UNICEF Venture Fund: Office of Innovation

Transcript

[Applause] hi everyone a very good afternoon and thank you so much for joining us here today my name is Sana Bethy I work with UNICEF Venture funds and also manage our crypto operations at the Venture fund I'm not sure how many of you knew UNICEF had adventure fun in the first place but I also mentioned we have a crypto fund so let's get right to it we work in a reality and while we're here in in a very beautiful town in in Switzerland we do work in a reality where 50 of the world is not connected to the internet and we work for children who don't have access to that internet we also have a situation where many of the digital solutions that we're talking about are not necessarily built taking

into account their unique realities or their unique needs and so that that's what brings us to why we do what we do at the UNICEF Venture fund we have a 35 million dollar pool funding vehicle which also holds some crypto we have about 2527 each and eight Bitcoin uh in our prototype crypto fund this fund's goal is really to test identify invest in and scale Frontier Technology Solutions we challenge Frontier Tech to create just open Innovation by just we're looking at is Justice open Innovation that's really our return on investment so it's UNICEF

we do not accept Equity but we invest in the open source Solutions open source IP if the solutions that are building with us so The Venture fund we sit very far away from what is regular core UNICEF programming and that you can understand is you know a Health Nutrition emergency humanitarian support teams we also have dry tested Solutions is what UNICEF usually skills and usually works with so we sit on that far extreme upper right quadrant where we only invest in Frontier Technologies such as blockchain zones AI data science virtual and augmented reality now the reason for that is we'll do a landscape analysis every three to five years to identify

what is Frontier how do we Define frontier and how can we ensure that local problem solvers are building solutions for their own needs so create local solutions for local problems and ensuring they have the right funding the right technical assistance and capacity to do so so we invest in these early stage prototypes and provide them with technical assistance in funding so that they're able to become larger platforms we invest in them as cohorts so they can lean on each other's open source IP and really skill so at the seed stage we provide about a hundred thousand dollars we then have for companies that are able to generate promising results if they are showcasing promising results we then

provide them with an additional uh 200 to 400 000 this can be to improve their product features or it's really that missing middle to say you might need to build more IP you might need to build more um have more testing results to be able to actually be ready for a series a or series B investment so we have the funding and then we have technical uh assistance this technical assistance isn't like a regular acceleration program we conduct a very extensive needs assessment to identify what are the two or three areas we can help a company in one year and we then connect them with the right mentorship to be able to do so here's just a also a mix of some of our partners and donors at the moment

to date we've invested in 130 companies or 130 Investments across 75 countries um when I say this I'd also like to mention we've been around about 10 years the crypto fund came much later in 2019 The Venture fund was launched in 2014. we also have 43 of our portfolio is female-led Founders so all the pink dots on this map are actually female and companies that we're investing in so from an from a UNICEF sdg angle you can of course see that a majority or at least some high majority of our Solutions are focused on education followed by Health we then have work we invest in remote learning job

matching and then there's industry Innovation infrastructure I'll come to that in just a moment so on our investment thesis we usually take this as two approaches the first being something that's directly related to UNICEF programs so here's an example of big stream it's a company based in Mexico they have actually built a solution called Zoe which is a cognitive learning solution to improve children's cognitive skills it's powered by AI now this company got investment from us many years ago they were then contracted by a UNICEF country office operations saying okay this the solution Works let's give it more funding to build another game they're now scaling the solution they've signed a partnership with the government of Guatemala to scale their solution to a million children across across the

country this is a programmatic investment the second lens we take is that of the core infrastructure that I was mentioning so co-infastructure is any solution that can be used for multiple purposes we may be investing in it for one purpose but we might scale it for multiple purposes across UNICEF so here's an example a blockchain relevance example so statwick from India has developed a supply chain platform to track vaccine delivery so we invest in them specifically for vaccines but the government of India is actually using the same solution to track rice bags from Farmers to Russian centers for distribution overall The Venture fund looks at its results in two ways

on the social side we have companies have been able to reach 31.7 million beneficiaries we also have had startups that we've invested in one country has gone on to scale to more than their original country of founding so about 20 startups have gone on to scale to 36 additional countries um from from UNICEF support could be through our partners or could be directly through unicef's country office operation on the financial side 88 of our companies are still active we do like to fail because we ill only promise US that we're doing well if we're failing enough as well we need to take those risks and challenge Tech and not invest in things that are already

tried and tested so we think 88 sometimes can be High um 80 of the portfolio is generating Revenue we've had seven exits um and 27.7 million dollars is raised in follow-on funding today it hears a quick snapshot of the exits it's a good mix of blockchain solutions giraffe is on job matching vadive is a learning a VR solution for learning addicts Labs was a impact investing tool to tokenize impact investing and like results um so it's a pretty broad mix I'm happy to sort of dive into that later so overall what really makes us unique is the fact that we are working with local local Founders local problem

solvers our companies are creating successful open source business models that are generating results financial and social I mentioned the 43 female at Founders we have a Target to reach 50 uh getting there slowly we are the first and only mechanism in the UN to accept hold or disperse cryptocurrency and finally everything we invest in is exclusively open source with that some of some of the themes that we're looking to invest in at the moment we launched a call on climate Tech which was in Jan we will soon actually end of this month be launching a new call for applications on Mental Health Nutrition and psychosocial well-being again this is a cross-cutting

