Aligning its portfolio of publicly listed equities taught Next50 Foundation that companies and strategies that value and support aging could be found in unexpected places.
Now, the Denver-based foundation is applying the same lesson as it rotates its private equity portfolio. As an LP, Denver-based Next50 is looking at a pipeline of managers that are thinking about healthy aging across economic wellbeing, social inclusion, health and the built environment.
The $285 million foundation this week made its first venture fund commitment under a new investment framework, backing Enable Ventures, which is applying its own lessons from investing in disability solutions. The premise is that aging, like disability, is not a condition to accommodate, but rather a market to build for.
Next50 was established in 2016 with the proceeds from the sale of InnovAge, a Denver-based senior care operator. The foundation says it is 85% along its journey to align every dollar it owns with its mission to value and support aging.
“Aging and disability are deeply intertwined, yet the market has ignored both,” Next50’s Peter Kaldes tells ImpactAlpha. “By investing in companies that treat disability and aging as assets, we’re betting on a generation of technologies that will let older adults live, work and participate on their own terms.”
Next50 has had a handful of age-oriented fund investments that predate its new investment framework. 1843 Capital, a Washington, DC-based venture capital fund, invests in what it calls the “100+ year healthspan,” including tech solutions that improve health, independence and quality of life for older adults. Age1 is a San Francisco-based venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage tech companies working to extend healthy human lifespan and prevent or treat age-related diseases.
As with its public-equities portfolio, Next50 is hoping to send a signal to other private-equity LPs. Over the coming decade, older adults will outnumber children in the US for the first time. Globally, the 60-plus population is on pace to exceed 2 billion by 2050. By 2030, the longevity economy is projected to reach $8 trillion. In 2024, it attracted roughly $8.5 billion in dedicated investment.
With Next50 as an anchor client, JPMorgan Chase’s private bank created “Support Aging” as a thematic cause, or screen, in its sustainable investments team that is now being used by other clients as well. The framework sorts opportunities on a spectrum from age-friendly to age-inclusive to age-centered
With a new Aging Investing Roadmap, developed with Sorenson Impact Institute, Next50 is seeking again to bring other investors along with it in embedding the needs of older adults into capital decisions, as investors have done with climate and racial equity.
Aging themes can stand alone or be integrated with other impact themes, such as affordable housing or health, or socio-economic considerations such as gender, race or income.
Next50’s taxonomy places investments on a spectrum from age-responsive, which avoids harm and seeks out age-friendly practices; to age-integrated, which treats older adults as stakeholders and contributes to better outcomes for them; to age-centered, a more intentional approach focused on driving improved outcomes.
The roadmap offers sample screening and due diligence questions, as well as examples of aging-themed investments in a range of asset classes.
“Aging is the next megatrend, on par with climate,” Kaldes says in a forward to the roadmap. “The demographics are certain, the implications economy-wide, and the capital requirement measured in trillions.”
Other funds focused on aging include Elder Ventures, which is investing with a focus on aging in place, cognitive health, work and finance and staying connected; and Equitable Ventures, which invests in early stage companies addressing the unmet physical, mental, spiritual, and social needs of older adults.
In France, where one out every three people will soon be over 60 years old, UMR, the retirement savings arm of French mutual insurer Group VYV, earlier this year earmarked €350 million ($398 million) for a five-year “aging well” investment strategy. UMR last week selected Paris-based fund managers Serena and Makesense to manage a €75 million impact fund that will invest in European companies addressing home-based and preventive health care, mental health and career support, social connection and culture, and end-of-life care.
Market-shaping
Next50’s Kaldes says he has been getting a lot of board meeting invitations lately from leaders at foundations and family offices who want to hear about impact investing’s next big opportunity.
“Have we seen the capital unleashed? No, not yet,” Kaldes told ImpactAlpha. “There is an openness to understanding what it is more so than ever before.”
