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Last week, more than 200 people from across the AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP (ATC) spectrum — including startups, investors, enterprises, testbeds and business services — journeyed to Washington, D.C., for the 2025 ATC Summit and the pre-Summit Founders Day to hear from AgeTech experts and to participate in workshops, breakout sessions and networking opportunities, all focused on educating, equipping, connecting and inspiring AgeTech pioneers.

Founders Day: Focusing on the Startup Journey

The day prior to the official start of the Summit itself was Founders Day, which offered a range of programming designed specifically to address the unique and pressing challenges of ATC startup participants. 

The first session, the Long Story Short Pitch Exercise, gave small groups of founders a lighthearted opportunity to practice, get feedback on, and distill their pitches into the most compelling presentation possible. 

The highlight of the morning was Innovating with AI: Insights from a Founder, a fireside chat with Raj Aggarwal, formerly of AWS and Localytics, and an experienced founder. Aggarwal reflected on his time “in the startup trenches” and shared some hard-won insights, including advice that founders don’t always need to overthink everything.

Aggarwal offered other insights, including the importance of growing a company at a deliberate pace: Raising too much money too fast can lead to unexpected complications. He also described the importance of having a true passion for your company and surrounding yourself with the right people — especially people you can be candid with, and who will be candid with you.

The afternoon of Founders Day was dedicated to breakout sessions on topics near and dear to founders’ hearts:

• Go to Market on a Budget focused on helping marketers understand how they can optimize their content marketing, customer relation campaigns and influencer outreach motion to cost-effectively reach their audience.

• Go to Market with Retail gave startups tips for securing coveted shelf space with national retailers and for leveraging online channels to increase visibility and get their solution in front of buyers.

• Unlocking Nontraditional Funding explored tapping into alternative sources of capital, building strategic relationships, staying current on the shifting funding landscape and diversifying funding strategies to empower sustainable growth. 

• Pilot to Scale: Your CCRC Growth Playbook offered insights into how continuing care retirement communities evaluate new technology and ways that businesses can effectively pitch their products, then plan and conduct pilots at scale.
  
  

Throughout the day, founders themselves also took the stage to share first-hand their recent breakthrough success stories, along with tips they’ve learned that could help their fellow AgeTech pioneers, including: the importance of doing deep dives with early users to iterate solutions for maximum effectiveness; finding “right-size” manufacturing partners who are eager to grow with you; gaining traction with payers by joining a point solution to platforms that have pre-existing relationships with those payers; avoiding problems by not scaling too quickly; easing the FDA process (and reimbursement) by designing products to meet the requirements of specific reimbursement codes; seeking out community with other AgeTech entrepreneurs to combat loneliness; and pivoting to meet customers’ adjacent needs to gain more traction and additional revenue.

ATC Summit, Day 1: Advancing AgeTech Innovation in 2025

The first official day of the Summit kicked off with one-to-one meetings between Collaborative participants. These opportunities to start conversations, make meaningful connections and spark innovation continued throughout the day.

The first formal session was the keynote address Be the Changemaker: Turning Ideas into Impact, by Nate Mook, former CEO of World Central Kitchen (WCK), a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing fresh meals to victims of humanitarian, climate and community crises. Mook shared stories of WCK’s work on the front lines — literally — providing food relief to civilians caught up in the war in Ukraine, to victims of Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, and in the wake of other crises around the world. 

Describing how WCK evolved from a small nongovernmental organization into one that has global impact, Mook reflected on the power of interconnectedness, especially in this era of globalization. When disaster strikes, the problems that arise are too complex for one organization to solve in a vacuum. Cooperation is crucial, so when WCK moves into an area devastated by crisis, it works to tap into local networks of chefs, restaurants and volunteers to facilitate cooking food and getting it distributed to thousands of people every day. Mook noted that solving the problems of our day requires innovation, collaboration and understanding what people actually need, along with the ability to learn from mistakes.

Next up, a panel of three policy experts shared their insights for Navigating Federal Policy in 2025. Asked about the top issues they believe will impact older adults in the near future, the panelists pointed to significant and substantial cuts that could create havoc in the Medicaid system. These cuts could also impact AgeTech companies working on solutions related to Medicaid, but they could also present an opportunity for companies that can leverage new technologies to help streamline the administration of Medicaid benefits. 

