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Kwamane Liddell did not build ThriveLink because he thought healthcare needed another app.
He built it because he had seen what happens when access breaks down in ordinary, avoidable ways. His uncle suffered a stroke while living in a food desert, an experience that shaped how Liddell came to understand the link between health, infrastructure and everyday access.
Liddell’s own path through healthcare gave him a different perspective on the problem. He started as a hospital janitor, later became a trauma nurse, trained as a lawyer and eventually moved into executive leadership.
Across those roles, he kept seeing the same pattern.
“People often don’t know what services are available, whether they qualify or how to navigate the systems designed to help them,” Liddell said.
People were not always missing care because services were unavailable. They were missing care because the path to getting help did not match how they lived.
His experience reflects a broader challenge. More than 100 million Americans face barriers to accessing primary care, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
That is the problem ThriveLink set out to solve.
Throughout his career, Liddell met countless people whose biggest health challenges had little to do with medical care itself. They were struggling to find food, keep the lights on, secure transportation or access benefits they didn’t know existed.
“It became clear that the problem wasn’t a lack of resources,” Liddell said. “It was a lack of access.”
The company uses telephonic AI to help people apply for healthcare and social services over the phone. It supports 75 languages and does not require broadband, a smartphone or much digital confidence. That makes it useful for groups that many digital health products still struggle to reach, including older adults, people with disabilities and people dealing with literacy or internet access barriers.
“Healthcare rarely breaks down at the point of diagnosis,” Liddell said. “It breaks down when people are left to figure out what comes next.”
ThriveLink is part of Reckitt Catalyst, a program developed with Acumen America that supports entrepreneurs working to expand health and wellness access in underserved communities. Along with funding, founders gain access to mentorship, expertise and networks that can help promising solutions reach more people.
“Far too many people still face barriers to accessing the health services, information and support they need,” said Jérôme Lemaire, president of North America at Reckitt. “What continues to stand out is that many of the most practical solutions are coming from entrepreneurs who understand those challenges firsthand.”
Amanda Ducach saw a different challenge.
As co-founder and CEO of Ema EQ, she focused on what happens when someone has a health question and no obvious place to ask it. For many women, that can mean sitting with symptoms that feel too specific for a search engine and too easy to dismiss in traditional care settings.
Ema EQ, an AI platform built for women’s health, was trained on more than 10 million real conversations.
Research from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute found that women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men, creating an estimated $1 trillion annual economic opportunity if those disparities are meaningfully addressed by 2040.
Women were searching everywhere for answers and rarely finding information that reflected their actual experiences.
“Women can find information everywhere,” Ducach said. “What was missing was something that could understand a person’s situation in context and respond the way a thoughtful clinician would, asking the right follow-up question, noticing what someone leaves unsaid and recognizing when something needs real attention. That is where better understanding, better questions and more informed decisions actually come from.”
General AI can return a confident answer, but the hard part in women’s health is everything built around that answer: the clinical grounding, the safety and the ability to understand context.
“Most tools were built for general questions and treat women’s health as a small corner of everything they know,” Ducach said. “Ema EQ is built for women’s health specifically, and her real value is in how she reasons, not simply what she knows.”
That distinction is shaping how users seek information. Instead of relying on broad search results, people are asking more specific questions about symptoms, conditions and care options. In some cases, that means identifying concerns earlier or arriving at conversations with providers better informed.
Healthcare still asks a lot from the user. Download this. Log in there. Fill out a form. Wait for a callback. Search for symptoms. Sort through conflicting information. Follow up again.
ThriveLink meets people on the phone, while Ema EQ starts with the questions women are already asking.
“For years, healthcare technology has been designed primarily around institutions, workflows and systems,” Ducach said. “We’re starting to see more solutions built around how people actually seek information, make decisions and access care. The most useful innovations are often the ones that make it easier for people to understand their options, get answers to their questions and take the next step with confidence.”
Kwamane Liddell did not build ThriveLink because he thought healthcare needed another app.
He built it because he had seen what happens when access breaks down in ordinary, avoidable ways. His uncle suffered a stroke while living in a food desert, an experience that shaped how Liddell came to understand the link between health, infrastructure and everyday access.
Liddell’s own path through healthcare gave him a different perspective on the problem. He started as a hospital janitor, later became a trauma nurse, trained as a lawyer and eventually moved into executive leadership.