MONTREAL—Canada is home to the second-oldest average country population in North America, behind sunny and surprisingly gerontological Bermuda. The reason is simple enough: as in most prosperous western nations, we live comparatively longer and make comparatively fewer babies. These tendencies, experts have predicted with varying degrees of doom, will stifle the economy, strain the health-care system and tear through our social safety net.

Three Montreal venture capital types recently took a look at this looming demographic crisis and saw what venture capitalists love to see: a massive and largely untapped market—one on which they are looking to place a US$250-million bet.

AgeTech Capital was founded last August expressly to invest in solutions that will shrink the so-called “care gap” between increasing demand for medical services and society’s ability to provide them. “There’s so much cool technology that’s been built, just this massive opportunity to harness that through innovative business models, solutions and services to better serve our elders,” AgeTech Capital co-founder Alan MacIntosh, who is a co-founder, former partner and current board member of Real Ventures, told me recently. Should it reach the U$250-million mark, AgeTech Capital will be by far the biggest fund of its kind in the country. 

The money to be made outfitting elders to stay safely at home and otherwise enhancing their golden years is, in a word, bonkers. “Age-tech” is a frustratingly broad category, the product of that quaint propensity in the tech world to mate a noun with the word “tech” and call it a business opportunity. But consider the outlines of the target market. Globally, the spending power of people aged 65 and older is expected to increase to US$14 trillion by 2030, due in large part to the growing number of people doing the spending—997,488,000 people, to be exact, a 42 per cent increase from 2019. And the oncoming waves of seniors are more connected to and comfortable with technology than their pre-baby boom forerunners.

The pandemic only accelerated the tendency, while bringing some others to light. The aging—baby boomers, for the most part—want to “age in place,” a fancy way of saying staying put in one’s home. If and when they go to long-term care facilities, they expect care that is at once comprehensive and unobtrusive. They understandably want to stave off loneliness. 

Serving these needs will require a massive amount of technology, like wearables that, say, detect unsafe posture; digital assistants for home health monitoring; and assistive robots that can deliver medicine, take temperature and—whoah—provide companionship.   

Yet the age-tech space is barely known, let alone served to the extent its size would seem to warrant. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have barely mentioned the term, while one of the few outfits to track the age-tech market, the hilariously named Gerontechnologist, has only been doing so since 2017. 

Again, the reason is simple enough. Tech, being a young person’s game, is largely geared towards youthful wants and whimsies like getting food, getting places and going viral. In seeking to ease the trip down the mortal coil, age-tech is antithetical to this world. It’s also an uncomfortable reminder of what’s in store for every one of us. “We’ve heard the words ‘It’s not sexy’ many times,” AgeTech Capital co-founder Pascale Audette told me.

Founders Audette and MacIntosh, along with partner Lyne Landry, started fundraising late last year. The scale of their goal reflects both the market potential and the relative dearth of VC muscle in the space. Though the group has a U.S. venture partner, its fund will be largely focused on Series A investments in the Canadian market, creating everything from wearables to robots to aging-friendly workplaces. The trio is approaching Canadian and U.S. institutions, corporations, pension funds, family offices. The group has met with Quebec economy and innovation minister Pierre Fitzgibbon, whose government has made no secret of wanting to increase Quebec’s retirement age from 60 to 62. 

In certain respects, the Canadian market is certainly ripe for AgeTech Capital’s play. There are proportionally less age-tech VCs here than in the U.S.—even though we have proportionally more grey hairs on this side of the border. And the owners of those grey hairs tend to be flush, with boomer-led households holding about 50 per cent of all wealth in the country as of 2019. AgeTech Capital’s home base of Quebec, whose residents are older on average than the country’s as a whole, is a particularly well-stocked market. 

Yet we also have medicare. Though the publicly-funded system has been a boon to elderly Canadians, who have one of the lowest poverty rates in the world, the bureaucratic machinery behind the system remains massive and lumbering, making investment within it challenging, to say the least. “The health system is so rigid and moves so slowly and you’ve got all these regulatory and scope of practice issues. The way the money flows, it’s just not like the rest of the economy,” Adrian Schauer, CEO of Montreal-based medtech AlayaCare, told me. “There’s this other category of could-be innovative technology that solves problems, but [it] runs up against the structural inertia of the health-care system.”

More private sector money may be inevitable. Though the idea is anathema to many, and has long been a third rail in Canadian political discourse, de facto for-profit medical care has been a Quebec staple for nearly two decades. And consider this: having arrived in one giant tide, baby boomers have bent the world around them to suit their needs, from cars to housing to workplaces to sex. It’s folly to think the same won’t happen as they shuffle toward their great reward. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin