Clock reset: Longevity startups chase why humans age

WHEN GAURAV GUPTA, one of the co-founders of Zomato, stopped travelling during the Covid-19 lockdowns, something unusual happened. The force majeure created a discipline he had never managed before: regular workouts, consistent sleep, and measured nutrition. The results were dramatic. He lost 15 kg. His metabolic markers improved. “My metabolic age came down by 14 years,” he says. For Gupta, the transformation wasn’t just personal; it was product-market insight. He quit Zomato and, in 2022, launched Gabit (a portmanteau of good and habit), an integrated platform designed to help people achieve their health goals through smart wearables, personalised fitness, and nutrition plans. Its key product is a smart ring built around four pillars: fitness, nutrition, sleep, and stress. “These four pillars are 98% of longevity,” he says. The biohacks that dominate social media? “That’s the last 2%.” Around the same time as Gabit’s launch, Rishi Pardal, then CEO and MD of United Breweries, confronted his own wake-up call. After developing complications that led doctors to recommend gall bladder removal surgery in 2022, he searched for alternatives. Working on a holistic recovery plan with (his now co-founder) Shiva Subramanian, who had a boutique wellness firm, Pardal avoided surgery. The experience reshaped his thinking about preventive care. In 2024, he co-founded Biopeak, a Bengaluru-based longevity clinic offering deep diagnostics, personalised health plans, and AI-driven risk prediction. Genetics, advanced blood panels, MRI scans, metabolites, and microbiome data are collated into structured interventions aimed at extending what he calls “quality years”. And in recent months, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal has ventured headfirst into longevity through Continue Research, which is an “effort to identify and study upstream mechanisms in biology” for the next phase of human existence, according to its website. “Conscious evolution is humanity’s next necessity,” wrote Goyal last October, when he introduced Continue to the world. He refrained from using the terms “company” and “startup” to describe the new entity. While Continue declined to participate in this story, Goyal’s recent social media posts indicate that the entity has hit the accelerator to launch Temple, a wearable that tracks real-time cerebral blood flow to the brain. It is based on Continue’s gravity ageing hypothesis, which says that gravity’s long-term pull reduces brain circulation and accelerates ageing. In early March, Goyal announced that Temple raised its first round worth $54 million from family and friends at a post-money valuation of around $190 million. From wearables to high-end clinics, longevity is emerging as India’s newest startup frontier. Founders and investors are as interested in the science of longevity as they are in its potential opportunity. For instance, Nikhil Kamath, through NKSquared and Rainmatter Foundation, has invested over $1.43 million in at least two funding rounds in Biopeak. “Sustained institutional and angel support reflects the growing belief that data-driven preventive healthcare and chronic disease management platforms are emerging as scalable, long-term pillars of India’s healthtech ecosystem. Angel investors are increasingly backing clinical and data-driven models that focus on early detection, personalised interventions, and deeper molecular and cellular understanding, moving beyond generic wellness claims. While the market is still emerging, it is expanding among affluent, health-conscious segments,” says Raja Lahiri, partner and tech industry leader, Grant Thornton Bharat. Rainmatter is guided by two principles. “First, science and credibility. Longevity attracts a lot of hype, so we prioritise companies that focus on driving measurable outcomes,” says Dilip, head of Rainmatter Health. The second principle is preventive impact. “We are particularly interested in solutions that move healthcare upstream, helping people stay healthier rather than only treating disease later… Our goal is to support founders and initiatives that can meaningfully improve the healthspan of Indians.” Globally, billionaire-backed ventures such as Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences have legitimised ageing as a venture category. In India, researchers, investors, and healthcare practitioners are focussing on the little-known aspects first: why do we age — and what does healthy ageing look like for Indians? The baseline gap In 2023, when Prashanth Prakash, the founding partner of venture capital firm Accel Partners, began speaking publicly about longevity, it was personal. In his late forties, he discovered early signs of pre-diabetes. “I never knew I would be on a trajectory to get diabetes,” he says. After years of self-experimentation — studying metabolism, sleep, stress, biomarkers, and preventive health — he reversed the symptoms. But the experience exposed a systemic problem: understanding ageing required navigating fragmented research across disciplines — endocrinology, cardiology, genomics, nutrition, and behavioural science — that went beyond curative research. “One shouldn’t be spending