Financing impact beyond the venture capital model.

At the 2025 AVPN Global Conference in Hong Kong, GIF’s Managing Director for ESG and Gender, Katie Carrasco, joined a closed-door panel to explore how collaboration can drive progress at the intersection of climate and health. The session also marked the launch of a new Community of Practice to connect investors, policymakers, innovators and other ecosystem players committed to scaling solutions in this space.

The session featured three fireside chats, centred around three core goals for the group:

• Unlocking commercial capital through investment readiness
• Enabling government scale via policy engagement
• Mobilising philanthropic funding to address critical ecosystem gaps

Katie spoke alongside Diana Guzman, Chief of Sustainability at Prudential plc and Chair of the Prudence Foundation in a fireside chat on how different players along the capital spectrum can complement each other to scale the innovation of climate health initiatives. Here are some key takeaways from the session:

The good news: the innovation pipeline is strong

There is no shortage of impactful, technologically and scientifically sound innovations in the climate and health space. AVPN’s recent Lighthouse Fund report highlights a growing pipeline of innovators across diverse thematic areas. Opportunity lies not only in finding innovations, but helping them scale.

Innovators need to prove out business fundamentals

Innovators often need support in translating strong technical products into commercially viable businesses. GIF supports businesses in addressing the following key areas so that the pathway to scale is clearer:

• Product market fit: Innovations need to provide solutions to real-world challenges.
• Pricing: Understanding the market and competitors and pricing your innovation to be financially sound and sustainable.
• Unit economics: Understanding the revenues and costs at the per-unit level.
• Customer acquisition: Particularly in low income settings where customers and users are two different groups.
• Regulatory and procurement readiness: This is often underestimated, particularly in the length of time it takes to secure approvals and get on government or donor procurement lists.

Access to the right capital matters

Many innovators are stuck in a cycle of chasing small grants that constrain their runway and do not provide space to graduate from a prototype to a pilot. This is particularly pertinent in the MedTech space where engagement with regulators and governments often extends past their runway.

GIF support can make a huge difference to entrepreneurs facing the challenging gap between developing their promising ideas and widespread adoption. We deploy creative, patient capital to de-risk solutions, while mobilising blended capital - public, private, and philanthropic - to deliver sustainable, transformative change at scale. We do this to meet entrepreneurs where they are in their development, with the right capital at the right time.

Targeted support is needed to support growth

In addition to accessing the right capital, targeted support beyond funding is critical to supporting innovators scale. This is central to GIF’s model. Our investment, analytics and ESG teams provide tailored support to innovators to support them address barriers to scale.

GIF’s Thrive Fund addresses this need directly. It invests in high-potential, early- and growth- stage climate-health technologies in emerging markets, providing both capital and catalytic technical support to accelerate adoption and scale.

Under GIF’s Thrive Fund, we are working with PATH, a leader in global health innovation, to combine deep technical expertise with a proven track record in financing impact-first solutions in climate-health. By blending patient capital with knowledge support, Thrive helps innovators develop commercially viable business models built around early-stage technologies, navigate regulatory and procurement processes and build health system capacity. This ultimately improves climate-health resilience and demonstrates the outsized impact of emerging market technologies.

The role of partnerships

Strategic matchmaking and cross-sector collaboration are key to scaling climate-health solutions. By intentionally connecting innovators with the right mix of investors, policymakers and technical partners, funders can help bridge gaps in expertise, funding and market access.

These partnerships are particularly important given the underfunding of health adaptation within climate finance. As Diana Guzman pointed out, less than 2% of global climate finance is currently allocated to health adaptation. This offers an opportunity to align public and private resources and bring together diverse perspectives to enable systemic, scalable solutions that no single actor could deliver alone. Thoughtful facilitation of these networks can accelerate adoption of scalable technologies, strengthen health systems and ensure innovations achieve meaningful, lasting impact.

Final thoughts

The session concluded with a powerful call to action, highlighting the urgent need for greater collaboration at the intersection of climate and health. As the impacts of a changing climate continue to challenge health systems worldwide, it’s clear that innovation, innovative financing, and partnership will be key to driving creative solutions. At GIF, we are committed to supporting innovators with flexible, patient capital wherever they are in their journey to scale.

Read more about our work on climate and health here.