E508 | Paolo Pio, Exceptional Ventures: Betting on Better Humans: Inside Exceptional Ventures’ Health & Longevity Playbook

0:00What if venture capital could add decades of joyful, healthy living for everyone? There's so much B is going on, and we see it as our duty to debunk that, to be a voice of reason and science. But here's what most longevity investors get wrong. You don't just want to add two decades of being frail, weak, and sick. Paolo Pio and his team at Exceptional Ventures discovered something revolutionary. We believe truly that from lifespan to lifespan, we want to increase the joy span. But how do you actually invest in joy span? This translates into the following investment verticals. prevention, early detection and diagnostics, and that's part of the grand care.

0:37The numbers tell the story. Health, awareness and longevity, which is a huge market, the almost two trillions for some other numbers more growing at incredible rate. And their vision for the future? Our vision basically from 4 ,000 of fund one to 30 ,000 in fund three, providing returns that are gone from big to bigger to ginormous. discover how a London-based VC is redefining what it means to invest in human potential and why JoySpan might be the key to unlocking the next wave of health tech innovation.

1:30This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the EUVC podcast. I hope that by now this is the home for European venture that you have gotten so used to attending once in a while. Today, we're diving deep with one of the scene's most thoughtful bridge builders, Paolo Pio of Exceptional Ventures. From his vantage point across Europe and the US, Paolo brings a global operators lens to what Europe needs to become truly exceptional. And of course, the focus here is entirely on the longevity space, which, as you can see, I am, in fact, 70 years old, but I look like a 35-year-old.

2:09I'm kidding here. Everyone, I'm looking so much forward to this episode. Paolo, welcome to the pod. Thank you so much, Andreas, for your invitation. And a big fan of what you guys are building. I'm glad I get to contribute a tiny bit. Thank you, man. You're amazing. Paolo, this is one of our pitch episodes, as I like to call them, where I'll ask you to pull up the deck on exceptional ventures to tell us all what you're about and what you're building. I'll ask questions kind of as an LP might do in a meeting along the way, but I don't want to steal the thunder either. So sometimes I'll just shut up and let you take the light.

2:43Sounds like a plan. I'm happy to give you background on what we're building at Exceptional Adventures. We'll kind of go through the deck, but I don't want to make it overly boring. And so we'll take some poetic licenses, keep it here and there. Beautiful, Paolo. Nothing is ever boring with you. Let's go. Very well. So for those who don't know me, my name is Paolo Pio, and I am the co-founder and general partner at Exceptional Adventures. We are a London-based VC fund with the mission to help people live longer, healthier, and happier lives. So this is something I strongly feel about. I love nutrition.

3:27I love fitness. I love health. I'm a nerd when it comes down to reading about each of these topics. And so has my co-founder, Matt. Hence why four years ago when we met, we did a few things together in terms of investments, and then thought we could actually raise a fund. There will be mission driven, specifically with this mission that I just mentioned, which is our unimproving human joyous path. And just to walk you through the deck, we'll discuss exactly this mission of the team behind the mission. Why we chose to go after this opportunity. What's our investment strategy and how we do sourcing, evaluating and winning.

4:09And then why we think we are some of the best at adding value. Closing with a track record, what we learned from our first one. Just as a reminder, we're launching our second just now. So as just discussed, we believe what we want to build with exceptional ventures is a VC fund that over the next 15, 20 years, we really accomplish these. Help people live better and live longer. Each company we invest in gets us closer to this vision. We strongly believe in this. It's not just writing on the wall, but it's actually something that we ask ourselves, every time we want to cut a check, does this really get us closer to this?

4:55Is this really a startup that helps us live longer, healthier? If not, we don't cut the check. And with this, maybe just to take you guys a step back, the industry of, let's say, Logetic and living longer. It's time to be talking about lifespan. And so how many years of life we are given on this earth. And we know that that's been growing right through the centuries. And lately we're getting, you know, beginning of the century. Last century we were at like 40, 50. By the end we were at like 70 or so. Now we're getting to the high 70s. But which of these years are actually lived in a healthy condition, right?