Like Next50, The SCAN Foundation, in Long Beach, Calif., invests through an aging lens, backing supportive services like home-based care for older adults and affordable senior housing. Archstone Foundation, also in Calif., partners with community-based organizations to promote equitable aging and strengthen systems that serve older adults. Chicago-based RRF Foundation for Aging, formerly known as the Retirement Research Foundation, since 1979 has deployed over $239 million towards projects that improve the lives of older adults.
In the UK, the Vivensa Foundation, formerly the Dunhill Medical Trust, has set out its own impact investing mandate for its £170 million ($228 million) endowment.
In Denver this fall, Next50 will host a convening with 150 foundations to explore how to invest in the longevity economy (see, “Building foundation – and personal – portfolios that value and support aging”).
ImpactAlpha and Next50 have partnered to expand coverage of investment opportunities in healthy aging, and to chronicle the foundation’s efforts to align its endowment investments, across asset classes, with its programmatic mission to value and support aging.
“The people who are going to benefit from the bulk of investments today, they’re 30 years old,” Kaldes says. “35 years from now, when they become a majority, they’re going to be 65 years old. They’re going to need to have seen the results of all this investment that we’re advocating for.”
Dual use
The demographic shift, he argues, is visible even in his own backyard. In Colorado, Kaldes home state, there are now more people over 60 than under 18. Multiply that across the globe and the scale of the opportunity becomes hard to dismiss.
“So as economies literally are changing because of demographic shifts, people are recognizing, oh man, we need more capital, more investment, more ways to support the very real future or the now that we’re living in demographically,” Kaldes says.
Next50 and Enable share a conviction that solutions built for people with disabilities could scale naturally to older adults, a population that acquires disability at an accelerating rate. The connection is more than a market insight, it’s a biological reality.
“With a population living and working longer, we are witnessing a seminal shift in the economy,” Enable’s Regina Kline told ImpactAlpha. “To meet this moment, we need to build agile, inventive and human-centered tools that eliminate barriers and unlock full potential across multiple verticals from lifelong learning and employment to accessing healthcare and caregiving, to assistive technologies like captioning, wayfinding and mobility solutions.”
“These,” she adds, “are solutions that the disability community has perfected.”
Enable, with backing from investors including UnitedHealth Group, the Society for Human Resources Management and Liberty Mutual Investments, is building a portfolio that puts that ‘dual use’ thesis into practice. Earlier this month, the firm led a $5.7 million investment for Kalogon, a Florida-based company developing medically-validated seat cushions that redistribute pressure automatically to prevent skin breakdown. Kalogon’s founder Tim Balz, who launched the company originally to create smart seating for wheelchair users, said that the startup needed funding to scale up to serve pilots and passengers on long-haul flights at Enable’s Disability Innovation Forum last year (see, “‘Dual use’ disability tech attracts LPs and GPs to untapped talent and a growing market”).
“Aging is fundamentally a story of acquiring disability,” says Kline, who co-founded Enable four years ago with Jim Sorenson, the billionaire founder of Sorenson Impact, who made his fortune applying video compression technology to real-time captioning to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more fluidly.
Enable’s portfolio also includes San Francisco-based Wheel the World, which has built an accessibility map that tracks accessibility data points at hotels for disability-inclusive travel, and Be My Eyes, a Danish startup that connects blind and low-vision individuals with volunteers for support with everyday tasks, like reading food labels or finding a flight gate at the airport.
The hardest part of the framework, Kaldes says, is drawing the line. Not every infrastructure investment qualifies just because older adults use roads or buses.
“For the built environment, for example, we’re looking at infrastructure PE and whether the opportunities align with our impact taxonomy — age-centered, age-integrated, age-responsive,” Kaldes says. Next50 includes “age-ready infrastructure” in its strategy.
“Examples we’re looking at include telecom and digital infrastructure, social infrastructure and energy transition,” he adds. “Things we’re not exploring include certain transportation and logistics and certain energy and utilities that do harm to older adults.”
