The average lifetime of a corporate venture capital unit is 3.7 years. If you survive three CEO changes, you have a shot at longevity. This panel brings together CVC leaders from Swiss Post, Jung Heinrich, and Worley to debate why corporate venture capital is more strategic than pure VC — and why Europe urgently needs multi-corporate funds that pool risk across sectors.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why 42% of corporate VCs already prefer to co-invest with other CVCs, and why multi-corporate topic-based funds could transform European deep tech investment→ How Swiss Post’s CVC maintains independence from corporate strategy to invest in technologies that may not generate returns for three to four years→ Why Worley builds startup partnerships across three continents by embedding portfolio companies with regional engineering teams in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas→ The CFO death valley: why most CVCs get shut down at year three for financial underperformance or year six for lack of strategic value→ Why universities are the best deal-flow source for energy and deep-tech CVCs — because that is where R&D actually begins─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Tobias — Moderator, CVC & Open Innovation Summit🎙 Jeppe — CVC Leader (Shipping & Jung Heinrich)🎙 Ivo — Head of CVC, Swiss Post🎙 Marta — Head of Partnerships & Corporations, Worley─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: corporate venture capital, CVC, startup investing, open innovation, deep tech, energy transition, corporate strategy, venture building, Swiss Post, Worley, private equity, startup partnerships, data centers, industrial innovation, European venture, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTGood morning, that's very loud. How is everybody doing? Good. Very good. So there is 80 people who signed up to this, but I said, you know, 9.15 on a Thursday morning. We'll see how much show up. But excited for this discussion. I think we had a brief interaction before. I think there has not been so many corporate venture capital conversations in Davos over the last couple of years. So it's also a bit of an experiment, but great to see some familiar faces. So we can make this maybe a bit more of a discussion. Good morning. Hello. You found us. So what we want to do today, we want to talk about strategic capital and how corporates and corporate venture capital can provide strategic capital when it comes to building more resilience and having a pretty esteemed panel, a lot of experience coming together. I'll briefly introduce the panel. Next to me is Jeppe, who has been working in corporate venture capital for many decades and the name is on the list there. He's going to start a new corporate venture capital fund with a German company, Jung Heinrich, but has a lot of experience from the shipping side. And we'll talk about that. Then Ivo, who is currently running the corporate venture capital group at Swiss Post, but coming in with a lot of experience from the U.S., working in ventures, working in Silicon Valley and bringing that experience to the European ecosystem. And then last but not least, Marta, who is in charge of partnerships and corporations at a big consulting and advisory organization based in the Middle East. So looking forward to the conversation with the three of you. Unfortunately, Katharina is delayed due to some traffic problems. So I'll see if she manages to join, then we'll put her in. Otherwise, we'll take more questions from the audience. Maybe a few quick thoughts about the corporate venture capital and open innovation summit, which is the group who is co-hosting this with Andervos. And all of us have been at the summit in Berlin. It is an invite-only summit where the heads of corporate venture capital are meeting to talk about their challenges, best practic

90% of AI models and algorithms inside organizations are unknown to the organization itself. When infrastructure goes down in an agentic world, you don’t just lose connectivity — you lose context, while autonomous agents may already be mid-conversation with other systems. This panel brings together cybersecurity veterans, AI governance experts, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to debate digital infrastructure risk in 2026.