Over the past seven 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 the things about our money-health-and-privacy that the SixThirty team is talking about right now. 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.
- A Health Insurance Tipping Point? Health insurance premiums are going up in 2026 – about 26% for ACA plans and 6.5% – 10% for commercial plans. Does this represent the tipping point for “consumers” of healthcare or will the frog continue to happily boil in the water of ever increasing cost of healthcare and health insurance? Odds are the frog will continue to boil – but expect investment activity around health and wealth to increase as the sense of urgency rises for employers and families who have to deal with what is amounting to an affordability crisis. ICHRA, HSA / HRA / FSA, concierge medicine, direct contracting – expect all of these areas and others to garner more attention as healthcare and health insurance becomes more expensive and delivers less bang for the buck to patients.
- AI was certainly the major theme for digital health in 2025. Across health benefits, administration, drug discovery, documentation, patient data and more – AI forward platforms dominated the narrative and share of venture dollars deployed in 2025. Something tells me this is one trend that’s likely to continue. But what’s a non-obvious, not AI-exclusive trend to keep an eye on? How about those startups and platforms that can measure, enable, finance, and even take risk in an ever-changing regulatory and pricing environments within healthcare? For those platforms that are confident in their health metric RoI – why not put your money where your mouth is, or at least enable others to do so? Those that do are certain to garner more attention heading in 2026.
- Tokenization is becoming a more practical way to represent and manage ownership of assets and rights in digital form. This includes financial assets, real estate interests, and certain types of data. The appeal is less about novelty and more about efficiency: reducing friction in transactions, improving recordkeeping, and expanding access through fractional ownership. As these systems mature, there is room for companies focused on the underlying infrastructure, compliance, and coordination needed to make tokenized assets usable and trustworthy for consumers and institutions.
- Housing continues to be under pressure from rising prices and limited affordability, with homeownership increasingly difficult to achieve and maintain. What was once viewed as a reliable source of long-term security is, for many households, becoming a source of financial and practical uncertainty due to higher costs, insurance challenges, and exposure to climate-related risks. Floods, fires, heat, and other climate events are influencing where people can live and how risk is priced across the housing system. These conditions point to the need for new approaches across housing finance, insurance, and resilience that better reflect today’s economic and environmental realities.
- For most small business owners, the business isn’t just a source of income—it is the retirement plan. It’s their largest asset and the foundation of their financial future. Yet banks, advisors, and technology providers still talk about IRAs and 401(k)s while the core asset that matters most is under strain. That strain is real. Rising labor costs, tighter credit, and persistent inflation are compounded by one of the biggest hidden taxes small business owners face: healthcare. When healthcare costs materially impact cash flow, long-term planning takes a back seat to keeping the business healthy. At the same time, the small business technology stack remains fragmented and outdated. Owners juggle disconnected systems for banking, accounting, payroll, lending, and benefits—creating friction, poor visibility, and unnecessary risk. In 2026, the opportunity is clear: help small business owners stabilize and grow the asset that is their nest egg. The winners will be banks, advisors, and platforms that align financial services, healthcare strategy, and decision-making around the real balance sheet that matters.
- For decades, community and regional banks competed on proximity and relationships to be the “hometown choice.” That advantage is rapidly eroding. Customers now expect seamless digital experiences regardless of where their bank is headquartered, and fintech competitors have shown that loyalty follows relevance, not location. In 2026, we believe banks will be forced to sharpen their ideal customer profiles with far greater precision. Winning institutions will differentiate not by where they operate, but by who they serve and how deeply they understand that customer’s needs. Whether it’s a specific type of small business, a defined professional segment, or a niche financial behavior, clarity of ICP will drive product strategy, technology adoption, and go-to-market success. This shift creates meaningful opportunity for fintechs that help banks specialize, personalize, and deliver tailored value at scale.
