More people are putting real money into fitness, recovery, diagnostics, and longevity—not because they're sick, but because staying healthy matters. This week, we're exploring why. ionava believes health deserves a financial infrastructure built around it, so healthy choices actually pay off.

What Preventive Health Actually Means

Preventive health, in the way it's being talked about and practiced today, represents the choices people make outside doctors' offices and insurance claims: the morning workout, the therapy appointment, the sauna session, or the sleep tracker on their wrist. The through-line is a simple but significant shift: health as something you invest in continuously, not something you address when it breaks down.

What we call healthcare in the United States is more like “sickcare”. America spends the most out of any first-world nation on healthcare, yet has worse outcomes than most. The system was built to respond to illness, not to reward the behaviors that prevent illness from developing in the first place. That gap is increasingly visible to the people who are most actively investing in their own health, and it's driving demand for a new category of products and financial infrastructure that actually recognizes what they're doing.

Preventive health is mainly self-directed, largely out of pocket, and growing fast. The global preventive healthcare technologies and services market grew from $296 billion in 2024 to roughly $341 billion in 2025, and is projected to reach $741 billion by 2031 at a compound annual growth rate of 12.45%.¹ The individuals’ segment (meaning direct-to-consumer, rather than hospital or provider-driven) is expected to record the fastest growth of any end-user category in these next five years. This signals that people are choosing and funding themselves, entirely outside the traditional clinical system. Are you one of them?

¹ Mordor Intelligence, "Preventive Healthcare Technologies and Services Market," mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/preventive-healthcare-technologies-and-services-market, 2026.

The Preventive Health Gap

Consumer behavior and the health insurance system are moving in opposite directions.

People are spending more on their own health and wellness than at any point in modern history, and much of it is out of pocket. Wearable trackers alone generated $95 billion in global revenue in 2025, and the global wellness market broadly is now worth over $6.8 trillion, but prevention programs still make up less than 3% of healthcare budgets.

Many of the conditions that drive America's healthcare spending are also among the most preventable. The CDC estimates that physical inactivity alone costs the U.S. $192 billion annually in healthcare spending, while obesity costs nearly $173 billion and tobacco-related illness over $240 billion — a combined burden exceeding $600 billion each year from risk factors that are largely modifiable through lifestyle. The personal financial case for prevention isn't ambiguous; the system's incentives just haven't caught up.

The result is a structural gap: a growing segment of health-conscious consumers who spend meaningfully on their own wellbeing and receive no financial recognition for it from the system they're paying into. This is the specific gap ionava is designed to close. ionava is not on a mission to replace insurance, but they are building the financial layer that connects proactive wellness spending to actual financial value.

Othership: Preventive Health in Practice

During NY Tech Week, CCV and ionava co-hosted a midday sauna, cold plunge, and breathwork session at Othership in Williamsburg — a community wellness space built around contrast therapy, with locations in New York and Toronto. Instead of a standard tech happy hour, we decided to sweat it out with the community ionava was built for: founders, wellness-forward professionals, and people who already treat their physical and mental health as a genuine priority.

The science behind contrast therapy is more robust than most people realize. As per a study of men who dry sauna users in Finland, sauna use has been associated with a 22% lower risk of sudden cardiac death for those who go 2–3 times per week, and up to a 63% reduction in risk for those who go 4–7 times per week. A later Finnish cohort included reductions in risk as well for a mixed group of men and women. Cold exposure triggers the release of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine, producing measurable improvements in mood, mental clarity, and stress resilience. A 2025 UCSF clinical trial found that whole-body heating combined with cognitive behavioral therapy produced clinically meaningful reductions in major depressive disorder symptoms for over 85% of participants. These are the kinds of practices that deliver documented health benefits, but the traditional insurance system has no mechanism to recognize or reward this type of wellness.

Where Preventive Health is Heading

The preventive health space is still early, and the surface area of what it encompasses is expanding quickly. Longevity, the idea of extending not just lifespan but the number of years spent in genuinely good health, has become one of the most visible expressions. Figures like Bryan Johnson and researchers like Dr. Peter Attia have pulled the conversation into mainstream culture, and the market has followed. The global biohacking market was valued at $33 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow 17% through 2031, with an estimated 82 million consumers actively using at least one longevity-oriented wearable device today, up from 41 million just four years ago.

Longevity is one example of a much broader shift. Wearables are becoming clinical-grade diagnostic tools. Continuous glucose monitors, once exclusively for diabetic patients, are now widely used by healthy people tracking metabolic response. AI-powered health analytics are beginning to surface personalized risk signals years before an annual checkup could catch. The consumer appetite for preventive health is only growing, and the tools available to meet it are becoming more sophisticated every year. And, many are not covered by insurance.

The potential for preventative health is significant, and the financial infrastructure to support it is still largely unbuilt—ionava is one of the companies consciously taking on its construction. 

If this series raises questions for you, whether you're someone thinking about your own health spending, a brand operating in this space, or an investor watching the category, we're happy to connect you! ionava’s non-networked cash-pay Marketplace for health and wellness goods and services goes live in October. Have a health innovation product or service? Marktplace pitches for premium placements are now open.

Join one of ionava's upcoming events here to learn how you can make your health spending simpler, more affordable and more transparent; or join their Marketplace as a health/wellness provider.

Until next week,

Team CCV