Tej Kohli Foundation

Tej Kohli founded the Tej Kohli Foundation in 2005 and under Tej Kohli’s guidance it has become a global hub for interdisciplinary innovation as part of the Tej Kohli mission to eliminate needless corneal blindness worldwide by 2035. The Tej Kohli Foundation is built around ‘Rebuilding You’ - a precept that directly draws from Tej Kohli’s own life experiences. The longest uninterrupted project of the Tej Kohli Foundation is the ‘Funda Kohli’ project, which has fed hundreds of children every day in Costa Rica since 2005. In 2010 the Tej Kohli Foundation funded its first donor cornea implants at Niramaya Hospital in India. After funding thousands of corneal transplants for the world’s poorest people, in 2015 Tej Kohli substantially expanded efforts to combat corneal blindness in poor and underserved communities with the ambitious launch the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute in Hyderabad. Between January 2016 and November 2019 the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute welcomed more than 223,404 outpatients and completed more than 43,255 surgical procedures, largely for free. Tej Kohli has also driven the Tej Kohli Foundation’s pursuit of a ‘universal treatment’ for corneal blindness through it’s ‘Applied Research’ program, a longstanding scientific collaboration between researchers in Montreal Canada, and Moorfields Eye Hospital. In 2020 the ‘Applied Research’ program announced that it had moved one step closer in its mission to invest an affordable, accessible and scalable universal cure for corneal blindness through the regeneration of corneal tissue. In 2019 Tej Kohli also funded the Tej Kohli Cornea Program at Massachusetts Eye And Ear in Boston with an initial donation of $2m. A strong believer in the power of technology to improve human life, in late 2019 Tej Kohli launched the ‘Future Bionics’ program to fund the purchase and fitting of 3D-printed bionic ‘Hero Arms’ for young people with limb difference in the UK.