Meet Hope Khoury
A strategist, operator, and advocate who believes that innovation is most powerful when it begins with empathy. As the Chief Operating Officer of Go Vertical ICM and the founder of The Hope Project, Hope sits at a rare intersection: where science meets lived experience, and where the business of innovation becomes a tool for human dignity. Her work is redefining how women’s health innovations move from ideas to impact, not through speed or hype, but through structure, integrity, and care.
Early Journey
Hope’s career began at the cross-section of business strategy and social impact, where she worked with founders and organizations trying to grow in complex, often uncertain markets. What fascinated her most was not just the strategy itself, but the people, how entrepreneurs persisted through ambiguity, and how small teams found ways to build despite limited resources.
“I started my career at the intersection of business, strategy, and impact,” she recalls. “Over time I moved deeper into entrepreneurship and innovation, supporting early-stage companies with go-to-market strategy, fundraising readiness, and business model design.”
Those years shaped her view of what it truly means to build something sustainable , not only a company that could survive, but one that could serve.
When Hope and her partner Michael, co-founded Go Vertical ICM, it was born from a belief that ideas deserve a clear path to market. She and her team began guiding founders through the long and often intimidating journey from concept to commercialization, translating vision into structure, and potential into products. Yet even then, Hope sensed a deeper purpose calling her forward, one that would soon make her professional mission profoundly personal.
The Turning Point
That turning point arrived in the form of a diagnosis. Hope was told she had uterine fibroids, a condition affecting millions of women yet still under-discussed and under-funded in medical research. The experience revealed not only how isolating women’s health journeys can be, but how unprepared systems are to meet them with understanding and urgency.
“My own experience with uterine fibroids was a turning point,” she says quietly. “It exposed how late many women are taken seriously, how fragmented their journeys are, and how little emphasis is placed on prevention.”
What could have been an ending became a beginning. During her recovery, Hope realized that she could not continue to build innovation pipelines without addressing the very gaps she had lived through herself. “Lying in a hospital bed, I realised that if I walked away from that experience without building something from it, I would carry regret,” she reflects. “That moment led directly to Hope as a broader platform and to The Hope Project specifically, a commitment to turn a personal health story into a prevention-driven initiative that could benefit others.”
The process of building while healing was anything but linear. Navigating chronic health, surgery, and the responsibilities of leadership required a new kind of resilience, one grounded in honesty and balance. Hope began to redefine her own approach to work: slower when needed, clearer in purpose, and more forgiving of imperfection. The experience reshaped not just how she built, but why.
Their Work Today
Today, Hope’s mission bridges entrepreneurship, strategy, and advocacy. At Go Vertical ICM, she leads a team that helps founders transform concepts into investable, scalable ventures. Through programs like the Creation Accelerator Program (CAP) and the FemTech Accelerator, she’s helping innovators navigate the long road from prototype to production, making commercialization structured, transparent, and attainable.
But her deeper purpose lives within The Hope Project, a prevention-centered initiative aimed at transforming how we understand and address uterine health. The project represents not just a medical effort, but a cultural one, challenging how society talks about women’s bodies, and how long women are expected to wait for solutions.
“What drives me today,” Hope explains, “is the conviction that women’s health and women’s innovation should no longer be treated as side topics. I lead with a mix of strategy and lived experience, I’ve been the patient, the founder, and the operator.”
Through Hope and Go Vertical ICM, she is also cultivating an ecosystem, connecting founders, clinicians, researchers, and investors to co-create scalable, science-informed solutions for women’s health. From wearable technologies to uterine health supplements, her work is not only building new products; it’s building pathways for women to be heard, funded, and believed.
Every initiative she leads carries a quiet, deliberate message: progress doesn’t have to come at the expense of humanity. For Hope, innovation is not just about efficiency, it’s about empathy translated into systems that last.
Closing Reflection
For Hope Khoury, success is not about recognition or scale; it is about alignment, when values and impact meet in the same space.
“Success is when strategy and empathy meet,” she says. “When what we build is fundable, but also deeply human.”
Her story is a reminder that purpose often begins where pain once lived and that sometimes the most transformative ideas come from those who have lived the problem themselves. Through her leadership, Hope is proving that when women’s health is treated not as a niche, but as a necessity, innovation becomes not just possible, but profoundly human.
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