The pitch is usually the founder’s job. At Health Innovation Exchange, the microphone sometimes goes to the ministry. Officials describe the health problems they need solved; entrepreneurs listen for a place their technology might fit. It is an appealing reversal of the conference ritual: before anyone explains how their product will change the world, somebody explains what the public health system actually needs.
That format, written into HIEx’s 2026 World Health Assembly programme, captures its business better than the word “exchange” does. The Geneva organisation helps connect health innovations with government priorities, investment and implementation partners. Its subject is the awkward interval between a solution that works and a system prepared to use it.
The distinction matters. A founder can build a diagnostic tool, demonstrate it and attract applause without finding a route into routine care. HIEx operates in that interval through accelerators, policy conversations and practical introductions. For entrepreneurs, the attraction is access to people who influence adoption. For ministries, it is a way to start with their own problems.
A question before a company
HIEx traces its beginnings to conversations with African and Asian health ministers during the 2018 United Nations General Assembly. The question was how technology could help transform healthcare access. Its account of those discussions puts a particular emphasis on understanding ministry needs before presenting innovations. Listening was part of the original design.
UNAIDS and partners launched the initiative on May 21, 2019, alongside the World Health Assembly. A three-day gathering at the Palais des Nations showcased 24 innovations spanning HIV, tuberculosis and health systems. Examples ranged from rapid screening to sexual-health education and primary-care support. The selection made room for service delivery as well as technology.
Founder and chief executive Pradeep Kakkattil came from global health and development. In 2022, he received a Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year award for his work creating HIEx. The organisation then became a stand-alone association in 2023. That history helps explain its position: comfortable around public institutions, but increasingly organised around ventures, investment and commercial adoption.
The customer has more than one name
HIEx serves several constituencies whose interests overlap without being identical. Ministries want solutions that fit public priorities. Entrepreneurs need capital, distribution and regulatory clarity. Investors want credible opportunities. Corporate and philanthropic partners want programmes that can deliver health benefits. Getting those groups into one room is useful; getting them to agree on what happens afterward is the harder assignment.
Its offer therefore comes in several forms. There are public sessions and private meetings around major health gatherings, innovation showcases, founder mentoring and investment connections. Its WHA79 partnership offerings describe hosted events with production and participant support, closed-door boardroom discussions and exhibition space. Convening is an actual service with logistics attached, rather than a synonym for knowing interesting people.
The business model follows that mix. HIEx solicits donations and offers partnership and sponsorship opportunities while working with programme backers. Its donation page accepts one-time, monthly and project-specific support. This is a nonprofit platform whose activities include accelerator delivery and advisory work; a conventional software subscription is not the useful comparison.
The functional alternatives are an accelerator, a specialist market-access adviser, an investor network or direct engagement with a ministry. HIEx’s proposition combines those connections. Its strongest distinction is the attempt to organise the work around public-system adoption, with policy people present early enough to shape the conversation.
Women founders, with somewhere to go next
Women-led ventures are a substantial part of that work. WiNFUND, co-founded with Reckitt and the Kofi Annan Foundation, launched in 2022 with an African focus. HIEx’s programme account reports more than 300 applications, a shortlist of 50 entrepreneurs and investments in six. Those numbers describe a selection process, not the number of companies HIEx has created.
There was an unusual fundraising flourish. In 2023, WiNFUND offered NFTs featuring work by Rwandan artist Christella Bijou. The collection announcement priced each at 0.08 ETH, then approximately $130, with proceeds intended to support women health entrepreneurs. Digital collectibles made for an attention-grabbing entrance to a much less fashionable subject: financing everyday healthcare access.
Reckitt’s 2023 social-impact report supplies more grounded examples. It reported that Ambulex reached 13,000 households with pre-hospital care through a county partnership, while Famasi Africa worked with 306 pharmacies. These are reported outcomes of supported ventures. They illustrate the work in the portfolio without turning every beneficiary into a direct HIEx customer.
The relationship expanded through Reckitt Catalyst in June 2025. Reckitt announced an up-to-£10 million commitment over five years, aiming to support 200 ventures and reach five million people by 2030. HIEx joined Yunus Social Innovation and Acumen America as a partner. Serena Williams became the programme’s first Entrepreneur-in-Residence, adding mentoring and public visibility.