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why AI should be treated like an adolescent: powerful but not yet mature enough for unsupervised access — parenting, not relying→ The hidden SaaS surveillance problem: how embedded AI models inside enterprise software are reading audio files and selling functional data without corporate knowledge→ Why the European Commission’s €200 billion tech subsidy program flows to B2B companies when European values have always centered on the middle class→ The case for data sovereignty: why Will.i.am told a Stanford/MIT audience to stop giving tech companies their data, and why even the biggest extractors don’t know you well enough for precision action→ How hybrid and private cloud architectures are resurging as companies realize that diversification — not consolidation — is the path to resilience─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Mike Butcher — Technology Journalist & Founder, PathFounders (Moderator)🎙 Sebastian — Founder, AI and Partners🎙 Tammy Shuring — CEO & Co-Founder, Polymathic🎙 Additional panelists on AI infrastructure and cybersecurity─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: digital infrastructure, AI governance, cybersecurity, cloud computing, data sovereignty, agentic AI, operational stability, data privacy, enterprise security, cloud concentration, hybrid cloud, SaaS, AI safety, tech regulation, European tech, data centers, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTIt's all in the pronunciation, he's founder of AI, founder of AI and Partners. Sebastian is lost in Davos somewhere. And finally, we have Tammy Shuring, who's CEO and co-founder of Polymathic, right. So, right, yeah, okay, let's just get my notes up here, sorry everyone, it's supposed to be here. Digital infrastructure is now part of the operational background of industrial systems. We're going to be looking at cloud concentration risk, cyber security, you name it. Now, one of the issues, let's kick this off, when digital infrastructure fails today, what breaks first? Is it IT systems, production lines, safety, or is it all manner of things these days? Could be anything, couldn't it? What are the most common scenarios? I think for a big part, it's already broken. We don't know really what is in addition to infrastructure, so what we do is we identify AI systems basically within cloud, on-prem, and SaaS, and we do that per department. And what we really see is 90% of all the models and LAMs and algorithms that we identify are unknown by the organization. And if you don't know what it is, what works then? Right. I can be very short, I don't think there is a predefined order. Could you switch your microphone on? Switch it on. Now better? Yeah. Okay. So, I think it can happen simultaneously, right? Also, maybe the question is more not what breaks first, but what has the greatest impact, and that again depends on the industry. I mean, it's definitely potentially detrimental if that breaks. Yeah, my opinion is the biggest thing to really watch out for is you're going to lose all context, and in a world that's becoming progressively agentic, we're going to be live in the moment taking action on behalf of systems, groups, companies, people, and if infrastructure, when infrastructure goes down, we have no ability to have context, yet these agents could already be in conversations with other agents, other systems, and s

The average age of board members at the top 500 companies is 64. Only 30% feel confident bringing ESG and sustainability into strategy. And an AI proposal that boosts margins by 20% while eliminating 40% of jobs just landed on the boardroom table. This panel of active board directors debates what it actually takes to govern in 2026.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why boards should spend 50% of their time on long-term strategy while executives focus 50% on short-term — the inverse allocation that separates governance from management→ How one board member stopped reading 300-page pre-meeting documents and started using AI to surface what actually matters, freeing time for deep-dive sessions→ Why courage — specifically the willingness to lose your board position — is the single most important quality boards need in 2026→ The BCG 10-20-70 framework: 10% technology adoption, 20% infrastructure readiness, 70% organizational change management→ Why boards that bring in competitors, customers, activists, and next-generation committees outperform those that stay insular─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Liz — Moderator🎙 Sanda Tritin — Board Member (Finance & ESG), Switzerland & Europe🎙 Dr. Rodrigo Crema — Board Member & Advisor (Healthcare, Genetics)🎙 Isabel Gromet — Founder, WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD)🎙 Milan Kumar — CIO, Automotive; Board Member, Manufacturing🎙 Christopher Williams — Governance Expert (Private & Nonprofit)🎙 Frederica Hoffman — VC & Board Director (Tech & Life Science)─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: board governance, corporate governance, boardroom, AI strategy, ESG, sustainability, board diversity, leadership, fiduciary duty, corporate boards, board effectiveness, change management, digital transformation, CEO oversight, risk management, courage, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTDiolch