The Circle came to Dubai

Last Monday, the Future Investments Circle convened in Dubai for the first time.

Held together with AIM Congress at the Dubai World Trade Centre, the afternoon brought two frontier sectors into the same closed-door room — the commercial space economy, and human healthspan — in front of investors, family offices and fund managers weighing where capital goes next.

It was also the first time the longevity thesis has been presented to the AIM Congress audience.

Here's what came out of it.

Speakers:

Dr. Shareef Al Romaithi, Madari Space · Dana Baki, The Exploration Company · Merry Walker, Symphony Space · Salim Al Alawi, Orbitworks

The panel started from a premise that would have been contentious two years ago and wasn't in this room: getting to orbit is no longer the hard problem. Reusable launch has cut the cost of reaching space by roughly 95% since 2008, and the constraint has moved elsewhere.

Three things worth carrying forward:

The investable layer has shifted from launch to what sits on top of it. Satellite manufacturing, orbital data infrastructure, in-space autonomy, and the ability to bring things back down are now distinct businesses with distinct economics. For allocators, that means the sector can no longer be underwritten as a single bet.

Sovereign capability is doing more than launching satellites — it's creating a supply chain. The UAE's build-out is producing manufacturing capacity, orbital services and export relationships that didn't exist regionally five years ago. The panel returned repeatedly to what it means for capital when a nation-state becomes an anchor customer and a co-investor at once.

Autonomy is the constraint that unlocks the rest. Machines that must wait for instructions from Earth cap what is commercially viable in orbit. The economics of everything above — servicing, compute, observation — depend on that changing.

Together with Longevity Investors

Speakers:

Dr. Alex Aliper, Insilico Medicine · Dr. Ksenia Butova, Longevium · Corey Gray, Smart Cities Council

We built this panel around a deliberate disagreement. Two panellists approach healthspan from the intervention side — AI-driven drug discovery, and clinical longevity medicine delivered at scale. The third argues that most population-level healthspan is determined by the built environment long before anyone reaches a clinic.

Three things worth carrying forward:

AI has compressed the timeline, and pharma has noticed. The gap between target identification and a compound entering human trials has narrowed from years to months in the leading cases, and the capital following it is now coming from large pharmaceutical balance sheets rather than venture alone. That changes the risk profile of the whole category.

The scalability question is unresolved, and it's the one investors should press on. Preventive and longevity medicine works clinically. Whether it becomes a scalable business or remains a boutique service delivered to a small number of people is a separate question, and the honest answer from the stage was that it depends on infrastructure that mostly doesn't exist yet.

The clinic is not the only lever, and possibly not the largest one. Air quality, heat, walkability, green space and social connection shape healthspan at a scale no clinical intervention reaches. The uncomfortable implication for this room is that some of the highest-leverage longevity investments may not look like healthcare at all — they look like mobility, housing and public space.

The tension the panel closed on: do you add healthy years in the clinic, or in the city? Dubai, which is building both simultaneously, is the live test.

To our speakers, for the substance and the candour. To Laura Buckwell, who hosted the afternoon and moderated both panels.

The Circle returns to Davos during the World Economic Forum on 18 January 2027.

Further details in the coming weeks.

Register your interest here.