For a founder, the smaller number was more immediately useful. The 2025 open call offered selected entrepreneurs up to $30,000 in flexible funding alongside six months of accelerator support. HIEx’s contribution includes investment preparation, government navigation and market access. Reckitt later reported more than 900 applications and 23 selections for the global 2025/26 cohort; HIEx profiles nine innovators within its own Catalyst portfolio.
Different sums, different promises
Three financial figures tell three different stories here. The individual accelerator offer supports selected entrepreneurs. Reckitt’s five-year commitment covers a broader partner programme. Meanwhile, HIEx’s Climate & Health Innovation and Equity Fund, or CHIEF, seeks a $500 million pool of blended catalytic finance. That final figure is a target. It belongs in the ambition column.
Per entrepreneur in the 2025 Catalyst call.
Reckitt’s five-year Catalyst commitment.
CHIEF’s intended financing pool.
CHIEF’s stated purpose is to support climate-resilient, equitable health systems through investment and technical assistance. HIEx also works with the International Solar Alliance around the climate-health connection. The logic is practical: health services depend on infrastructure, and energy belongs in the conversation about whether care can be delivered reliably.
Another route into implementation is its collaboration with Dure Technologies. The partners established a social enterprise to help ministries set up and manage Digital Transformation Offices, combining advice with hands-on digitisation support. HIEx lists countries including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Indonesia as priorities. An office inside the system offers a different point of entry from a stand at a conference.
The first obstruction is often adoption
HIEx’s current writing challenges the diagnosis that more founder funding will, by itself, solve the scale problem. Interviews and discussions with Catalyst entrepreneurs brought up procurement barriers, repeated demands for proof and poorly matched financing. This is a documented sharpening of its argument, rather than a tidy account of one failed project followed by a miraculous pivot.
“The challenge is not the quality of innovation. It is whether the system is set up to adopt and scale it.”Dr. Abas Hassen, Ethiopia Ministry of Health, in HIEx’s analysis of adoption barriers
That analysis of women-led innovation puts the obstruction around the product. For readers building similar programmes, the practical inference is to identify the buyer, procurement route and long-term delivery partner before commissioning another demonstration. The method depends on an institution being able and willing to adopt the result. A useful introduction cannot supply that authority on its own.
The ventures make those institutional questions tangible. LifeBank, profiled by HIEx, organises access to blood, oxygen and medical supplies across Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia. Sehat Kahani connects remote female doctors with patients through digital services and community clinics in Pakistan. Supply logistics and workforce access require different partners; “healthtech” is too broad a description to choose either route to market.
Consider the contrast. A medical delivery business has to make procurement and physical distribution work together. A remote-care business has to connect clinical expertise with patients and the people assisting them locally. Both may use software, yet the institutional relationships that make the service useful are different. This is the case for matching support to the delivery problem, rather than assuming every venture needs the same accelerator curriculum.
There is a lesson here for funders, too. A sensible programme review would ask whether a venture has gained an operational partner or a credible path to procurement, as well as whether it has attended workshops. The implication of HIEx’s argument is to judge the next operational step as carefully as the next investment pitch. Where the prospective buyer has no sustainable budget, or the proposed service cannot fit existing workflows, convening leaves the central obstacle in place.
What a useful handshake looks like
One 2026 agreement offers a concrete picture of HIEx’s role. At the World Health Assembly, it convened a partnership between Wellbeing Foundation Africa and Proximie Global Health, supported through Proximie’s initiative with Amazon Web Services. The first phase commits to a digital simulation hub at the foundation’s Lagos Centre of Excellence.
The plan integrates live expert training and recorded cases into existing obstetric and newborn-care training. Experiences from trainees’ home facilities are intended to feed back into subsequent teaching. That detail matters: the technology is being attached to a training programme with a place, partners and a feedback process. The agreement establishes an implementation plan; its health benefits remain something the partners must deliver.
This is where HIEx’s work becomes easiest to understand. It can help a founder find the people responsible for adoption, help an investor understand a health-system need and help an institution assemble a delivery partnership. The useful question after each meeting is wonderfully plain: who is responsible for the next step?