yn fawr iawn am fod yma ar gyfer'r nesaf o'r pânel. Unwaith eto, rydyn ni'n cyfathrebu ar y thema o bwrddau. Roeddwn i eisiau ddweud bod hyn yn mynd i fod yn ddiddorol iawn, ac rydyn ni'n gobeithio cael rhai ohonoch chi i roi'r cyfeiriadau i'r cwestiynau rydyn ni'n cael heddiw hefyd. Felly, dywedwch yn ddiolch, yw'r un peth rydw i'n gallu ei ddweud, a rhannwch ymwneud â'r ymgyrch rydyn ni'n mynd i'w gael. Mae'r technoleg yn cyfrannu newidiadau newydd, fel rydw i'n siŵr eich bod chi'n gwybod. A heddiw, rydyn ni'n mynd i edrych ar yr effaith ar bwrddau. Y cwestiynau cyntaf i'n pânelwyr yw, yn 10 mlynedd, a fydd y bwrddau'n ymgyrchu'r ystafell mwyaf yn y cymdeithas neu'r mwyaf hir? Helo, fy enw i yw Sanda Tritin. Rydw i'n aelod o bwrddau mwyaf yma yng Nghymru, a hefyd yng Nghymru. Yn aml, mewn amgylchedd ar gyfer cyllid a chyfrannu cymdeithasol. I fynd i'ch cwestiwn, Liz, mae'r cwestiwn hon yn dda iawn. A dylid y bwrddau fod yn y mwyaf hyfryd? Dydw i ddim yn credu hynny. Mae'n rhaid iddyn nhw fod yn y mwyaf hyfryd mewn cymryd penderfyniadau, ond efallai nad ydyn nhw bob amser mewn cynnydd. A ydyn nhw'n bod yn y mwyaf hyfryd? Wel, dyna ni. Byddwn yn cael cwestiwn nesaf, rwy'n meddwl hefyd, ar sut i gadarnhau'r cynydd, ac mae'r technoleg yn siŵr yn cynyddu'r cynydd, ac rwy'n meddwl y bydd y bwrddau bob amser yn y pen draw o wneud penderfyniadau, oherwydd dyma beth mae'r sefydliad yn ei gadarnhau. Felly, fy enw i yw Dracolwg Crema. Nid ydw i yno ar hyn o bryd, ond mae'n bwysig. Rwy'n cadarnhau gwaith gwahanol, mae gen i gwahanol bwrdd hefyd, ond rydyn i'n ymgyrchu ffysiwn, bwrdd ymatologwyr, rwy'n ymgyrchu ymatebau genetic a thysiau cynghori. Mae gen i nifer o wybodau, ac rwy'n ymgyrchu, a'r cynghorydd. Felly, pa bwrddau yw, rydyn i'n meddwl, os ydym yn adnodd, rwy'n ymddangos nad ydym yn y gwaith ffod, ond yn arddangos'r bobl ffod i wneud y penderfyniadau gwaith gwahanol. Nid yw hyn yn eithaf eisiau, oherwydd rwy

82% of the next generation entering the workforce said they would prefer an AI boss — because it would be fairer, less political, and let them work from home. Meanwhile, LLMs are trained on only 15% of the world’s information because only 15% is digitized. This panel brings together board members, startup founders, and a neuroscientist to wrestle with what leadership actually means when geopolitics is now the number-one driver of AI adoption.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why 56% of companies are accelerating AI adoption specifically because of tariff uncertainty and geopolitical volatility→ The three traits every successful AI project shares: trusted data, business-first framing, and serious change management→ A mood-jacket case study where nine months were spent training machine learning models but only one week on employee communication — and it failed→ Why context — not intelligence — determines whether leaders extend grace or hunt down the person who cut them off in traffic→ The case for vulnerability from the top: why leaders who admit what they don’t know create environments where the best people do their best work─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Dr. Catherine Carlton — Former Mayor of Menlo Park; Trust Researcher (Moderator)🎙 Sandy Carter — Chief Business Officer; Chair, Applied AI Group, Digital Economist🎙 Dr. Friedrich — Physician, Scientist, Harvard Faculty🎙 Laura Ann Edwards — Founder, Geospace Resources🎙 Marlene — Dispute Resolution Lawyer & International Mediator🎙 Kevan Pimani — Chairman, Animoca Brands (NASDAQ)🎙 Philipp van Caneghem — Entrepreneur, Investor & Former Salesforce Innovation Lead─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: leadership, board governance, geopolitics, AI adoption, trust, change management, corporate leadership, board members, technology strategy, CEO, remote work, Gen Z, organizational culture, decision making, resilience, Silicon Valley, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTHello everyone, thank you so much for coming and apologies for confusion on the time and congratulations you made it. This is a wonderful thing about Davos, it's fluid and flexible, I always tell my children the secret to life is to be flexible and keep your sense of humor and so here we are. My name is Catherine Carlton, I'm the former mayor of the city of Menlo Park in Silicon Valley and then I retired from politics, it's always good to retire voluntarily when people say no stay and I'm doing my doctorate now, I've just finished my doctorate on trust and how to facilitate trust when people work remotely and that applies to leadership working remotely and a lot of boards are remote, international boards and many times haven't even met in person which really does impact our research has shown that just meeting for an hour over coffee even will