HLTH launched in May 2018 at the Aria in Las Vegas with 80 speakers and roughly 3,000 attendees, built on an initial $5 million in venture funding from serial events entrepreneurs Jonathan Weiner and Anil Aggarwal, the same pair who founded Money20/20 in fintech, per Provisions Group's account of the show's history. By its 2025 edition the show drew more than 12,000 attendees, including First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and performers John Legend and Lenny Kravitz, per contemporaneous event coverage. The growth curve mirrors the same playbook Weiner and Aggarwal used to build Money20/20 into fintech's dominant stage a decade earlier.
Why did Weiner and Aggarwal build a healthcare version of Money20/20?
Jonathan Weiner told Drug Store News ahead of HLTH's 2018 launch that existing healthcare conferences had a gap around discussions of innovation, and that HLTH would invite senior leaders across payers, providers, employers, startups, pharma, government, and media into one venue to close that gap. The stated goal, cutting costs while improving quality of care, framed the conference as an industry-change vehicle rather than a straightforward trade show, a positioning choice that distinguished HLTH from established health IT gatherings like HIMSS from its first year.
HLTH's inaugural event sold out its roughly 3,500 confirmed attendee slots ahead of the show, a smaller number than the 45,000-plus that HIMSS drew the same year, per Chief Healthcare Executive's contemporaneous coverage of the launch. The gap between the two shows' scale was deliberate: Weiner positioned HLTH as a curated, innovation-focused gathering rather than a volume play against an already-dominant incumbent conference.
How did the same founders scale three different industry conferences?
Jonathan Weiner's event portfolio began with Money20/20 in fintech, expanded to Shoptalk in retail technology in 2015, and then HLTH in healthcare in 2018, according to TSNN's account of his acquisition history. Weiner sold Money20/20 to Ascential in 2014, sold Shoptalk to Hyve Group in December 2019, and then sold HLTH to Hyve Group again in October 2024, meaning Weiner has now built and sold conference properties to acquirers on three separate occasions across three different industries.
The repeated pattern, build a category-crossing conference from a founder's own venture capital, then exit to a public or private events group, is now a documented playbook rather than a one-time success. Weiner also sold two smaller properties, Prepaid Expo and Paybefore, to Informa in 2007 and 2011 respectively, meaning the HLTH sale to Hyve was at minimum his fifth conference-industry exit, per A Media Operator's account of his deal history.
What changed when Hyve Group acquired HLTH in 2024?
Hyve Group's October 2024 acquisition of HLTH Inc. brought over 80 employees and offices in New York, London, and Dublin into Hyve's portfolio, with founder Jonathan Weiner remaining as CEO to lead the next growth phase, per Event Industry News's coverage of the deal. The acquisition made HLTH Hyve's largest event by revenue, according to Skift Meetings' reporting, and followed Hyve's earlier 2024 acquisition of POSSIBLE, a marketing-focused conference.
HLTH's client roster at the time of acquisition included Johnson & Johnson, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, according to Hyve's own announcement, giving the healthcare conference a blue-chip sponsor base comparable to Money20/20's banking and payments sponsor list. Hyve itself has an acquisition history stretching back to 1991 under its original name, ITE, and was taken private and delisted from the London Stock Exchange in 2023 after 25 years as a public company, per A Media Operator's reporting, meaning HLTH now sits inside a privately held events conglomerate rather than a publicly traded one.
What does HLTH's speaker roster show about how the show positions itself?
HLTH's 2025 edition featured First Lady Dr. Jill Biden alongside musicians John Legend and Lenny Kravitz on the same speaker roster as Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams and Nvidia healthcare and life sciences VP Kimberly Powell, per contemporaneous event coverage. The mix of political, cultural, and executive speakers is a deliberate strategy distinct from a traditional trade show format: it widens the pool of press outlets covering the event beyond trade healthcare media to general-interest and entertainment press, the same strategy Advertising Week uses with its own mix of celebrity and brand-executive speakers.
Weiner's willingness to program entertainment names alongside health system CEOs traces back to the same instinct that shaped Money20/20's own speaker mix of bank executives and cultural figures, suggesting the celebrity-plus-executive format is a Weiner-specific programming signature that has now been applied across two separate industries.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
