Founded in 1987 in Austin, Texas, to celebrate the city’s local music and film scene, the annual SXSW Conference and Festivals has evolved into a world-renowned, multifaceted event that bridges the arts, culture and technology with music and comedy showcases, film and TV screenings, and panels and presentations that explore emerging technologies and industries — including AgeTech.
This year, SXSW 2025 features a variety of sessions particularly relevant to AgeTech, and several AgeTech Collaborative™ participants are even presenting! Specific topics include innovation in healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and robotics, as well as consumer insights on the 50-plus market. There are also sessions focused on startup growth and scaling, VC funding and corporate partnerships.
Here’s a rundown of some of the AgeTech-related events offered at SXSW this year; if you’re attending SXSW 2025, consider checking some of these out to see how they could help propel your AgeTech journey.
For Startups
Check out these events — many led by AgeTech Collaborative participants! — focused on helping startups succeed in a competitive environment:
The 50-Plus Market
These sessions aim to help reshape outdated narratives around aging and offer insights into ways that entrepreneurs can better understand this massive, untapped market.
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Drew Barrymore to Beyoncé: How GenX & Millennials Embrace Aging: Barbara Shipley, senior vice president of brand integration at AARP, co-leads this session that helps today’s marketers learn how to tap into the 50-plus demographic, which accounts for 53% of consumer spending and contributes $8.3 trillion annually to the economy.
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Gaming Without Age Limits: The 50+ Opportunity: A panel of experts on consumer behavior, marketing and design — including Brittne Kakulla and Jim Barnett of AARP — offers insights into creating age-inclusive games that tap into the major growth opportunity represented by 53 million U.S. gamers aged 50 and above.
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Midlife: A Missed Opportunity for Monetization: Representatives of top beauty brands share how they are reframing the notion of aging from something that women should fear to something they can celebrate — and something they can use as a jumping-off point for career growth and personal reinvention.
Health and Wellness
From women’s health to the future of XR tech, these sessions explore innovative ways to improve the lives of all adults as they get older.
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The Future of Care: The Rise of Patient-Centered Clinical XR: Kyle Rand, cofounder and CEO of AgeTech Collaborative startup participant Rendever, joins a panel that examines why a technology-based approach to healthcare treatments is positively changing humans’ bid for connection and, in turn, is shifting society’s relationship with XR technology.
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The Economics of a Dementia Diagnosis: This session explores how the private and public spheres must work together to tackle the medical and economic challenges of dementia, which extend beyond direct healthcare expenses, bleeding household finances and exacerbating economic disparities.
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The Vagina Business: Innovative Breakthroughs in Women's Health: Freelance journalist and author Maria Gerner discusses her book “The Vagina Business: Innovative Breakthroughs in Women’s Health,” which shines a light on the innovators challenging the status quo in women's healthcare, and highlights groundbreaking solutions for periods, childbirth, menopause and more.
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Peter Attia: The Science and Art of Longevity: This fireside chat explores the science and principles behind living a longer, healthier life and offers actionable strategies to help you take control of your health journey.
Emerging Tech
What will AgeTech — and all tech — look like in ten years? These sessions consider what’s on the horizon and ways that we can make sure innovation benefits everyone.
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Discovering What's Next: From Space to Climate Tech: Jim Adler, founder and general partner of Toyota Ventures, an AgeTech Collaborative investor participant, co-leads this session about the ever-evolving landscape of early-stage startups and venture capital investment, including Toyota Ventures’ journey and emerging technologies in areas as far-ranging as aerospace, generative AI, robotics, and hydrogen.
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Pushing Creativity to New Bounds: Future Robot Applications: In this session, a distinguished panel of roboticists and AI experts discuss how this technology can enhance the work of both today’s — and tomorrow’s — creators and extend their potential.
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The Promise of AI and Wearable Tech: Will It Lead to our Collective Wellbeing?: This session probes the inherent biases in AI and wearable tech devices and how they perpetuate racial inequities, examining such questions as: “Does the growing market of AI and wearable tech contribute to our collective wellbeing or our collective oppression?”
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Making Autonomous Transportation Accessible: In this session, experts present the current state of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, report on the needs and opinions of older adults and people with disabilities who could gain the most from AVs, and discuss solutions for increasing AV accessibility.
Plus — if you’re up for exploring the outer boundaries of aging itself — you can even check out “Don’t Die,” a keynote address by Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who’s been on an idiosyncratic quest to live virtually forever.
Keep SXSW 2025 on your radar this upcoming week for interesting news and announcements. And consider attending in 2026! Later this year, you can even submit your own AgeTech presentation and panel ideas for SXSW 2026 via the SXSW PanelPicker, SXSW’s official, crowd-sourced platform for shaping its conference programming.
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