Wadhwani Foundation and the Gates Foundation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) , to make India’s innovation ecosystem stronger via the National Innovation Network (NIN) , which is kind of a national scale extension of the Wadhwani Innovation Network (WIN).

This partnership, is largely aimed at letting translational research and entrepreneurial imagination move forward in domains with big societal relevance, such as health , nutrition, biotechnology, genomics, medtech and other emerging fields that match up with India’s development priorities.

As part of the deal, the Gates Foundation will back five NIN Centres of Excellence (CoEs) across five years, starting with two Centres this year.

The supported NIN CoEs are expected to help teams take their work beyond lab-stage efforts (TRL-4+), and sort of push it into actual field deployment. This means they’ll back up proof of concept development, prototyping, validation, pilot deployments , and also provide IP plus commercialization support, venture creation, along with industry collaborations. 

Launched by Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 29, 2025, the Wadhwani Innovation Network (WIN) was set up by the Wadhwani Foundation, to connect academia with industry, and funding partners too, so that research-to-market pathways move faster across India. NIN now scales this entire approach at a national level.  

Since the launch, WIN has backed more than 50 high-potential projects spanning healthtech, medtech, biotechnology, and quantum technologies. It also created Centres of Excellence across top institutions like IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT(ISM) Dhanbad, Indian Institute of Science, and C-CAMP. Two upcoming Super Hubs include the Wadhwani School of AI & Intelligent Systems at IIT Kanpur, and the Wadhwani Health & Bio Hub at IIT Bombay.

NIN expands this approach into a broader collaborative platform that enables government agencies, philanthropies, CSR initiatives, corporates, and institutional partners to support translational research and innovation through a shared operational and governance framework developed by the Wadhwani Foundation.

Speaking about the collaboration, Dr. Ajay Kela, CEO & Board Member, Wadhwani Foundation, said, “WIN has demonstrated that India’s innovation potential can be unlocked when researchers, institutions, industry, and capital come together with a shared mission. Through NIN, we now have the opportunity to democratize innovation across India and help position the country as a global leader in innovation — enabling more institutions, researchers, and entrepreneurs to translate breakthrough ideas into products, startups, and societal impact. We are delighted to collaborate with the Gates Foundation, a pioneer and leader in healthcare innovation, in advancing innovation-led solutions in areas critical to India’s future.”

Archna Vyas, Director, India Country Office, Gates Foundation, said, “Some of the most consequential health and nutrition innovations of the next decade will originate in Indian institutions. Our collaboration with Wadhwani Foundation will help support the opportunity and possibility for these innovations by investing in translational pathways that can enable India's research talent to move ideas from discovery to deployment. We see this as core to the Gates Foundation's work in India: supporting Indian researchers and entrepreneurs to turn promising science into affordable, scalable solutions, that translate into impact outcomes, for India and the Global South.”