fast track that relationship so that your brain says when you call remotely oh, I remember her, she was great and the amygdala comes down, prefrontal cortex charges in and you have not only better communication but that the oxytocin and the neurotransmitters that help you on the trust level flow that much better and the triple bottom line of trust because we're talking a lot about trust this week, higher levels of trust working in higher quartiles of trust not only produce better decisions that make benefits financial and otherwise for the corporations, when you're working in a higher trust environment it physically benefits you as well, you have better outcomes for inflammation, for diabetes, for cancer, for heart disease and then flows out into if you're working in higher quartiles of trust you're happier with your marriage, your children, you function better and therefore it benefits individuals, it benefits the corporation and then it benefits the community a

Professional services firms are billing clients for hours while privately using AI to slash those same hours — and nobody is talking about it. This panel pulls back the curtain on how consulting and legal firms are actually adopting AI, why junior consultants are bypassing corporate systems to use ChatGPT on their phones, and what that means for confidentiality, talent development, and the future of the billable hour.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why the legal industry’s billable-hour model “rewards the slow and the stupid” and how value-based pricing is replacing it for commoditized legal products→ How consulting firms are shifting from 100-page PowerPoint deliverables to real-time digital database integrations with private equity clients→ Why confidentiality is the unspoken crisis: smaller firms are routing client data through public LLMs, and junior staff are bypassing corporate AI systems entirely→ The future consulting org chart: from pyramid to diamond shape, with fewer juniors, more seasoned industry experts, and AI handling repetitive analysis→ Why the hiring pipeline is broken — university grades no longer signal competence when theses can be AI-generated, pushing firms toward internship-based evaluation─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Robin — Moderator🎙 Roland Scherer — Partner, Kearney🎙 Michael Engel — Partner, White & Case🎙 Beata Rosenthal — Partner, Roland Berger🎙 Marina March — Founder, IKAI─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: AI professional services, consulting, legal tech, billable hours, management consulting, law firm AI, Kearney, White & Case, Roland Berger, confidentiality, AI governance, enterprise AI, talent management, future of work, value-based billing, digital transformation, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTWe're joining us. This panel is about rewiring and reimagining the enterprise. According to the new rules of AI, as we're getting our AI ready societies together and our AI ready workforce, one of the big sectors is the professional sectors, which is being totally transformed, not only internally, but also for what their clients are demanding of them. On our panel, we have Roland Scherer from Kearney. If you haven't visited their glass house down on the promenade, then you're missing out. We also have Michael Engel from White & Case. We've heard a lot about the legal industry transformation and some of the big case studies around the hiccups with AI have come from the legal industry. And then we have Beata Rosenthal. Did I brutalize that? Okay. All right. Thank you. From Roland Berger. So don't get confused between Roland from Kearney and Roland Berger. And then, of course, we have Marina March from Akai, IKAI. So shall we begin? I know that one of the big, you know, should we start with the legal industry, Michael? Because I know you're ready to talk about what you're seeing internally and externally. Yeah. So adding, I'm being surrounded by consultants, just starting with giving the legal flavor. So what we're seeing as a key trend is AI. When you look at the legal process, it's a lot of drafting and a lot of document creation. So the journey at the moment starts here and you do the first draft of an SBA or an application for an IP trademark registration and so on. And then you get the drafts and then you add, you know, the senior lawyer value. So one of the trends we're seeing is where the journey no longer starts here, but actually with a more refined starting point, so to say. So instead of having a general SBA as a template, you would have now AI tools saying, I want to have a SBA for a software company or SBA of a natural resources company where you have to think about soil combination, et cetera. And the second big trend we're seeing is that clients more and more,