5:36because you don't just want to add two decades of being frail, weak, and sick. Hence, from lifespan, we move the conversation to healthspan. So how many healthy decades can I add to life? And a lot of the changes that came to do this would be lifestyle changes, so fitness, nutrition, sleep, and they really get us there. But now sometimes to the detriment of actually us taking advantage of the time we spend on earth. So you would see exaggeration in the sense of people that go to sleep every night at 8.30 p.m., right? That have their last meal at 11 a.m. They eat 1 ,925 calories per day. They transfuse their son's blood.

6:26Stay away from sugar. Stay away from chocolate. And what kind of life are we living in? So we believe truly that from lifespan to lifespan, we want to increase the joy span. So how many years of healthy life, which we can get joy out of life, do we have, right? With the fund, that's the mission. These are the companies that we want to back, right? Following the principle of what is that amount? I'm willing to sacrifice to live longer. And what I am not. And in my case, for example, it can be I love sports and adrenaline and climbing, mountaineering, snowboarding. Those are not necessarily very good for longevity, but they give me pleasure.

7:11They give me joy. That's my thing. For someone else, it can be chocolate. For someone else, it can be wine. So that's really the concept behind JoySpend that we are pursuing as a fund. In order to follow this vision, mission, right, and maximize joy span, this translates into the following investment verticals, which relate to prevention, early detection and diagnostics, and then smart degree and care. So, you know, ideally we want to prevent getting sick. And as mentioned, how do we do that? Well, we want to build a really strong sleep hygiene and habits and prioritize it at least eight hours of sleep per night.

7:52And then exercise, it's super important, right? And, you know, we want to be able to do resistance training, cardiovascular training, stability training. Each of them is proven to extend your lives, is directly correlated to how many years we live. In fact, the fitter you are, the longer you live. Nutrition, also very important. Don't overeat, right? Like my mom used to say, get up from the table when you are 80 % full. She had the secret. And then protein, very important. Fiber, super important. Stay away from trans fats and fried stuff. Those are all good things. And on top of it, then you want to add stress management.

8:36And so in a world where we are continuously bombarded by WhatsApp, emails, and do this, do that, how do you take a breath and de-stress and manage your levels of cortisol? And then on top, what is that giving us purpose in what we do? and the sense of connections with the loved ones and with our friends. So in a way, this is what prevents us from getting sick. This was the bulk of our investments in Fund 1. Now in Fund 2, we're also adventuring into early detection and diagnostic because unfortunately we all get sick. And so might as well catch it early, as early as possible when it's still curable before it actually generates into disease.

9:22And the last, let's say, pillar of our investment thesis is around smarter delivery and care. So how technology is enabling us to provide better, smarter delivery, you know, and using from telemedicine to AI to nanobots to brain computer interfaces and all that. To capture, to follow, to fulfill this mission, we put together an incredible team. Started just as mentioned with myself and my co-founder. This is a good time to briefly introduce myself where I mentioned, yeah, I started the fund Exceptional Ventures. in 2022, together we met. Before that, my career actually started as a computer science engineer.

10:05That's where I studied in Italy. And I left for my first job in 2006 to go to San Francisco. I worked at Cisco for 13 years, first writing code as an engineer, then in a product management fashion. And then I closed leading business development for Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. At the same time, I did an executive MBA here in London to learn about investments and finance. And I discovered venture capital. I thought it was fun and realized, discovered my passion for it. Decided that's what I wanted to do. So in 2017, 18, I started doing engine investments in the areas I was most passionate about, which all related to health, wellness, and fitness.

10:51because I'm also on the side of fitness instructor certified in HIIT, so high in pace for eating and training. And basically that became my main job in 2019 when I was introduced to an American fund investing in health and wellness called Joya's Partners that was expanding to Europe. They needed a managing director to lead this expansion. We met like the chatter. I joined them. I launched Joya's European arm. We invested in more than 20 companies over nine countries in the period of time I was with them. And eventually, as mentioned in 2021, I met with Matt. We realized we had a lot of common passion and together we decided to start EB.

