientists who appreciate the extraordinary complexity of biology and believe that truly disruptive technologies may take many years to reach the market.
- Pragmatic investors who focus on preventive medicine businesses—companies that may not revolutionize healthcare but are more likely to become profitable in the near term while delivering meaningful health benefits.
- Long-term investors who back ambitious biotech startups, pursuing high-risk, high-reward opportunities.
- Futurists who believe that artificial general intelligence is only a few years away and could dramatically accelerate the cure of many, if not all, diseases.
- Startup founders developing breakthrough biotechnology who are advancing their therapies toward the clinic and the market, and who are optimistic about the results of the validation process in the coming years.
As you can imagine, these groups don’t always agree – and that’s exactly the point.
Our role is not to tell people what to think. It’s to expose them to the strongest arguments from different perspectives so they can form their own views.
Ultimately, our goal is not to provide all the answers, but to help our participants ask the right questions.
After speaking with investors through the 2025 Forum and the 2060 Investment Club, what do you now think investors most misunderstand about longevity?
Rather than saying investors misunderstand longevity, I would say that most of them simply don’t understand it yet – and for good reason. That’s exactly why the 2060 Forum exists.
On one side, there is biotechnology. The biology of aging is extraordinarily complex and largely inaccessible to most investors. Yet, this is where the truly disruptive breakthroughs are likely to emerge. This is where the next trillion-dollar company could be created. Because so few investors understand the field today, it remains a blue ocean with relatively little competition.
On the other side, there is preventive medicine: consumer health apps, advanced diagnostics, epigenetic clocks, and many other solutions that are already experiencing exponential growth. These businesses are easy to understand, highly relatable, and therefore already attract significant amounts of capital. But, because the barriers to entry are often relatively low, competition is intense. Investors can certainly generate attractive returns in this segment, but identifying the long-term winners is far from straightforward.
In my view, a sound longevity investment strategy combines both approaches. Yet many investors remain reluctant to invest in biotechnology and allocate most of their capital to preventive medicine instead.
I believe that’s a mistake.
Since last year, the 2060 ecosystem seems to have expanded beyond the Forum itself, including the Investment Club, Ikare.Health, and newer investment initiatives. How do these pieces fit together?
From day one, the vision of the 2060 Foundation has been to build a constellation of profitable, mission-driven ventures, each led by a dedicated and highly competent team, and all deeply interconnected in a mutually reinforcing ecosystem. That vision is becoming more tangible every day.
- The 2060 Club makes longevity investing accessible to a broader audience by lowering the minimum investment ticket while carefully selecting high-potential startups.
- The 3060 Fund of Funds enables qualified investors to gain diversified exposure to the entire longevity sector without the complexity of selecting dozens of startups or actively managing a private equity portfolio. In many ways, it is the closest thing to an S&P 500 for longevity—except that it invests in private companies rather than publicly traded ones.
- Ikare helps people stay healthy for as long as possible by giving them access to the latest advances in preventive medicine. After all, investors are people too. Why invest in the longevity technologies of tomorrow if we don’t even benefit from the longevity technologies that already exist today?
- Last but certainly not least, the global longevity community remains relatively small and geographically dispersed. And as social creatures, we eventually need to meet face to face.
That’s where the 2060 Forum comes in.
- We want investors to shake hands with the founders they’ve backed. We want longevity physicians to meet their patients. We want Ikare patients to become investors, and investors to become Ikare patients.
- In other words, we want every part of the longevity ecosystem to strengthen every other part.
Can you explain the 2060 Longevity Investment Club in practical terms? Who is it for, what role does it play, and how does it decide which startups or opportunities to present?
The 2060 Club is a community of investors who co-invest alongside me in carefully selected longevity startups.
Our goal is to invest in five to ten companies each year. Individual investments typically range from $5,000 to $20,000 per startup, allowing us to aggregate approximately $500,000 per financing round. For each investment, we create a dedicated Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that pools capital from all participating investors. I personally invest in every startup alongside our members.
The 2060 Club follows a straightforward and well-established venture capital model. It has two revenue streams: an annual membership fee and a 10% carried interest on successful exits.
The Club manages each investment throughout the life of the company until a liquidity event occurs, at which point the proceeds are distributed to investors.
Overall, the 2060 Club is an ideal solution for investors who want exposure to the longevity sector but lack the expertise to identify the best opportunities or the network and scale required to negotiate attractive investment terms.
When your team evaluates a longevity startup, what does the diligence process actually look like? Who assesses the science, the market, and the investment risk?
We often co-invest alongside longevity-focused venture capital funds such as Apollo Health Ventures and LongGame. Whenever possible, we leverage their due diligence as an additional layer of validation.