99% of all AI today is black-boxed — you don’t know how results are generated. Meanwhile, a startup called Cognifiber is turning optical fibers into processors that could accelerate AI inference by 1,000x while cutting power consumption by 8,000x. This panel brings together an AI prediction company, a photonic computing startup, a data interoperability firm, and Microsoft to debate how AI is rewiring financial services from risk assessment to fraud detection.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ How AxonJ uses hybrid reinforcement learning and real-time signals — like website changes or stopped TikTok campaigns — to predict company risk 40% more accurately than balance-sheet models alone→ Why Cognifiber’s fiber-optic processors could shrink city-sized data centers to a single building while democratizing AI access→ How MMC Convert helps banks find “invisible creditworthy” people through utility bill patterns and psychometric AI models→ Microsoft’s perspective on multi-agent orchestration, low-code platforms, and why the dollar-per-token cost is actually falling→ The centralized vs. decentralized debate: why on-premises AI uses up to 80% less electricity and drives democratization─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Robin — Moderator🎙 Jean-Philippe (JP) — Founder & CEO, AxonJ🎙 Eyal — Founder, Cognifiber🎙 Shanu — Founder, MMC Convert🎙 Ujjwal Kumar — Principal Architect, Office of the CTO, Microsoft─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: AI financial services, fintech, agentic AI, photonic computing, data interoperability, risk prediction, fraud detection, Microsoft, decentralized AI, energy consumption, machine learning, reinforcement learning, banking, insurance, data centers, AI governance, enterprise AI, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTReWire is about reimagining, reinventing the enterprise using the zeitgeist technology of the moment, AI. We have enterprises at various stage of adoption. Each one of our panelists is helping to facilitate this disruption, but then also is adopting AI in their own enterprise. As we go down, I'd love for you to meet everyone and have them introduce themselves to you. This is Jean-Philippe. If you see him out and about, you can call him JP. We're not quite in the right order, but he's the founder and CEO of AxonJ. Do you want to tell us about where you are in your AI journey and how you're helping to contribute to the transformation of the world? Thank you. So, yes, I'm Jean-Philippe. And four years ago, I started a journey. I started an AI company, so before the AI wave, even, but my background is in data. I had a company before that I sold, a big data company that I sold to, to Bradstreet. And this is actually my third project that I'm launching. And meanwhile, we have offices around the world and we have customers like SAP, et cetera, and HP. And what we're doing is we're predicting company behavior in the real time based on reinforcement learning and different types of learning. We call it hybrid learning. And the thing is that I believe in transparency in AI. So I believe that we predict using signals in real time, that behavior, and showing what signals has what weight in the algorithm. So you can act upon that, whatever you're doing. So we're predicting risk, we're predicting cash flows, and we're predicting how companies are behaving. And here we have Eyal, he is not from NVIDIA, but he's actually an NVIDIA disruptor. He did not slip something in Dr. Unger's drink last night, but he's here to tell us about his company, Cognifiber. Hi all, thank you for coming and thank you for having me. So in Cognifiber, we do a very simple thing. We take optical fibers and we turn them into processors. Now take a second, there are a lot of fibers, high speed data. Now if each of the fibers be

More than 50% of global GDP depends on nature, yet it is still treated as an externality. A new generation of AI-powered earth observation tools can now answer the question “how many tin roofs are in California?” in seconds — and it costs almost nothing to query the same data again. This panel explores how satellite imagery, ground-truth sensors, and Islamic endowment finance are converging to make nature a viable asset class.