11:29We also have a complementary background. In fact, Matt is a fantastic co-founder. I am lucky to be working with him because prior to this, he was one of the original founders of Capital One Bank in the US in the late 80s. You guys might know Capital One is today the sixth largest American bank with a market cap of roughly$70 billion. So Matt was hugely successful as founder. He exited Capital One in the early 2000s and started basically working with founders at the early stage, helping them with advice, mentorship. Sometimes they were asking to become board members, sometimes chairman. So over the following 20 years, from early 2000 until early 2020s, he invested in more than 150 companies with a fantastic track record in terms of returns.

12:25And one of them is Octopus Group. Many might be familiar with Octopus Ventures as well as Octopus Energy. They're all part of Octopus Group. Matt was first external investor back in 2001, as well as chairman from Inception back then, up until a year or so ago. And just to add to this, Paolo, we have an episode coming out with you and Matt on the 6th of July. So very soon, there'll be a full episode with Paolo and Matt going out together, talking about their thesis around JoySpan in much more detail than we'll be able to today. Absolutely. Thank you for that. It was a fun one. I appreciate it. Yeah.

13:06So together, as mentioned, we kind of now have this vision of building, let's say, another Capcom One or another octopus. But really, as a mission-driven fund, right, develop this into a franchise over the next 15, 20 years, Exceptional Ventures to be the health and wellness firm. So every founder operating in this space, we wanted to come and talk with us first, right? And we really want to help them out. And we want to be subject matter experts and recognized as such in the area of health at the intersection with technology. This was three years ago, three, no, four years ago when we met. And as mentioned, we did our first fund starting ourselves and eventually put it together on an incredible team.

13:54You know, right now we are a core team of seven people with a number of venture partners, advisors, and scouts, many in the UK, a few in Europe and US. I believe we probably have Annie and Mark on the line. I would love for them to introduce themselves if it's possible. Hello, everyone. My name is Anna. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you, Paolo and Andreas, for the opportunity. society um as paulo was mentioning i am a scientist i joined the team last year early 2024 i come from barcelona i studied biotechnology i worked for a couple of startups in in cambridge and in the uk i in the in barcelona as well developing new therapeutics for cardiovascular disease and chronic pain in 2018 i completely moved to the uk to pursue my phd and i became a doctor in pharmacology in 2022.

14:50And I continued working as an academic researcher. And on the site, I was building my commercialization skills and business skills together with the entrepreneurship, scientific entrepreneurship community in London. I helped expand it and met lots of incredible entrepreneurs. And on that journey, I also met Matt and Paolo. and here I am today learning a lot, making most of it and developing great relationships with founders and investors in this space. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Anna. Fantastic. Thank you, Anna. Maybe given this introduction right now, you could maybe talk just for a second why you have prioritized getting a communication and community manager at this time of the fund development cycle Because it's not always that you see that with a fund of your size.

15:42Right. So that, Annie does that plus scientific research. So she helps us with both, giving her PhD in pharmacology background. And the reason we prioritize is because we feel strongly the need to, in a way, within a space like ours that is attracting a lot of charlatans and are telling you to buy these supplements that is going to make you sleep perfect every night or this other one that will increase your biceps and this other one that is going to do something else. Can I get that one? Yeah, man, me too. I'd love that. But there's so much B is going on and we see it as our duty to debunk that, right?

16:30To be a voice of reason and science. And hence, that's what we're doing. We We backed science-backed companies and we speak out about what is data proven and what is just fiction. And again, people telling you whatever BS, leveraging their position as influencers in order to sell olive oil for 40 pounds a bottle. Yeah. And to those listening in, Paolo is the diplomatic one of the founding team. And if you tune into the other episode that we have coming out with both Paolo and Matt, you'll notice that Matt has a big vocabulary when it comes to talking about BS creators in the industry of longevity.

17:17To fulfill our mission, to help people live longer, healthier and happier lives, of course, we want to make exceptional returns with the companies we invest in. And we want to support, educate the public, the consumers around what is science from what is fiction. So the opportunity we're going after is the one of, as mentioned, health, wellness, and longevity, which is a huge market in almost two trillions for some other numbers more, growing at an incredible rate and driven by a number of trends. On one side, you have an aging population, right? People are getting older. Healthcare system can't keep up anymore.

18:00Cost of healthcare is increasing. Also, consumers, younger generations, care more about staying well, right? They're more proactive. They measure themselves in every possible way rather than the other generation that was waiting until, you know, my dad wouldn't freaking go to a doctor until he just can't move anymore. And that's the case still now. So on one side, you have these health trends, but on the other side, you have also scientific progress that is pushing into this market. Because now you have new drugs that really can help you lose weight, like the GLP-1s, right? That weren't available just a few years ago.

18:35Now you have new technologies that can allow you to do early screening and risk assessment using AI that also wasn't available until a few years ago. Now you can have a doctor that knows everything in your pocket. There's a number of trends that are making this such a huge space and growing massive. But then because it's growing so fast, also massive is also attracting fantastic entrepreneurs as well as charlatans. So in a way, we go back to what you mentioned earlier. So Q1 in 2025 was actually an all-time record for health tech, which was the most invested sector before fintech even, right? So almost twice as much capital.

19:15Now, we've been talking about this for the last four years. So in a way, we definitely were early calling this out. And now we're fantastically positioned to capture this. We already did it with our fund line and our fund line is doing well because of the trends in the sectors. Of course, I believe we are great investors, but it's a lot has to do with things going up and to the right because of the trends just so earlier. To anyone listening in, not watching the screen, Paolo is showing a chart here showing that health tech reached 4.8 billion in Q1 2025, almost twice as much as fintech, which only reached 2.8 billion in deal value.

19:54I'd love to ask you, Paolo, what companies drove this remarkable deal volume in health? I mean, you have many. You have, you know, from NecoHelp, for example, that I'm sure you know, that FIT received a hundred and some million last quarter in funding. So some very large macro rounds. You also have a lot of like tech bio kind of companies. So you have very, very large rounds and you also have a high volume in general of a longer tail. So it's a proper shift. And it includes therapeutics. It includes medical devices. It includes health and tech, which is mainly what we invest in. So across the board, AI is a big part of it as well.

20:41And health is a fantastic application of AI. In fact, of the 11 AI unicorns that were coined last quarter, six of them were in health, which is worldwide. This is a huge deal. Now, for example, Abridge, it's an AI scribe. It listens in while you're speaking with your doctor. and by the end of it, types out of the notes, action items, drugs you need to take. NecoHealth, we just discussed it. It's a high-end preventative health clinic by the founders of Spotify. Another one I love is OpenAvidest that basically does that. It assists doctors at the point of delivery where basically a pediatrician knows everything about this.

21:24An orthopedist knows everything about this much. So doctors tend to be very, very, very deep and very, very narrow. Now you train an LLM that is as deep as many doctors, but in all the many different areas of medicine, right? And so now you have a super supporter that can really help out doctors at the point of decision making. So in terms of investments, right, you know, as mentioned, we're launching our second fund. Our second fund, we plan to focus on the areas mentioned earlier. So prevention, so stay well, catch it early, and then smarter delivery and care. Our stage is still going to be precedence seed.

22:06Ideally, our entry valuation below$10 million, which is exactly the same as$1.1, doing check sizes between$200K up to$1 million. We want to invest over the next three years, so from summer 2025 to summer 2028 into 50 to 60 companies. is we know we're going to invest beyond 70 % UK, Europe, 30 % US, which reflects similar and it moves into a second to what we need to offer on one. And our vision is really to deliver exceptional returns and impact. And our target for fundraising on Fund 2 is between 35 and 50 million pounds. I just wanted to shoot in a comment, which is thank you for doing 50 to 60 investments.

22:47I think we have far too many in Europe that don't follow a model where they do a lot of investments like you do. I am excited by it. I know there are others that have another philosophy. And I know that both can be argued for. I'm just happy to see it. Appreciate it. Thank you. And I also believe that each one should play to their strength. Our strength is to be very, you know, it to be thematic. So within the sectors of health, I love being thematic and prolific and do many investments within the sectors of health. Because that way, we can then get our founders. One is building this part of the health solution.

