By Natalia Arjomand, Senior Director, SecondMuse Capital & David Ball, Head of Well-being, SecondMuse
$6.2 trillion. That’s the cumulative GDP gain from scaling known brain health interventions globally by 2050, according to the latest report by McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum (WEF). And yet the investment infrastructure to capture even a fraction of that value barely exists. The evidence is compelling, as it has been historically for other social and environmental interventions with massive financial and quality-of-life ROIs. Without the capital architecture to act on these opportunities, their final impact never quite reaches its potential. That critical infrastructure is being built right now for the brain economy.
Brain capital, defined as the prevention and promotion of brain health and brain skills, is gaining real traction as an investment priority. But momentum alone doesn’t build a market. From SecondMuse’s work over the last 15 years on systems change, we know that emerging fields require specific conditions before capital can flow at scale. Clean energy is the clearest recent example. It wasn’t a scientific consensus that unlocked the solar and wind markets. It was the painstaking construction of shared definitions, measurement standards, proof-of-concept deals, and coordinated stakeholder action over 20 years. Affordable housing followed the same logic a generation earlier. The need was self-evident for decades—yet private capital stayed largely on the sidelines until the introduction of tax credits created a standardized deal structure and gave institutional investors a predictable vehicle. More than $100 billion in capital followed. The unlock, in both cases, was financial architecture.
The brain economy is now on that same trajectory, and understanding what it needs to mature is essential for any investor or funder who wants to be well-positioned when it does.
“We invest deliberately in roads, data centers, and power grids, the infrastructure a modern economy runs on. Resourcing brain capital is the human foundation of that same economy,” shares Harris Eyre, Executive Director of the Global Brain Economy Initiative. “The science is there. The policy momentum is there. What we are building now is the shared investment architecture to match.”
Our Thesis: Systemic Investing Is the Architecture Needed
At SecondMuse Capital, we’ve arrived at a clear view: addressing brain capital requires a systemic investing approach. Rather than funding isolated interventions, a systemic investing approach coordinates the right mix of investors, funders, and capital types, such as debt, equity, grants, and more, across sectors and life stages. The goal isn’t to solve a single problem. It’s to shift a system.
Brain capital is not an event. It is a trajectory built across decades, shaped by food, housing, education, work, healthcare, and social connection at every stage of life. That trajectory is never owned by a single sector, and no single investment theme can hold that complexity alone. This cross-sectoral, multi-system reality is exactly what systemic investing is designed to navigate.
Consider the relationship between mental health and work. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression and anxiety cost the global economy an estimated 12 billion working days and $1 trillion in lost productivity every year. That’s not a health crisis or a work crisis in isolation—it’s a systems challenge. Siloed investments leave value on the table and don’t address the interconnectedness of the workplace of the future and the mental health of the workforce. McKinsey Health Institute estimates that proactive and integrated brain capital investments, including in the mental health of the workforce and the design of work itself, could generate up to $12.5 trillion in global economic value. When investment is coordinated across local government, the private sector, our health and education systems, the returns compound in ways that no single intervention could achieve.
Within that complexity, not all intervention points are equal. Research across the brain economy identifies specific nodes where a targeted capital input shifts health, productivity, and economic trajectories for decades to come—early childhood development, food systems, and the workplace among the most significant. And when investments are coordinated across these levels, the returns don’t add. They multiply.
Crucially, the enabling conditions for this kind of coordinated investment in brain capital are actively being built. Shared measurement frameworks, policy infrastructure, and place-based pilots are emerging across the field. The window to help shape that architecture, rather than simply invest in it once it exists, is open today.
Applied Practice: Whole Economy Approach for Youth Mental Health
The gap between the investment logic the field needs and the one it currently has is not abstract to us. Nearly a decade ago, SecondMuse founded the Headstream initiative to take a whole economy approach to supporting the mental well-being of young people.
At the time, the mental health sector was early-stage, deeply fragmented, and disconnected from customer markets. Access to quality interventions for young people was limited. Poor mental health was undermining young people’s ability to learn, build relationships, and enter the workforce. Investments in those systems flowed in silos, each optimizing for its own outcomes. Caution was the default response from investors and institutional partners alike. What was missing wasn’t entrepreneurial energy. It was the coordinated infrastructure that made existing solutions investable.
Building that infrastructure became Headstream’s main priority. We focused on three interlocking interventions that no single-sector investor could fund or execute alone. First, developing shared measurement frameworks so outcomes could be compared and capital allocated with confidence. Second, practicing what we think of as market choreography—connecting startups to the school districts, healthcare systems, and corporate customers who needed their solutions but had no reliable way to find or evaluate them. Finally, convening coordinated stakeholder action across funders, institutions, and policymakers who were each addressing part of the problem in isolation.
The results reflect that architecture. The innovation ecosystem matured. Then education, health care, and consumer markets opened, leading to a rapid influx of capital. Startups in Headstream’s portfolio have now reached more than 50 million young people and caring adults and raised $237M in follow-on funding. Headstream is one proof point of systemic investing. The brain economy, in its full complexity, will require the same logic applied at scale.
What’s Coming in This Series
In the pieces ahead, we’ll be making the full case: what systemic investing actually means in practice, how systemic investing creates combinatorial returns across communities and organizations, and why the communities most affected by brain health inequities must be at the center of how solutions are designed.
