Business
Healthcare, Education and Government: Entrepreneurs need to lead the recovery
Published by linker 5
Posted on July 8, 2020
5 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by linker 5
Posted on July 8, 2020
5 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
By Magnus Grimeland, CEO of early stage VC Antler
As Covid-19 spread across the world, countless industries changed – almost overnight. Transformations that we’d expect to wait five or ten years to see, compacted into a matter of weeks.
The conversations began immediately: if even just a fraction of us continue working remotely, what does that mean for the future of cities and the future of work? How do we change our healthcare industry to be better prepared? Will innovation within medicine save swathes of humanity faster than we’d hoped? Will the way governments work change? Will how we learn, and how we teach our children ever go back to how it was before? Should it? Will millions of people choose to fly less?
There are many sectors where the velocity of change is unlike anything we’ve seen before. There is an opportunity to innovate in areas where disruption has been historically slow, or even negligible, often because the existing solutions were ‘good enough’, rather than being brillaint.
Three areas, amongst many, that I am very excited about are health, education, and the government itself.
Health
Health-tech companies have rolled out new products quickly. UK telehealth startup AccuRx, which enables doctors to securely text patients, built a video call tool over a weekend in March. Around 1,300 NHS GP surgeries had signed up within 24 hours. Within Health, an Antler portfolio company that digitised the process of booking a screening, has seen online GP consultations rocket, from 5 percent to 95 percent of their activity.
In a post-COVID world, some things will stick. Tech-enabled solutions will continue to improve outcomes for patients and providers: clinical engagement platforms like Wellpepper, diagnostic tools like Cue and Halo Labs, the likes of Vamstar (a portfolio company of ours) which predicts and matches healthcare contracts, and workforce tools like Lantum.
We have the opportunity to address longstanding problems: that healthcare spending keeps increasing; that the majority of healthcare spending in the developed world is spent on treating diseases that could have been prevented with small lifestyle change; and how billions of people are still underserved.
Education
With millions of kids at home, the future of education comes to the fore.
State provision of education has ensured, across much of the developed world, that its format looks little different to the days of industrialisation. Bear in mind that the cost to educate a child has increased considerably – to $5,000-$10,000 a year in the US and UK.
Now, e-learning has hit, the edtech market is estimated to grow to $341bn by 2025. While homeschooling has been working in most cases, I have yet to meet a parent who is pleased about the tech solutions currently in place. The post-Covid world will see an improvement in these tools, and hopefully a move towards a more egalitarian shakeout in education.
Relying on education as a public service has capped innovation; now is the time for a groundswell of entrepreneurs to throw open cheap and radically new education models and methods. It has begun, from online course providers like Kahn Academy, Udemy and Brilliant to in-demand job trainers like Eskwelabs, an Antler portfolio company.
Government
The current pandemic has shown how impactful technology can be to improve governmental services – i.e. tools that enable the government, at any level, to communicate effectively with citizens, manage crises, institute programmes, engender transparency and create greater efficiencies.
Govtech startups raised just $1.8bn in the last five years, while the mobile gaming industry was worth $70bn before coronavirus. There’s a huge opportunity here, and some great companies are already working on improvements, like London-based govtech accelerator Public.io.
Nations around the world will come away from this in debt and reliant on certain centralized services. As builders and innovators, it is our duty to lighten the load and improve outcomes for civilians.
This is the area that arguably warrants the most innovation. We cannot rely on governments to improve our future: we must start building it ourselves. Uber-style (historically public) services are helping – like New York waste company RTS – and community apps like Nextdoor are leading transformations at a local level. Catalyzing innovation in fundamental areas of life, like healthcare and education, will ease the burden on public services.
Even areas where the state now has to operate can be enhanced by private enterprise and innovation – tracking and containing Covid-19, for example. As governments scramble to strike the balance between privacy and protection, private initiatives like Safe Paths, Covid Watch and Zoe are harnessing crowdsourcing to bake privacy-by-design into tracking apps.
The human suffering and impact of the world of this pandemic is a tragedy. Let us at least ensure that the momentum that has been created will continue, helping us to improve the sectors most vital to human progress.
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