23:27The other one is building this piece to work together. We've done it time and again. Countless of our founders, we made introductions and they went and one became distributor of the other. One became customers. Two, we started and built a product together. So we have at least 20, 25 examples out of our fund wine. You know, every new company we invest in can work with each of our now almost 40 portfolio companies. So this is basically a flywheel that compounds week after week, month after month, year after year. So that's why we have this big vision that we want to build over the last 15, 20 years and having a large portfolio enables it even more.

24:09And then in terms of geographic location, we are a very internationally driven firm. Our own team is distributed across UK, US, France, Italy, and India. Our investments out of Fundwine, half of them roughly were in the UK. 20 % was in the US more or less. And then 30 % was in Europe across a number of countries. And our own LPs come from the UK, come from the US, come from Italy, of course, and then many other countries that we have almost 100 LPs in Fund 1. The backers of Fund One were many of my ex-colleagues from Cisco in the United States, from London where Matt and I live, both friends and ex-colleagues from Octopus from Matt's side, Capital One also from that side.

25:02And then founders, exited founders from Italy, but also from the new and old economy, right? They want to differentiate into this. So we have founders that invested after having listed their company on NASDAQ, for example. So we have an incredible group of people. But yes, you're right. Many invested 50K, 100K, 150K, some put 250K, 750K, 1 million. So that was our fund one, right? And those people, and we have also five family offices in Fund 1. And many of those people are reconfirming now into our Fund 2. Many of those people went to also collaborate with our startups because those are, as I mentioned, excellent founders, and they can actually help our entrepreneurs that are building and are starting from scratch, you know, younger, and are more inexperienced.

25:52So, you know, those people that care about the sectors we invest in are our best supporters. European venture, when you boil it down to the best people, there's not that many left. It's not like we have a ton of longevity-focused funds that take, so to say, this perspective as you do, which is both around community, but also around this point that you're trying to actually focus on the lifestyle and the change that's happening in the world right now around why longevity is coming into people's minds, so to say, where there's a lot of funds that maybe come from more of a medical background or more of a pharmacological background and life science background, and then also do longevity, so to say, as an extension of that, but not where it's an explicit focus like yours.

26:43So I really think that Exceptional has an incredible chance and opportunity of becoming the joy span, the longevity fund of Europe, which I think is hugely exciting. And which is also why I like that you're taking many shots because I think that in this space, there's so much happening and we don't know where the winner is going to be. So I think it makes a ton of sense that you want to be able to capture as much as possible across Europe, rather than make a few concentrated bets. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I think the same and fund three is going to be even more targeting 9 ,200 companies when the time comes in 2028.

27:24I love it. Exactly. So how do we source deals? Well, the majority of our deals, our invested companies came by referrals, referral of other VC in the space. This is one of the reasons I love being a thematic investor. It's very clear for people to know when to call us, right? If it's a deal in health and the intersection with that, that's it. And give us a call. If it's related to telemedicine, if it's related to Bridgetown Life Pharmacy, if it's related to preventative health, continuous monitoring, female health, gut microbiome, fertility, all those things we've all invested across all those areas.

28:04Being thematic allows us to build our reputation and have a very clear position in the market. And also it's clear where we add value. People know that within the areas of health, we are experts ourselves, and so are our founders, and we can make this connection. We've done it coming again. So other VCs, our existing portfolio founders have been great at sourcing. Our previous angel companies, Mac now has invested in 200 companies as angel. I've done almost 15 as angel, and in my previous fund, also 25. So it's a big community of funders that go and do it again and we back them again, or they recommended their friends, right?

28:42And then, of course, we have our own scout and a lot of friends of the fund. And our LPs as well have referred to a lot of deals. So I think we really benefit, as mentioned, this network effect that is compounding produces this positively selected deal flow that we're seeing in these stats. We did in Fund 1 37 investments over three years, right? for Fund 1 launched in June 2022. Now we are almost in June 2025. We're almost fully deployed. We have three more investments to go that hopefully we should be closing over the next month or so. And then comes August, we'll do closing of our new fund, Fund 2, and we'll continue doing investments up to Fund 2.