Robert Garber: Healthcare Innovation and the Future of Health Tech Investing

Global health expenditure exceeds $9 trillion a year, roughly 10% of world GDP, which makes healthcare the largest industry on earth. It is also one of the least digitized and least consumer-oriented. Administrative waste in the United States alone is estimated at $1 trillion a year. Japan is projected to be short 30,000 physicians by 2030 while its population ages faster than any in history. In both countries the gap between what healthcare costs and what it delivers keeps widening.

7wire Ventures, a Chicago-based venture capital firm, invests in companies working on that gap. Its thesis is that healthcare is moving toward the consumer. Robert Garber brings the firm’s perspective to the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 in Tokyo on April 26.

The 7wire Thesis: Connected Health Consumers

7wire was founded on the view that healthcare is moving from a provider-driven model to a consumer-driven one, and the firm invests in the companies making that move possible.

The firm organizes its investing around what it calls the Connected Health Consumer: the patient who uses data, digital tools, and personalized services to manage their own care. The portfolio follows that definition. It includes companies building infrastructure for virtual care delivery, health data interoperability, personalized wellness, behavioral health platforms, and the digital front doors through which patients now enter the system.

In finance, retail, travel, and media, technology moved power from institutions to individuals some time ago. Healthcare has held out. Regulation is heavy, the incumbents are large, the data is fragmented, and failure costs lives. Mobile access, data portability, and AI personalization are now arriving in healthcare anyway.

7wire’s portfolio companies work across the health tech stack, from patient engagement and clinical decision support to data infrastructure and health plan administration. The firm pairs healthcare domain knowledge with technology investing discipline. Generalist tech investors tend to underestimate the regulatory side; healthcare-native investors tend to underestimate how fast the technology moves.

Digital Health in 2026

COVID-19 compressed about a decade of telehealth adoption into twelve months. In the United States, virtual visits went from roughly 1% of ambulatory visits in February 2020 to more than 40% by April 2020. The question since has been how much of that stuck.

Five years on, telehealth has neither replaced in-person care nor retreated to 2019 levels. It has settled into a hybrid in which virtual care handles a growing share of primary care consultations, mental health services, chronic disease management, and post-surgical follow-up. McKinsey estimates that about 20% of all healthcare spending could eventually be delivered virtually.

Underneath the telehealth numbers, a data layer is being built for continuous, personalized, proactive health management. Remote patient monitoring devices, wearable sensors, AI symptom checkers, and predictive analytics engines produce health information that did not exist ten years ago.

Clinical diagnostics shows the pace. By 2024 the FDA had cleared more than 900 AI-enabled medical devices, up from fewer than 100 in 2019. Among them are systems that detect diabetic retinopathy from retinal scans as accurately as human ophthalmologists, algorithms that spot early signs of sepsis in electronic health records hours before clinicians would, and imaging tools that flag possible cancers in mammograms and CT scans. Radiologists have not been replaced. They now work alongside software that processes images at a scale no person can.

For health tech investors, the sector has moved from pandemic-driven adoption to AI-driven infrastructure. Digitizing an existing workflow is no longer enough to raise a round; the companies getting funded are the ones trying to predict and prevent disease before symptoms appear.

Japan as a Health Tech Market

29.3% of Japan’s population is over 65, the highest share of any major economy. Germany, South Korea, China, and eventually the United States are headed the same way. Japan’s healthcare system spends about $550 billion a year, the third highest in the world in absolute terms, and the figure rises as the population ages and chronic disease becomes more common.

The country faces a projected shortage of 30,000 physicians by 2030 and a sharper shortage of nurses and caregivers. The ratio of working-age adults to elderly dependents has fallen below 2:1 and continues to fall. The existing model, in-person consultations at hospitals and clinics supported by a dense network of pharmacies, is near its structural limit.

The government has responded. The Digital Agency, established in 2021, made healthcare digitization a core priority, including the nationwide rollout of the My Number Card as a digital health insurance card. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has loosened telemedicine rules, allowing initial consultations to be conducted virtually and enabling online prescription services. Japan’s pharmaceutical industry, the third largest in the world, is investing in digital therapeutics, AI-driven drug discovery, and precision medicine.

For international health tech companies, Japan combines high spending, sophisticated consumers, strong IP protection, and a government looking for technology answers to a demographic problem. Language, regulation, and business culture are obstacles, and companies with partners who know both the technology and the market have an easier time with them.

AI, Longevity, and Impact

Health tech investing touches several of the summit’s core themes: AI reshaping established industries, the economics of demographic change, and whether technology can produce equitable outcomes as well as efficient ones.

The longevity economy, the market serving people over 50, is already estimated at $22 trillion worldwide. Companies building infrastructure for healthy aging stand to capture a large share of it. Whether advanced health technology reaches beyond people who can afford concierge medicine is still an open question.

Japan has universal health insurance, which gives broad access to care. Japan leads the world in acceptance of assistive robotics and health monitoring devices among older people, which suggests technology-enabled care can work in an aging society. At the same time, the rural-urban gap in access is widening, specialist wait times are growing, and costs show no sign of leveling off.

What Robert Garber Will Discuss at T4IS 2026

Garber’s session covers how venture capital can speed up healthcare innovation that reaches whole populations, and what other countries can take from Japan, where the demographic pressure arrived first.

He joins a speaker lineup drawn from government, finance, and technology. Former Minister Taro Kono covers the policy side of Japan’s digital transformation, including healthcare digitization. Yoshito Hori, founder and president of GLOBIS, delivers the keynote on leadership and human capital. Kathy Matsui of MPower Partners speaks on impact-driven venture capital. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, addresses decentralized infrastructure and what it could mean for health data ownership and portability. Jesper Koll of Monex Group provides the macroeconomic context for Japan’s structural change.

The summit is invitation-only. Senior executives, policymakers, and technologists meet at Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioi Conference for a single day. A physician shortage is a problem for hospital administrators, for the ministry that licenses doctors, for the insurers that pay them, and for the companies selling software into the gap, and the room is set up so those people talk to each other. Garber speaks for the investors in that room.

The Tech for Impact Summit 2026 takes place on April 26 in Tokyo. To learn more about partnership opportunities, visit tech4impactsummit.com.

Watch the highlight video from previous editions: youtu.be/ujy7ZXflrt4