- Securing AI-powered financial services: AI / Gen AI continues to penetrate the financial lives of consumers and businesses as well as the firms that serve them. However, it also creates new risks and threats. For example, as AI agents take on more responsibilities in enterprises and financial institutions, the Model Context Protocols (MCPs) that manage them become the new power center, offering a new attack surface. Compromising the MCP means compromising the entire agent fleet and the downstream tooling they control. Additionally, how do enterprises in regulated industries ensure that these agents or – for example – the marketing content generated by GenAI tools are compliant? GenAI-enabled deepfakes (voice, video, images…) are on the rise, and financial services are a key target- with Deloitte estimating $40bn in fraud losses in the US alone by 2027. We will be on the lookout for solutions that address some of these emerging challenges, building upon our work and investments around securing / insuring AI.
- The battle for the lucrative midsize / corporate segment is set to amplify. Tech-enabled channels and embedded finance will continue to help incumbent banks and insurers bend the cost curve of accessing and serving midsize firms. However, expect to see big ideas emerge in and around the core financial services offerings- e.g. helping founder(s) or senior managers to sell (a portion of) the business, or manage their private wealth; specialized offerings like roll-up vehicles and equity management for the nearly 15,000 Private Equity-backed firms in the US; solutions enabling midsize firms access capital markets via tokenization and securitisation. We are intently watching the cross-border trade, treasury & payments space and how stablecoin-powered offerings can help businesses. We will be tracking industry-specific solutions that connect midsize firms upstream and downstream players with “winner takes most” potential.
- Cool and useful companies will be built in fintech, insurtech, and health that are not “ai-powered” or “.ai”! We don’t dispute the excitement and hype around AI – and to be clear, are quite excited and are actively investing in AI-native companies, but we also think, particularly in financial services and healthcare, there are urgent needs around product innovation that do not need to be AI-first for the sake of AI.
- Incumbents in wealth management, capital markets, and investment management must take prediction markets seriously. Some regard prediction markets as gambling; others consider it a new trillion $ asset class. Whatever it may ultimately become, it’s still early days, and much infrastructure and use-cases are yet to be built.
- Private markets remain the most technologically-antiquated corner of institutional finance and allocators are the most operationally-minimalist users of technology. Until now. As PE, Private Credit, and VC firms scale AUM amid fee pressure and LPs move from portfolio introspection into broader transparency, excel-driven and email-based workflows become untenable. For instance, in “pre-trade” investment allocation decisions into alternative fund managers, the next generation of research management will be driven by systems of engagement based on new repeatable workflows that pair with existing repeatable evaluation processes that CIOs have spent careers refining. Allocators already possess the latter, but now they can complement these with the long-overdue former. Who they select will depend on a lot of factors, but intuitive workflows and adoption based on trust will be paramount in those decisions.
- Alternatives infrastructure for the generational wealth transfer. The flood of transferred wealth is about to course through pipes that cannot possibly hope to contain it. The institutionalization of private wealth has already accelerated, but the tech stack to support it is still under construction. Private wealth clients, family offices, all the way up to multi-family offices, OCIOs, etc. have all increased their exposure to privates while relying on systems that break under illiquids, in part because these were built for publics. The artifact from data and software built for public data that is useful here to translate to privates: “What is my portfolio and exposure today, and what could that mean for tomorrow?” In 2026, the founders that can take this simple question and answer it cleanly by taking care of the messy operations and data that underlie it will be very interesting early-stage opportunities.
- Market data refinement, piping, and distribution (public, private, or alternative data, alike) is in need of retooling. As margins compress around asset management, data inefficiency has become a structural tax on institutional performance. Large incumbents may currently dominate real estate for systems of record but still leave massive gaps in data normalization, lineage and cross-asset analytics. The founders that close this gap will provide systems of engagement that yield not just accurate insights (too low a bar), but important insights; i.e. those observations and trends that warrant the scarce time and precious attention that CIOs, portfolio managers and other investors have (allegedly) now won back upon the advent of AI. Now that CIOs got this time back thanks to generative and agentic properties taking care of the grunt work, let’s listen to the founders that are building the platforms making the space in which the high-value work can take place.