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ How large earth observation models convert satellite images into queryable “embeddings” that slash the cost of monitoring forests, fire risk, and land use→ Why Safi manages 4.1 million hectares in the Amazon using eDNA, bioacoustics, and camera traps alongside satellite data→ How illegal gold mining — not logging — is the single biggest threat to Amazon deforestation, and why AI can predict criminality spikes from commodity price movements→ Why perpetual Islamic endowment finance (waqf) solves the “permanence problem” that undermines short-term biodiversity interventions→ The case for nature as the “parent company” where 50% of GDP is a wholly-owned subsidiary─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Moderator — GP, Cerulean Ventures🎙 Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño — Co-Founder & CEO, Clay (earth observation AI)🎙 Maxime Haroun — Co-Founder, Safi─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: natural capital, earth observation, satellite imagery, AI, biodiversity, Amazon rainforest, deforestation, conservation finance, waqf, Islamic finance, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, nature-based solutions, sustainable investing, family office, climate tech, remote sensing, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTAll right, so we're going to get started. Today we're going to talk about applications of AI to natural capital. And if you happen to be a family office, I'm sure if you have a business in paper, if you have a business in agroforestry, tropical, tropical soft commodities, energy, you have a nature impact. And you've almost certainly only thought about it as a philanthropic requirement. So today, if you sit down and listen to the panel, we will be going through the opportunity to invest and make money in nature. And I'd like to introduce my two panelists. So Bruno, please tell us a little bit about you and legend. Thank you. Quickly about me, I'm a scientist by training, astrophysics. So I've worked with data basically all my life, and specifically with maps. And I work with maps, with Mapbox, a company that makes online maps. Then I work in the World Bank on applications of data for development, in development outcomes, for development environments. And then at Microsoft, building the planetary computer. So I did a lot of mapping. And now I'm working on applying the ChargePT technology, the T transformer, not for text, but for satellite images. So understanding it. Awesome. And Maxime, could you give us a quick introduction on yourself and Safi? Yes, of course. So myself, I've been in the financial sector for about 17 years. Worked actually with family office, single family office and multifamily offices, and also investment banks. So I came from the finance world, and one of the biggest questions that we were wondering is how, why the best, I would say, land stay world of the world are not getting access to institutional capital. And we see a lot of the initiative to protect the nature as pure philanthropy, or having a billionaire buying a land and then saying we don't do anything with it, when it is an interesting productive asset on the long term. So that's in a nutshell what Safi is doing, and probably will find synergy with Bruno as a matter of fact. All right. So I'll set a little bit of the stage here. Over the last 20 years, one of the key investment theses coming out of Si

Sun King went from scraping by for a decade to powering 50 million people with off-grid solar across 11 countries — backed by the largest local-currency securitization in Sub-Saharan African history. Rwanda scaled from 20 donor-funded clinics to over 350 self-sustaining, nurse-operated healthcare posts in under five years. This panel asks: how do you build the ecosystem that makes that kind of scale possible?─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ How Sun King built a financing ecosystem from social venture capital through to commercial securitization over 15 years to deliver 340,000 solar kits per month→ Why Doctors Without Borders took its Nobel Prize money to create a new drug development model that brought 20 molecules to market for six neglected diseases→ How the World Food Program’s blockchain identity platform saved $270 million in duplicate aid across 55 agencies in Ukraine→ Why the TransCap Initiative argues that capital orchestration — not just blended finance — is needed to transform entire agricultural systems→ The tension between investing in ecosystem building versus direct investment, and why philanthropy needs to be bolder─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Terence La — Head of Investments, Pensions for Purpose (Moderator)🎙 Patrick Walsh — Co-Founder & CEO, Sun King🎙 Stephen Cornish — General Director, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Geneva🎙 Bernhard Kowatsch — Director, Global Accelerator & Ventures, UN World Food Programme🎙 Dominic Hofstetter — Space Building Lead, TransCap Initiative🎙 Monica Sanders — Board Member, Society for Family Health Rwanda─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: impact investing, ecosystem building, blended finance, off-grid solar, Sun King, MSF, World Food Programme, blockchain, capital orchestration, systemic investing, philanthropy, development finance, Africa, healthcare, energy