Blog

Launched by VCs and founders as an effort to tackle COVID-19 in March 2020 with a INR 100 crore fund, ACT has transformed into a movement of scale to tackle problems across healthcare, education, environment and women’s participation in the workplace.

Efforts by ACTs’ 50+ grantees to combat COVID-19 across areas of prevention, testing, manufacturing of masks and PPE Kits, treatment and hospital capacity building, mental health and more touched the lives of 49 million people across the country.

“The pandemic required decisive and timely action. ACT Grants’ processes were thorough, seamless and most importantly, aligned closely with what we wanted to do. Together, we could act on immediately and effectively saving many lives.”

– Dileep Raman, (Cloudphysician) an ACT grantee shared his experience of working with ACT last year.

At the recently held virtual ACT Summit 2021, domain experts, VCs, and founders – got together to discuss the learnings from ACT’s response to the pandemic and the impact that it delivered. The Summit also shed light on the role of technology in delivering healthcare and how solutions such as tele-ICU and at-home healthcare that were effective during COVID-19 can be long term solutions as well.

“There is a lot of latent capacity in healthcare. There are hospitals, doctors, care centres. What we need is to make these resources & infrastructure efficient to transform healthcare in India,” shared Nachiket Mor, Visiting Scientist, The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health who spoke at the summit

Download the ACT Impact Report to know more about the impact in numbers and stories of grantees empowered by ACT.

While ACT will continue to work on the COVID response, it will now look at broader healthcare challenges with the aim to raise an INR 50 crore healthcare fund. Partnering and enabling the government’s vision for building a future-ready healthcare system, ACT has curated the framework across primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare levels. ACT will take a systemic approach while deep-diving into four specific disease verticals enabling access, quality and affordability. These include communicable diseases, with focus on tuberculosis detection and monitoring; non communicable diseases directed towards cancer and mental health; and developing medical products and technology.

If you’re solving for healthcare in India, or know someone who is – or if you are a passionate individual who would like to give their time towards empowering innovative ideas to see them scale, join the ACT for Healthcare team.