Demographics in Motion

By White Star Capital’s Early Growth Team

Our Early Growth Fund team has been working on four reports that detail the macro themes that we believe will drive tech innovation in the coming years:

• the impact of widespread demographic shifts;
• the digitisation of all industries and enterprises;
• the creation of new digital infrastructures and management tools to help handle, analyse and secure the zettabytes of data being produced;
• and finally, the demand for climate technology, new circular business models, and green innovation.

Our themes of focus have evolved since our first fund in 2014 in response to rapid technological adoption and the changing world around us, but the criteria we apply to each investment have remained consistent across our three Early Growth Funds to date.

Having published reports on the Sustainable Global Economy, Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Data-driven Transformation, we’re excited to share our final piece of research on Demographics in Motion.

This report details how evolving age, income, gender, and other socioeconomic attributes across our global population are driving changes in online consumer behaviours.

Key findings

• Consumer fintech, health, and pet tech startups raised $17bn in Q1-Q3 of 2023
• Over 650 new VC funds have been raised since 2015 specialising in consumer fintech, digital health, and pet tech investments
• There have been 163 VC-backed unicorns in these sectors since 2015
• In the first three quarters of 2023, over 130 exits were completed in the consumer fintech, digital health, and pet tech space

What do we mean by Demographics in Motion?

The global population of people aged 65+ is projected to double by 2050, and triple by 2100 to ~2.5bn people. At the same time, the number of people aged 25–64 is expected to grow from ~4bn to ~5bn through 2050 and level off thereafter, while the number of people under the age of 15 will decline. This demographic shift will have significant impacts on economies, healthcare, and social security systems globally.

Income growth across tech-native Millennials and Gen Z, paired with an increasingly tech-savvy older population will lead to consumers spending significantly more time online and transacting digitally.

Meanwhile, the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history is unfolding currently, with the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation expected to pass down $129tn+ in assets in the US alone.

An increasingly tech-savvy population is currently spending most of their disposable income on healthcare and financial products, aside from consumer necessities such as housing, food, and transportation. As people marry and have children later in life, they look to pets for companionship, who are already viewed as equivalent to humans in the household, and in turn command similar spending habits.

In summary, our core areas of focus within the Demographics in Motion space for Fund IV include:

• Consumer Fintech: Digital banking, lending, payments & money transfer, wealth management, and insurance
• Consumer Digital Health: Search & navigation, health insurance, preventative care, hybrid care, virtual-only care, medications, and rehabilitation
• Consumer Pet Tech: Pet care, pet insurance, pet food & supplements, pet services, and other pet products

If you have any questions or are an entrepreneur building something in a sector covered by our research, please reach out to our team. They’ll be happy to hear from you!