Five Questions with Able Innovations CEO Jayiesh Singh

Able Innovations is a Canadian medtech company revolutionizing patient handling through robotics. By automating one of the most physically demanding tasks in healthcare—lifting and moving patients—Able Innovations is improving efficiency, reducing strain on caregivers, and enhancing dignity for patients.

CEO Jayiesh Singh recently sat down with CCI President Benjamin Bergen to discuss the challenges of scaling healthcare innovation in Canada, the impact of procurement policies on medtech adoption, and how the company is navigating shifting economic and trade conditions.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
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Benjamin Bergen: Jayiesh, thanks for joining us. Can you share the origin story of Able Innovations? What influenced the development of your technology, and what problem were you aiming to solve from the outset?

Jayiesh Singh: Absolutely. Able Innovations came from a mix of my background in robotics and my want to build technology that makes a real impact. I spent eight years at Morgan Solar, one of Canada’s most innovative solar energy companies, working across technology, operations, and business development. That experience showed me how important timing and policy are in bringing new technologies to market. At the same time, I was researching industries that hadn’t seen much disruption, looking for areas where innovation could create real value.

Healthcare stood out, not just as a major challenge but as something personal. My mom has worked in long-term care for as long as I can remember, and I spent a lot of time volunteering there. I saw how difficult patient handling was for staff and how much strain it put on them. Moving non-ambulatory patients often takes two to eight people, and it’s physically demanding. In 2018, I realized that robotics could automate this process—helping caregivers while improving dignity for patients. With an aging population, the need for efficiency is only growing. Then COVID-19 hit, and it exposed the cracks in our healthcare system even faster, making it clear that these kinds of solutions couldn’t wait.
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BB: Yeah, I was going to say—your research was really ahead of the curve, especially with how big healthcare spending is in Canada. It’s something we all care about, and like you said, the pandemic really made the staffing shortages even worse. You

touched on it a bit already, but what kind of impact did the pandemic have on long-term care facilities, hospitals, and the healthcare system as a whole?

JS: Yeah, I’ll focus on hospitals because while our long-term vision is to help people stay at home longer by making it easier to get in and out of bed, right now our technology is being used in hospitals to move completely immobile patients. The pandemic has had a huge impact across healthcare—we all see it in longer wait times and strain on quality of care. There’s a massive backlog that we’re still trying to clear, and that’s only added more pressure on the system.

But one of the biggest challenges is burnout. Frontline staff have been pushing themselves for years, and it’s catching up to them. That creates a cycle—burnout leads to staffing shortages, which drives up costs, which then worsens care and increases demand. It’s a problem we need to break out of, and I believe the answer lies in both technology and policy working together.
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BB: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been pushing hard on this at CCI—not just in healthcare, but across industries. One thing that’s really come to the forefront is the importance of domestic procurement. What’s been your experience getting your technology into Canadian healthcare facilities?

JS: I’d say we’re the exception, not the norm. The typical story for a Canadian medtech company is that they develop their product here, but their first real market is in the U.S. They establish themselves there, and only later do they start selling in Canada, almost as a secondary market. We’ve been fortunate to start and grow here, launching across the country from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy—far from it. But I think it speaks to the sheer need for technology like ours in Canada.

That said, there are still major barriers, especially when it comes to interprovincial procurement. We’ve had to go above and beyond the usual norms to get our technology into healthcare facilities, and that’s a challenge many medtech companies face. Canada has some of the best medtech firms in the world, but we don’t recognize our own strength. Because of how hard it is to sell into the Canadian healthcare system, companies have started discounting it as a viable market. That’s why I’ve been pushing for a dedicated innovation budget—not just for Canadian procurement, but specifically for Canadian innovation procurement. We also need a stronger commitment to a "buy in Canada" approach if we really want to scale our medtech sector.
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BB: Are there specific policy changes or improvements in procurement that would make it easier for companies like yours to scale and sell within Canada?

JS: Absolutely. One of the biggest changes that would help is a dedicated innovation procurement program. There used to be the Build in Canada Innovation Program (BCIP), which later became Innovation Solutions Canada (ISC), but it’s a much more diluted version of what it once was.

Healthcare sits in a tricky space. It’s a national priority, but because it's provincially administered, accessing federal funding for healthcare procurement is extremely difficult. There are national funding programs for hospital operations, but they don’t directly support procurement. That’s a huge gap. To make adoption easier, we need two things: dedicated federal funding for Canadian innovation and provincial funding that prioritizes buying Canadian-made solutions. Even if just 1% of provincial budgets were directed toward domestic innovation, the impact would be massive. We have world-class medtech companies here, and with the right policies, they could thrive.
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BB: Yeah, totally agree. Looking ahead, what’s next for Able Innovations? Where do you see the company going in the near future?

JS: It’s been a really gratifying year for us. I think it comes down to doing the right thing at the right time, having a fantastic team, and having strong support. Right now, we’re launching across Canada—with deployments in Nova Scotia, multiple facilities in Ontario, and BC—and we’re going to keep growing from there.

We’re also in discussions with the largest health system in the U.S., including the VA, which will be a big part of our expansion. But we believe we can build a successful company with Canada as our primary market—why not? That’s always been a personal belief of mine. Nova Scotia is a great example of how that can work. Instead of just addressing staffing shortages, the province also put money into innovative solutions, taking a bet on companies like ours. That kind of provincial leadership is important, and if this model works, it could scale across Nova Scotia and beyond. We have the talent and capacity here in Canada, so my goal is to see how quickly we can scale nationwide while managing our global growth.

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About the Council

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national business council of more than 150 scale-up technology companies headquartered in Canada. Our members are job-creators, philanthropists and leading commercialization experts in the 21st century digital economy.