By: Joel Brightfield, Principal at SixThirty
Over the past six years, SixThirty has invested at the intersection of wealth, health, and privacy. What started in January 2018 has, today, become widely recognized as a hotbed for startup investment.
SixThirty’s corporate LPs have collaborated with us to build a portfolio of 50+ big bold ideas solving real problems at this intersection. As we take the wrapping off the new year, we felt it was an opportune time to share our thoughts on the venture investment opportunity at the collision of money-health-and-privacy.
In no particular order, here are 11 things about our money-health-and-privacy that the SixThirty team is talking about. These are themes, ideas, and problem statements that all require industries to collaborate to solve problems for end consumers. Our belief is that there is an endless amount of entrepreneurial opportunity behind each of these ideas.
- Financial markets infrastructure for the next quarter-century. The investment portfolio of the future – whether that of retail, UHNW, or institutional – is a central focal point for SixThirty. As market infrastructure is renewed in capital markets (private and public alike), alternative assets, and fund formats, SixThirty is looking to back those emergent tech platforms around which new market structure can coalesce and form the basis of institutional competitiveness in data evaluation, product distribution, and allocation insights. And we’re not alone. SixThirty LP BNY recently detailed similar insight in their 2025 Outlook.
- Healthcare pricing transparency + resetting of high cost activities. The cost to insure human health and provide healthcare has continued its ever increasing march upward. Half of U.S. adults now claim it is difficult to afford healthcare. By nearly any metric it’s abundantly clear that the rising cost of healthcare is on an untenable path over the cliff which is ever more increasingly more urgent to address. Case in point… as Edward Jones reported, 64% of women in the sandwich generation say that caregiving has impacted their financial situation to some degree.
- Healthcare that prioritizes outcomes. In all seriousness, some healthcare consumers may be surprised to hear that there are healthcare models that only pay providers based on outcomes and quality of service. Barriers preventing shifts to schemes that prioritize outcomes like value-based care need to be chipped away at in 2025 and beyond. RGA, a SixThirty LP, agrees. Their belief, as detailed in this post, is that Artificial intelligence offers transformative potential for the healthcare and insurance industries by accelerating the time for care, reducing costs, and predicting treatments.
- Home affordability (buying and ongoing ownership). Property is under pressure. The United States is experiencing a shortage of approximately 6 million housing units, while unaffordability is at an all-time high. Americans now need $114,000 in annual income to afford the typical house in the U.S. This is up 90% from just two years ago. Millennials and generations to come are at risk of never building wealth from owning property because they were never able to own property in the first place. And if you are fortunate enough to own a home, the cost of ongoing ownership has skyrocketed – best exemplified by 20 – 30% YoY increases in home insurance premiums.
- Climate resiliency across our health, shelter, and wealth. The new era in the fight against climate change carries on. No longer are we doubting it and fighting it. It’s now an all-hands effort involving communities, governments, and industries. They are measuring it, adapting to it, and innovating. It’s a problem that will be solved with a multi-disciplinary approach. For example, lenders and insurers factoring in climate sensitivity of shared assets; all types of organizations hardening operations in response to more extreme and frequent catastrophic weather events. The next decade is critical for reaching climate-related goals like net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
- A marked shift in regulatory openness to crypto. Likewise, it’s a new era for crypto. A sweeping change of attitudes and personnel in D.C., coupled with maturing use-cases (see: Stablecoins) will spur tangible use cases. We see low hanging fruit in the form of more mass-acceptance of tokenized RWA and the infrastructure to support such new forms of transactions. Not to mention, the security that must be present.
- Manage risk “as far left of bang” as possible. Institutions don’t understand risk if they don’t understand value, and cannot quantify value if they cannot measure risk before the fact. Financial, insurance, and healthcare institutions require visibility into something before they can 1) understand what is at risk, 2) respond appropriately, 3) be resilient towards future systemic risks. SixThirty is excited for startups that share our desire to answer the bell of helping incumbent institutions manage risk as far “left of bang” as possible: enabling those institutions to be leaders, rather than followers in information security and institutional resilience.
- Continued rebuild of the SMB OS, now in the era of GenAI. As the saying goes, SMBs are the backbone of America. Managing them well – across finops, security, and benefits, continues to be a thorny problem. Progressive banks and insurers are taking notice and seeking to partner with solutions that can help alleviate the pain of managing an under-resourced business once and for all.
- B2B Payments hits center stage. Much of the venture capital focus in recent memory has been on consumer payments. In 2025, we expect to see many of the innovations deployed on the consumer side of the ledger (ubiquity, security, speed) applied to how businesses pay and get paid. We’re tracking themes like the democratization of banking relationships and a business’ ability to work with multiple banking partners, workflow automation and value-based pricing, and the deployment of AI Agents to transact on a business’ behalf. Success will ultimately depend on enablement and execution, especially when it comes to security, fraud, and compliance.
- Will 2025 be the year of a paradigm shift in employee benefits? The employee benefits space is easily among the areas where we see the highest volume of startup ideas. While many of these ideas are great, we continue to yearn for a true paradigm shift in how an employee benefits from benefits. This space epitomizes the wealth-health intersection, and is an underutilized opportunity to make a marked difference in personal well-being.
- Client-facing AI deployments move forward. Look no further than our recent take on the AI analyst space as one such example. FI’s presently are conducting structured evaluations of these platforms to explore how knowledge workers in their firms can derive value beyond that which is furnished by ‘generic’ GenAI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And, as Atul Kamra, SixThirty’s Managing Partner, discussed with Purdue University faculty and staff in December during the seminar on Generative AI in Finance, leaders from financial services and beyond recognize that there has been a breakthrough in user experience that has made the technology underlying GenAI radically accessible. Scaling parameters have fallen into place (although will continuously need investment) and multi-modal interactions are widely available.