access, social enterprise, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTSo, welcome to this session on building ecosystems for scaling impact initiatives. And what we're going to cover today is looking at why building ecosystem is as critical as initiatives, programs, ventures, innovations themselves. I'll start with an update. So, in my last 10 years of philanthropy and impact-investing experience, like many times I used to joke with my colleague that whenever the term ecosystem comes in, we're going to, in any conversation, we're going to have a shot. And it was more often than not, because suddenly in the last 10 years especially, it has become quite critical in the conversations, be it development finance, or even in the private sector approaches. So, we have quite a diverse set of panel here and we would love to get quite a bit of wide-ranging views on how do we go about building ecosystems. So, I'll start with a round of introductions for our panels and we'll then go into some of the key themes we're going to cover today. So, why don't I start with my right, Stephen, you want to go next? Hello. So, thrilled to be here. I'm Steve. I'm an innovator, environmentalist, and primarily a humanitarian. And I run the Geneva operational arm of Doctors Without Borders. So, hi everybody, Bernard. I'm with the World Food Program and I lead what's called the Global Accelerator and Ventures Team, based in Munich in Germany. But like, essentially, we work with communities across the globe. I'm Dominic. I lead an organization called the TransCap Initiative. We're a field builder for what we call systemic investing, which is an approach to capital deployment designed for transforming systems. My name is Monica Sanders. I am here representing Society for Family Health in Rwanda. I'm a board member there. In my day job, I work as a business strategist at the intersection of health equity, sustainability, and market developm

The traditional funding models for global health are gone. USAID shutdowns, WHO funding exits, tariff pressures, and development agency withdrawals have reshaped the landscape in a single year. Yet the next pandemic is coming — we just do not know when. From malaria bed nets in Nigeria to surgical AI in 4,000 operating rooms, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, but how to do it sustainably.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ Why health investment generates compounding returns through productivity gains, reduced sick leave, and longer healthier working lives→ How public-private partnerships are shifting from pilot programs to sustainable co-financed platforms that serve both governments and pharmaceutical companies→ Why technology is the key to making healthcare less labor-intensive and more cost-effective — the sector's fundamental structural challenge→ How data sovereignty laws and geopolitical fragmentation are forcing health tech companies to build configurable, locally compliant platforms→ Why prevention, early detection, and primary care intervention must replace the current model of late-stage hospital-centric treatment─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Moderators and panelists from the Health at Davos program, representing Dalberg Advisors, WHO, Deloitte, and leading health innovators─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: global health, health financing, pandemic preparedness, public-private partnerships, health innovation, WHO, USAID, health tech, digital health, prevention, primary care, health equity, health systems resilience, data sovereignty, health investment ROI, universal health coverage, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTThanks everybody. I am pleased to welcome our first panel to the stage. Ambassador Ramsammy, Maryaj, Priya, please come take our seats. We will share mics between us and dive in, as Lily said, really starting with some of these big geopolitical influences that have affected our sector. We were here just a year ago, and as Lily said, we really didn't know what the extent of the disruptions might be as we sat here. We knew about the WHO, but we didn't know much more than that. Of course, it only took a couple of days before we found out there was going to be disruption beyond what any scenario plan had suggested. We had all done scenario planning, I think, and no one could ever have predicted. Now that we are operating in a much tighter environment, the shift isn't only funding. It is other things, too. Obviously, the U.S. left the field and is now back with a new strategy and new country agreements. It's not just the U.S. We've seen European donors who have had to shift their funding from humanitarian support to security. I guess this week will tell us if that shift is going to happen even more than we had