five or six years trying to understand this multidisciplinary, complex area,” he says. That frustration helped catalyse the Longevity India Initiative in 2024 at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. If Prakash brought capital and urgency, the scientific leadership came from Deepak Kumar Saini, professor in IISc’s department of developmental biology & genetics, who has spent more than 15 years studying ageing at cellular and systemic levels. Their shared realisation: India lacks its own ageing baseline. For decades, Indian medical diagnostics have relied heavily on reference ranges derived from western populations. “If we don’t define our own baseline, how can we calculate biological age meaningfully?” asks Suramya Asthana, researcher and scientific coordinator of Longevity India. The implications are huge. A prevention-first healthcare architecture requires knowing what “normal” looks like before predicting deviation. To address the gap, Longevity India — which has among its patrons Biocon founder and executive chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Infosys co-founder S. Gopalakrishnan — launched the BHARAT (Biomarkers of Healthy Aging, Resilience, Adversity, and Transitions) Study. Its aim is to build India’s first comprehensive ageing database integrating clinical metrics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipid profiles, and lifestyle data. Two years in, the study spans multiple urban and rural sites across Bengaluru, with expansion planned to Mysuru, Chennai, and Delhi. Nearly a thousand samples have been collected so far. It also looks to take the research to space to understand ageing under microgravity and radiation exposure. “We still haven’t understood, at a molecular level, what ticks the ageing clock,” says Saini. It is not one pathway but many — DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, immune dysregulation, metabolic shifts, and more. The study attempts to layer these signals computationally, identifying patterns that consistently change with age across Indian populations. No intervention has conclusively proven lifespan extension in humans. What evidence supports, instead, is extending healthspan — the years lived free of disease and disability. But India complicates the science. “India is more complex than most continents,” says Saini. Genetic variation is vast. Diets range from strictly vegetarian to heavy meat consumption. Environmental exposure differs sharply between urban pollution corridors and rural settings. Socioeconomic disparities alter stress, sleep, and nutrition patterns. The noise is immense. Yet within that noise lies opportunity. If a biomarker trend holds across such diversity, it may represent a robust target for intervention. While IISc builds baselines, startups are building products. “The science is only one layer of the study. How do you deliver it?” says Accel’s Prakash. What needs equal focus is ecosystem-building with partners ranging from diagnostic labs and microbiome startups to high-end instrument makers. The logic is pragmatic: industry often leads in technological innovation, and academic labs can leverage those tools. That’s where players like Biopeak, Decode Age, and Gabit come in. Biopeak positions itself at the intersection of diagnostics and personalisation. “We are not blindly extrapolating Caucasian data into Indian datasets,” Pardal says. Notably, Accel’s Prakash is an investor in Biopeak, while Saini is a scientific advisor. Decode Age, founded by Parth Amin, Rakesh Somani, and Darshit Patel, operates at the intersection of life sciences and biotech. The company offers supplements targeting “root causes” of ageing and conducts microbiome research. Then come wearable-first models. Smart rings and watches collect continuous data — sleep cycles, heart rate variability, glucose trends, stress proxies. “Wearables give you calibrated trends,” says Asthana. Because devices adapt to individuals, they can detect deviations from personal baselines. Sleep tracking, in particular, has proven very useful. Cardiac arrhythmia prediction has already been validated in certain smartwatch models. “If you can’t sleep with it, you can’t track it,” says Gabit’s Gupta. Wearables are not substitutes for deep lab science. But they scale. That said, the emerging architecture is layered: consumer products at the base, diagnostics in the middle, and research-grade biomarkers at the top. “We need to normalise concepts like metabolic health check-ins in mid-life, functional assessments that preserve mobility, brain health support that goes beyond disease referrals, and social support structures that reduce isolation. That cultural shift towards owning health early and continuously is what will define successful ageing in India,” says Sangita Reddy, joint MD, Apollo Hospitals. A ‘silver tsunami’ Beyond the noise and the buzz, there is a demographic urgency to extend India’s healthspan. According to the UNFPA India Ageing Report 2023, India’s elderly population (60-plus) is projected to rise from 10.5% in 2022 to 20.8% by 2050. By mid-century, one in five Indians will be elderly. Before 2050, the elderly population will outnumber children aged 0–14. There is the possibility of a ‘silver tsunami’, as the senior care market could touch $50 billion in the next decade, according to the PwC-ASLI Senior Care Report 2024. Life expectancy has crossed 70. But a longer life without healthy years could strain families, healthcare systems, and the economy. “If you are older but do not have healthy years, it’s a big burden,” Saini says. Urban isolation compounds the challenge as lifestyle-led chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and metabolic disorders are on the increase. “This has shifted the focus from reactive healthcare to preventive, personalised, and performance-oriented wellness. Urban consumers are increasingly health-conscious and data-driven, actively tracking biomarkers, sleep cycles, nutrition, and fitness metrics, a trend accelerated by Covid-19,” says Lahiri of Grant Thornton Bharat. It was like climate change, says Biopeak’s Pardal. “We know it’s bad, but, you know, it’s somewhere in the distance… But the moment it comes close to your life, like Covid-19 came uncomfortably close… it prompted an awareness, a mass lifestyle change,” he explains. As ageing emerged as a major risk factor for severe outcomes, healthspan entered the mainstream discourse. Another reason for rising interest around healthspan expansion, says Prakash, is due to an earlier onset of chronic diseases, often fuelled by upward mobility and financial affordability. He attributes it also to an increased awareness among India’s youth who are taking steps to optimise themselves to avoid lifestyle diseases. The timing has also been opportune. Longevity is an ecosystem strategy that brings together preventive care, allied services, and technology, not as add-ons, but as integrated components of care, says Reddy. “AI and predictive analytics will be central to extending healthspan. Not because they are futuristic technologies, but because they help translate data into insights that matter.” Longevity, however, has become an elastic term, applied to everything from supplements to stem cell infusions. The broader narrative is that longevity is anti-ageing and elite-driven. But the stakeholders beg to differ. Biopeak’s Pardal says healthspan means maintaining independence, avoiding what he calls “the last marginal decade where people don’t have quality”. But he is cautious about shortcuts. Stem cell infusions remain experimental. Rapamycin, a drug sometimes discussed in longevity circles, is an immunosuppressant. “You may die of a common cold,” he says. Biohacking culture, in his view, risks outrunning evidence. Asthana says many commercial tests marketed as “biological age reversal” tools were originally designed to detect disease risk, not measure ageing itself. Standardised ageing biomarkers are still under debate globally. When confronted with the question of affordability, Saini draws an interesting analogy. “When the mobile phone was launched in the ’90s, it was championed by the rich because it was not affordable to the poor. But 20 years down the road, it’s become a commodity that has found its way into everybody’s daily life. I think we are in that stage in the longevity industry right now. It might be fuelled by the rich now… but after some time and once the scaling happens, it will get endorsed by the masses.” The way ahead India’s longevity industry is in its nascent stages — noisy, uneven, and occasionally overhyped. But beneath the buzz lies structural change. So, what would success look like 10 years from now? Saini has a couple of parameters. One, biomarkers that analyse the age of organs, not just the onset of a disease. “Change blood work from sickness-related to health-related. That’s going to be a win.” Two, reduced crowds at hospitals by shifting non-critical patients to primary healthcare centres. “It is important for India, where resource allocation is critical. Hospitals should be a place where only critical patients go for treatment.” Reddy echoes a similar vision: “The hospital of the future will move away from being a place you go to only when you are sick and evolve as a trusted hub that spans from home care to tertiary care. It will be digitally connected, physically accessible, data-enabled, and human-centric.” Decode Age’s Amin, meanwhile, flags the challenges: awareness and regulation. India lacks standardised endpoints for ageing trials. But even here, the tension is clear: between preventive aspiration and scientific validation. Reddy says regulation should not be a barrier to innovation, but it must ensure that new approaches are evidence-based, equitable, and patient-centric. “Policy can provide the scaffolding that ensures science, technology, and care evolve responsibly with outcomes that are measurable, reproducible, and beneficial to the broad population.” If these efforts succeed, it will not be by selling youth in a capsule or promising immortality to the wealthy few. It will be by answering a harder question: what does healthy ageing look like for 1.4 billion diverse bodies, and can that knowledge be translated into systems that ordinary people can access? And that will decide how the world defines longevity.

Clock reset: Longevity startups chase why humans age

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