A Thesis Built for Decades

Julian Kappus, Co-CEO of Heliad, on why demographic change is the defining investment thesis of our era and why most founders are still missing the point.

Julian Kappus came to AgeTech the way the best investors come to anything: through a problem that wouldn't leave him alone.

Before joining Heliad, he spent years in financial markets watching German pension funds struggle with a quiet crisis. Interest rates near zero. Defined benefit promises made in a different era. An ageing population living longer and drawing more. "I saw pension funds and insurance companies unable to generate enough yield to pay the pensions they'd promised," he says. "And I started thinking: this isn't a market anomaly. This is structural. It's the demographic."

That thread led him, eventually, to a founder named Nader, who built Gaia Family after realising something quietly radical: that having a baby had become a financial decision. Gaia offers outcome-based pricing and financing for IVF treatments, sitting at the exact intersection of healthcare and financial engineering that Kappus had been circling. "That company reshaped how I saw this space," he says. "It showed me that the most interesting AgeTech companies aren't just health companies. They're redesigning systems."

A Different Kind of Capital

Heliad is an evergreen fund. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

As a publicly listed investment company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Heliad operates on what Kappus calls permanent capital: no fund lifecycle, no LP pressure to return capital on a fixed timeline. "A typical ten-year fund is simply not equipped to address demographic change," he says. "These are thirty-year trends. If you're forced to exit in year seven, you're not really investing in the problem."

This model gives Heliad something most venture firms can't offer: the ability to partner with a founder from pre-seed through to IPO and beyond, without the clock running. Heliad's investment in fintech company flatexDEGIRO, held for fifteen years, is the clearest illustration of what that looks like in practice. Relationships that outlast market cycles. Follow-on capital available when a company needs it, not when a fund's mandate permits it.

There's a second dimension to the public listing that Kappus finds underappreciated. As a Frankfurt-listed company, Heliad sits at the gateway between private and public markets. It can help founders navigate capital markets, understand their equity story, and prepare for a potential IPO in ways a traditional VC simply cannot. "We're a bridge," he says. "And for European founders building category-defining companies, that bridge matters."

He's also conscious of something broader. Heliad's public shares give retail investors a way into private market returns. A small allocation to Heliad becomes, in effect, a diversified exposure to early-stage European tech. That's not incidental to the mission, but part of how Kappus thinks about what an investment firm can be.

The Two Bets

When Kappus talks about where he wants to deploy capital in AgeTech, two themes emerge. Both reflect the dual lens he's carried since his financial markets days.

The first is AI in care. The numbers on Europe's care workforce are not ambiguous. Birth rates have roughly halved over the last fifty to sixty years. The old-age dependency ratio is deteriorating in almost every European country. You cannot hire your way out of that. "AI should be automating the manual tasks, freeing up caretakers to spend actual time with the people they care for," Kappus says. "Turn service time into automated software solutions. That's the unlock."

The second theme is the intersection of fintech and health. This is the space that Gaia Family pointed him toward. Affordability is the unspoken crisis running underneath every AgeTech category. Care is expensive. Longevity treatments are expensive. Navigating the system is expensive. Kappus sees enormous opportunity in the companies building financial infrastructure around these moments: outcome-based pricing, insurance redesign, financing mechanisms that didn't exist a generation ago. "The healthcare system and the financial system are going to have to merge in new ways," he says. "The companies that figure that out early will be enormous."

What European Founders Can Grow

Kappus is generous with his time and blunt with his assessments. On the question of what founders consistently get wrong when building for older users, he doesn't hesitate.

"They over-index on UX and forget about distribution."

It's a diagnosis he's seen repeatedly. The product is thoughtful, the interface is clean, the user research is thorough. And then the company hits a wall because it hasn't reckoned with how people over 70 actually discover things. They're not on TikTok. They're not in the same information ecosystems as younger demographics. Reaching them requires different channels, different trust mechanisms, different relationships. Often through care professionals, family members, or institutions rather than direct-to-consumer.

The second pattern he identifies is subtler but more consequential: European founders tend to avoid the hardest, most regulated problems. The instinct is understandable. Regulation means complexity, long sales cycles, uncertain timelines. But Kappus argues the logic runs exactly backwards. "Mastering regulation builds a durable moat," he says. "If you've done the hard work of tailoring your product closely with the regulator, you've built something that's very difficult to replicate. The rigorous regulation in European healthcare isn't a burden. It's a stronghold."

The Two Companies That Don't Exist Yet

Ask Kappus where he sees the defining European AgeTech companies emerging and he gives two answers: one for the consumer market, one for B2B.

On the consumer side: a generational company built around social connection for people north of 70. The loneliness epidemic among older adults is documented, persistent, and largely unaddressed by technology. "There's a massive opportunity for a company that creates meaningful social interaction for that demographic," he says. "Not a utility. A platform. Something that becomes genuinely central to people's lives." He's not prescriptive about the format. Physical components might be part of it, digital certainly is. But the thesis is clear: connection at scale, for people who've been underserved by every consumer platform built in the last twenty years.

On the B2B side, the opportunity Kappus sees as most immediate is an end-to-end operating system for nursing homes, care centres, and retirement facilities. Staff recruitment. Workforce management. Clinical workflows. Financial administration. Augmentation with robotics and AI as those tools mature. "Think about what AI is doing to the playbook in PropTech right now," he says. "The same thing is coming for care infrastructure. The company that builds the management layer for this sector could be enormous."

The fragmented, under-digitised care sector in Europe is ripe for exactly this kind of vertical integration. The platform that sits at the centre of that consolidation will have leverage across every part of the stack.

The Bigger Picture

The conversation Kappus keeps returning to is not about any single company or sector. It's about the scale of what's actually required.

Europe's post-war social architecture was designed for a demographic reality that no longer exists. Pensions, healthcare, care infrastructure: all of it was built on assumptions about birth rates and lifespans that have been quietly invalidated. The mathematical underpinnings of those systems are broken, and everyone in finance, policy, and healthcare knows it. "Solving these problems will require redesigning multiple systems simultaneously," Kappus says. "It's not one fix, but rather a generational rebuilding project."

That's a daunting framing. It's also, he argues, the opportunity. When systems need to be rebuilt from scratch, the companies that build the new infrastructure don't just create value. They define the category for the next several decades. Heliad, with its evergreen structure and long-term mandate, is positioning itself to partner with the founders who show up to do that work.

"The thesis is no longer being debated," Kappus says. "The question now is who captures the returns."

Joining AgeTechX Berlin

Julian Kappus will be speaking at AgeTechX Berlin, October 5-6 2026. The forum brings together investors, founders, and policymakers who are building for an older Europe. Attendance is invite-only.

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