The broader 2060 Foundation ecosystem is also a significant advantage. Over the years, we’ve built strong relationships with universities, research institutions, leading scientists, and industry experts. In many areas of biotechnology, only a handful of people in the world have the expertise to fully understand what a company is developing. Being able to consult those experts is an invaluable part of our evaluation process.
My partner, Martial Trigeaud, brings decades of relevant experience to this effort. Before joining the 2060 Foundation, he was a serial entrepreneur in the medtech sector and later became the co-founder and General Partner of B21 Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on longevity.
Martial leads our due diligence process. His experience, network, and deep understanding of the field make him exceptionally well qualified for this role.
Has your threshold for what counts as investable longevity science changed over the past year?
I’m very bullish on disruptive biotechnology, and we will continue investing directly in these companies through the 2060 Club.
At the same time, we also invest in preventive medicine companies because they represent the path of least resistance for investors (as I explained earlier). They are easier to understand, easier to adopt, and attract significantly more capital today.
So yes, in a sense, our investment thesis has broadened. While we remain convinced that disruptive biotechnology will generate the largest long-term returns, we now also actively invest in preventive medicine companies as an essential part of the longevity ecosystem.
You have described longevity as a major investment opportunity, but biotech timelines are long and failure rates are high. How do you communicate the upside without encouraging unrealistic expectations?
Most of the time, we invest in biotechnology companies at very specific stages of their development. For example, we often invest when a company is close to completing Phase I or Phase II clinical trials, and is potentially just two or three years away from being acquired by a major pharmaceutical company.
Of course, there is never any certainty that such an outcome will materialize. But this illustrates an important point: investing in biotechnology is not necessarily riskier—or more long-term—than investing in many other sectors. When you invest at the right stage, the risk-reward profile can be remarkably attractive.
You have also discussed newer investment concepts around broader exposure to longevity, including 3060.vc. What are you trying to build there, and what problem does it solve for investors?
Let me tell you the story behind the 3060 Fund of Funds.
During last year’s edition of the 2060 Forum, a friend of mine, Martin Beaujouan—an exceptionally successful real estate investor—made an observation that completely changed the way I thought about longevity investing.
He pointed out that longevity is not a single industry. It’s an ecosystem that spans biotechnology, medtech, diagnostics, preventive medicine, nutrition, fitness, hospitality, real estate, insurance, and many other sectors. The field is simply too broad and too specialized for any individual investor to cover effectively.
To build a truly diversified longevity portfolio, you would need to invest in hundreds of startups, review thousands of investment opportunities every year, and possess deep expertise across multiple disciplines.
In short: mission impossible.
What we needed was the equivalent of the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ but for longevity: a single investment vehicle providing broad exposure to the entire longevity ecosystem.
Because there are still very few publicly traded longevity companies, an index fund isn’t a viable solution today. The closest equivalent is a fund of funds.
Our idea is simple. Each year, we select what we believe are the five best longevity-focused venture capital funds, based on factors such as track record, team quality, credibility, and historical performance. If each of those funds holds a portfolio of around 50 companies, our investors immediately gain exposure to roughly 250 startups. By carefully selecting funds with complementary investment strategies, we can provide broad exposure across the entire longevity landscape.
Today, there are roughly 50 venture capital funds dedicated primarily to longevity worldwide. As the industry matures, that number is likely to grow significantly. Our role is to continuously screen the market, evaluate these funds, rank them, and invest in the most compelling ones. The objective is to give our investors exposure to the longevity economy in much the same way that the S&P 500 provides exposure to the U.S. economy or the NASDAQ provides exposure to the technology sector.
Initially, we built this strategy for ourselves and a small group of close friends, but we quickly encountered another challenge. Many of the world’s leading venture capital funds require minimum commitments of around $500,000. Building a diversified portfolio across five funds therefore requires an investment of approximately $2.5 million.
The obvious solution was to bring together a community of like-minded investors so that we could invest alongside the world’s leading longevity funds.
That’s how the 3060 Fund of Funds was born.
To the best of my knowledge, it is the only investment vehicle specifically designed to give qualified investors broad, diversified exposure to the entire longevity sector through a single product.
Ikare.Health appears to focus on helping people act on today’s available longevity and preventive health tools. How do you distinguish responsible health optimization from overpromising or biohacking hype?
At Ikare.Health, we’re obsessed with the 80/20 principle. We constantly challenge our longevity physicians and health coaches with one simple question: “What are the 20% of interventions that will generate 80% of the health benefits for this particular patient?”
Ikare is the exact opposite of a service that overwhelms people with long lists of generic recommendations. Instead, we identify the one or two interventions that are likely to have the greatest impact for each individual.