Regarding health care more generally, the panelists noted that the perennial challenges revolve around access, quality and affordability. Medicare and Medicaid tend to “Band-Aid” over problems instead of solving them — but this, too, creates an opportunity for companies that can offer ways to reduce inefficiencies, such as creating an app to help people navigate Medicare. On the tech front, the panelists talked about the rise of ever-more sophisticated scams proliferating online, noting that we are likely to see more effort involved in protecting children and older adults from online fraud. 

After lunch, Monique Woodard, founding partner of Cake Ventures, and Elana Berkowitz, founding partner of Springbank Collective, took the stage for Strategic Marketing in the Silver Economy. Woodard and Berkowitz shared highlights from their recent whitepaper, Navigating the Silver Economy: Aging, Care, and Who’s in Charge — a deep dive into the dynamics between older adults and their caregivers, and the effect those dynamics have on strategic marketing.

Woodard and Berkowitz noted that when it comes to products designed for the AgeTech space, the buyer (typically an adult child) is often different than the user (an older adult). This “multiplayer mode” can make marketing tricky, and marketers must decide whether to target one or the other, or find ways to address the unique concerns of each in a single marketing message.

Moreover, the dynamics between caregivers and older adults change over time. Marketers should be aware of this shifting balance of power, and tailor their message accordingly, depending on the specific point in the lifecycle their product or service is designed for — both in the specific messaging and in the best channels to use. While younger adults have long tended to turn to digital tools for information, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and other factors are changing the specific channels they use. Traditional search engines no longer rule!

The final afternoon session was Best Practices for High-Impact Pilots with Real Consumers. Panelists representing a senior living facility, a state agency and a university discussed their experiences with pilot programs, and offered insights to help startups maximize their chances of partnering with organizations for a successful pilot.

Key takeaways included:

• Before you approach a testbed, ask yourself: “Does my product fill an important gap?” Pilot partners want to know that your product can address a significant unmet need, not just provide incremental improvements over existing solutions.

• Understand the context. The frontline staff at testbeds are short on time and long on stress. No matter how effective your solution could be, if it doesn’t integrate easily into established workflows, it could very well get sidelined.

• Data is important, but the “love” factor is priceless. When participants in a pilot refuse to give up their prototype device or service at the end of the pilot, you know you’ve got a winner.

• You can learn from failure. If the pilot produces less than optimal results, that’s an opportunity to discover where your product, service or approach still needs some work.

Day 1 wrapped up with networking opportunities, office hours with AgeTech Collaborative account managers and a reception with dinner, drinks — and a trivia contest!

ATC Summit, Day 2: Looking Toward the Future

Sam Jordan, a futurist whose job involves “strategic foresight,” gave the Summit’s closing keynote, Something’s Happening Here: Building the Future Before It’s Clear. Jordan described how strategic foresight involves using data and evidence to model multiple plausible versions of the future, so that organizations can make decisions today to prepare themselves for those possible futures. The process involves identifying signals to differentiate important advancements in tech and other areas from mere hype, then connecting those signals to understand the ways in which they might interact. 

Applying this strategic foresight model to AgeTech and what it could mean for AgeTech companies in particular, Jordan posited that companies will soon be able to actively mine AI hallucinations for creative solutions to complex problems — as indeed, some researchers are already doing. Companies could also leverage infinity engines to build digital sandboxes where they can test their products virtually, before they even build their first prototype. These and other developments could be the foundation of a brand new product development model that can give companies a structural edge over competitors — and make them more attractive to investors.

The final panel of the Summit, How to Work with AARP, focused on ways that companies can work with AARP in three key areas: leveraging AARP research for product development, advertising with AARP, and entering into a commercial agreement with AARP itself.

From keynote speeches and breakout sessions to informal networking moments with industry leaders and fellow AgeTech Collaborative participants, the 2025 ATC Summit gave attendees a chance to expand their understanding of the broader AgeTech landscape, dive deeper into specific challenges, and spark practical ideas for solving complex problems. If you didn’t attend this year, we hope to see you next year! And if you’re not yet part of the ATC ecosystem, consider becoming a participant to gain access to exclusive events such as the ATC Summit.

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