expected. I'd love to start with hearing from each of you how these disruptions have affected your work over the last year. Let me just also say the bios of all of our speakers are just phenomenal. You can read them all by clicking on that QR code. I will not go through your bios because I know we want very much to hear your perspectives. Priya, do you want to start with what the last year's disruptions have meant? Yeah, absolutely. Can you hear me okay? It's interesting because we all sort of anchor to last January. I actually think, especially from a global health perspective, the shift started during COVID, the pandemic, and afterwards, especially as we think about self-reliance and regionalization. I was living in Africa at the time, and quite frankly, we felt disappointed with how the ecosystem had worked or hadn't. I think what's happened in the last year has just, you could say, put fuel on the fire or just accelerated that journey. I think there's a lot mor

The Ebola vaccine is a remarkable product — a single dose that immunizes rapidly and safely. But it is expensive, requires extreme cold chain storage, and is manufactured on a process that does not scale easily. CEPI is investing up to $30 million to change that, partnering with Hilleman Laboratories, Merck, and SK Bioscience in a pioneering new model for public-private partnership.─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ How a new CEPI-Hilleman-Merck-SK Bioscience partnership is redesigning Ebola vaccine manufacturing to make it cheaper, more thermostable, and scalable→ Why Hilleman Laboratories operates as a for-profit entity with a nonprofit mission — a joint venture between MSD and the Wellcome Trust→ How this model was already proven with cholera vaccine development and transfer to large-scale manufacturing→ Why the same vaccine platform can be extended to develop vaccines for Marburg, Sudan virus, and Lassa fever→ How shared risk models across financial, technical, and policy dimensions create sustainable pathways for epidemic vaccines that lack commercial incentives─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Laura Herman — Partner, Dalberg Advisors (Moderator)🎙 Richard Hatchett — CEO, CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations)🎙 Romano — Hilleman Laboratories─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: pharmaceutical sovereignty, Africa, Ebola vaccine, CEPI, Hilleman Laboratories, Merck, SK Bioscience, pandemic preparedness, vaccine manufacturing, public-private partnership, Wellcome Trust, cholera, Marburg, Lassa fever, global health security, epidemic response, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTAs per before, please do click on the QR code to see the full bios of our panelists, but we're so thrilled to have you both here. And I'd love to start off with a recognition of the importance of collaboration that has already been reiterated, but when we think about what that might look like in a world where we face all kinds of dangerous pathogens that may not be immediately commercial opportunities for big pharma, we have to think about collaboration in a new way, in a new way that can bring those technologies to the people who need them in a sustainable way in advance of the pandemics and outbreaks that we've seen in the past. Today I'm excited to hear more about a new model for doing that. Richard, would you like to start us off? Can we start off with a description of this announcement and the new partnership that is unfolding? Sure. No, very, very excited. Thank you all for coming. My name is Richard Hatchett. I'm the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. We're an organization that supports the development of vaccines against epidemic and pandemic diseases. We were actually established here in Davos in 2017 as a result of the West African Ebola epidemic. So Ebola has always been a critically important disease for us. It is one of the iconic emerging infectious diseases. And I actually was prompted by, we were having a conversation a little bit earlier, was prompted to look back to see when was the last year that we did not have an outbreak of Ebola or one of the related filovirus diseases, Marburg or Sudan. Anybody want to guess? It was 2010. These outbreaks occur every year somewhere. And the diseases are extremely lethal. And the vaccine that we have, which Merck developed during the outbreak in 2014 to 2016, is a wonderful vaccine. It immunizes after a single dose. It is very safe. It has been used in hundreds of thousands of people, but it has some significant limitations. The process that is used to manufacture the vaccine is a very old process. It was developed rapidly in a crisis, obviously. So they used a tried and true process, but it doesn't scale very easily. The vaccine is expensive and