For one person, the priority may be improving sleep. For another, it may be building muscle mass. For someone else, it could be reversing prediabetes or optimizing metabolic health. Whatever the priority, we translate it into clear, actionable steps that can be integrated into the patient’s daily routine.
This 80/20 approach naturally helps patients focus on what matters most, ignore unnecessary complexity, and consistently execute on the changes that will have the greatest impact on their long-term health.
What evidence threshold do you personally use before you are comfortable recommending or building around a health intervention?
I’m a man of extremes: very low-tech when it comes to preventive medicine, and very high-tech when it comes to biotechnology. 🙂
When it comes to my own health, I follow a set of simple, evidence-based principles:
- Managing stress
- Prioritizing both the quantity and quality of sleep
- Eating an appropriate diet
- Maintaining good mental health through meaningful relationships and a strong sense of purpose
- Engaging in regular, varied physical activity
- Using personalized diagnostics, such as genetic testing, blood biomarkers, VO₂ max assessments, and other objective measurements
The challenge isn’t knowing what to do – it’s doing it consistently.
These principles may sound like common sense, but following them requires persistence and the ability to stay on your own path instead of constantly being pulled back toward the habits of your surrounding environment. It becomes even more challenging when you recognize that every individual is different and that the optimal balance between these interventions varies from person to person.
Personally, I believe that once these fundamentals are in place, the returns from pursuing increasingly sophisticated optimization strategies diminish rapidly. Rather than spending more time and money chasing marginal gains, I think those resources are often better invested in advancing the longevity field itself—by supporting research and development, advocacy, or other initiatives that accelerate scientific progress.
Since last year’s Forum, have you seen any concrete movement from policymakers, or is longevity still mostly being driven by private capital?
Government officials are beginning to take an interest in the longevity field, but concrete initiatives remain modest.
Influencing public policy is both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult. On the one hand, it doesn’t necessarily require enormous financial resources – meaningful advocacy efforts can begin with budgets of around $50,000 per year. On the other hand, changing laws is a long-term endeavor that often requires 10 to 15 years of patient, persistent work by experienced advocacy professionals.
For now, our priority is to build sustainable revenue streams that will allow us to support these efforts over the long term. Once that financial foundation is in place, we intend to allocate part of those resources to advocacy and public policy initiatives designed to accelerate the development of the longevity field.
A recurring criticism of longevity is that it could become a field for wealthy early adopters. Given the high cost of conferences, clinics, and early-stage investment access, what does democratization mean in practice?
The biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of longevity isn’t financial – it’s cultural. It’s a matter of mindset.
Many of the most powerful interventions are not expensive. In fact, they often cost less than the alternatives:
- Practicing intermittent fasting often costs less than eating more frequently.
- Walking, running, or exercising costs less than spending hours in front of Netflix.
- Preventing disease is generally less expensive than treating it.
- Getting eight hours of sleep costs less than regularly staying out late.
- Building meaningful relationships and living with purpose can be far more valuable – and often less costly – than dealing with the consequences of chronic stress, loneliness, or poor mental health.
- Quitting smoking and reducing alcohol consumption cost less than maintaining those habits.
Of course, changing behavior is much harder than making these comparisons. The challenge is rarely financial – it is psychological, social, and cultural.
The mission of the 2060 Foundation is to help make these ideas mainstream – to make healthy longevity aspirational, accessible, and, yes, even “sexy.”
It’s an ambitious mission, but we’re convinced the world is moving in that direction.
You have talked about building the South of France into a longevity hub. What parts of that are already real today, and what remains aspirational?
Today, most of our initiatives are virtual. Our teams and collaborators are spread across the world, working remotely, and that model has served us well. The projects are moving forward.
For now, we only come together in person for two days each year during the 2060 Forum. That’s valuable – but it’s not enough. We need a permanent home for the longevity ecosystem.
I imagine a high-end longevity campus in Southern France: a place where families who aspire to live according to the principles of healthy longevity can also work, build companies, conduct research, and collaborate every day. A place that truly embodies the ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body.
It would be much more than a real estate project. It would be a living community and a catalyst for innovation.
That vision hasn’t become reality yet – but we still have 34 years until 2060. 🙂
If we speak again next year, what would you want to be able to say 2060 accomplished in 2026?
Our goal for 2026 is to establish the 2060 Foundation as the leading organization promoting longevity in Europe.
We’re building that visibility on multiple fronts: appearing on television, participating in podcasts and conferences, helping channel more investment into the longevity sector, and bringing people who have only recently discovered longevity into direct contact with world-class scientists, physicians, entrepreneurs, and investors.
We’re making steady progress—and we believe we’re on the right path to achieve that vision.
View the article at lifespan.io