Indus cross-cutting sort of thematic call it could be a blockchain solution or an AI solution working in this space and later in the year towards the end of the year we're actually going to be investing in data security privacy and trust with that I'm going to hand over to my colleague Shane to take you into the other side of our work as well it's like a tag team or a duet or something thank you okay thanks very much guys so I actually work um on the the Frontier Tech team in the Venture fund so with Santa but on a on a kind of a separate side of the house um just to talk a little bit about the crypto funds you know as we are here at the crypto Valley and Santa mentioned the figures that we've raised already

for for Unicef it was like there were several reasons why we wanted to do we wanted to take advantage of the efficiencies that the technology had but we also wanted to learn for ourselves so there's no point in US exploring new technologies to deploy uh supporting UNICEF programming around the world if we don't understand them better ourselves at a headquarters level and understanding our digital future and then like have a better better understanding of how we can apply these Technologies in particular the crypto currencies in in the crypto fund uh to improve our programming and I'll talk a little bit more about that as well and also to get access to untapped resources so up to that point no UN agency was able to

accept cryptocurrency so that was the first the results from the crypto fund to date 3.6 million dollars equivalent was dispersed through the crypto fund we finished up actually I think the equivalent that we received was about 2.1 million dollars and at the end we've dispersed about 3.6 that's 2419 each and 4.8 Bitcoin and 41 projects were supported with the cryptocurrency speaking a little bit about some of the blockchain cohort companies that have graduated from our funds so these are from all around the world

um we have BX smart Labs I think came from Mexico so they developed a decentralized app for saving circles so kind of a community-based way for for people to sort of generate their own Financial infrastructure their own financial literacy treasure is an open source protocol to support rural Planters around the world and they have been very successful I think coming out of Iran originally wonderful company from Argentina and they developed a Wallace but also an Associated kind of financial literacy curriculum I guess that was included

with the wallet which has again proved to be very successful cotani pay and offram from crypto which did not really require internet connectivity which was very important I think they're an African company and leaf was mentioned as one of the companies from the cohort that was acquired so some pretty successful Financial inclusion uh blockchain companies rumsan rumsan has developed a blockchain based cash and voucher assistance program I'll talk a little bit about them here so they have just pretty much just finished a pilot with um UNICEF Nepal where UNICEF Nepal had a thesis that

cash voucher assistance programming is very important particularly in the humanitarian scenario where a shock has happened in this case flooding happens regularly in Nepal and they have to react to that with the cash assistance program traditionally this has taken a very long time to stand up and UNICEF Nepal went with the thesis that by using technology by using blockchain technology they could close the gap in terms of standing something up to be able to transfer the funds to the people and that's been that's been quite successful quadratic funding was mentioned earlier on so um part of what we do within the ventures team and within the Frontier

Tech team is we prototype we get to play around a little bit um the uh project we did earlier this year uh was was around dpgs um and we had some of our blockchain companies and also some of our AI portfolio companies and enter into a quadratic funding around with Bitcoin it was really successful um very very oversubscribed uh we denote it we donated 50 each from our crypto fund and you can see from the numbers there are over 15 000 individual donors and 67.5 each coming back so that was really very successful something we're going to look at again both in terms of the modality for our

cohort companies for for digital public goods but also for Innovative financing for for what we're trying to do as well um some of our kind of internal prototyping that we're looking to do as well again exploring Innovative financing models cryptocurrency based rewards for contributions bounties um also one of the biggest programmatic areas that we see uh can benefit from some of our blockchain work and particularly some of the crypto work is a cash transfer programming so you notice from the crypto fund 3.2 million dollars was transferred

you none of you here will be surprised to hear that took a number of minutes to go end to end and the fees associated with that 250 dollars perhaps when you think about cash transfer programming I think in 2021 UNICEF did 381 million dollars worth of cash transfer programming I have no idea what the fees were that were associated with that but I can tell you they were probably pretty high so there's certainly some value in exploring injecting crypto into that space and and I know that it has been done elsewhere but it's something that can be very interesting for us to be able to scale up building on the back of the crypto fund that we have as well a good day yesterday

this this conference I have a little bit of an ask for you if anyone wants to give back a call to action if you'll forgive me we're looking for technical Partnerships to help us build our Pilots we do kind of characterize ourselves the ventures team as being and the office of innovation is being outward looking and forward looking so we look out to private sector we look out to developers to people doing new and Innovative things and we like to see what's coming next so very interesting to work with other people of course we have investment opportunities you saw some of our startup firms some of our investees have been acquired that's also interesting and you can also donate to

the Venture fund you know maybe you guys have got some Bitcoin or each line around that you want to put to put to more work and we'd be happy to try and help you with that as well I think that's it thank you very much fantastic we do have uh two minutes uh Shane and Sana if any of you have any questions for the for the duo not equity

it's a good question so interestingly UNICEF is an equity-based organization so look at equity and everything that we do access so unicef's mandate is to improve the outcome of children around the world and it's done through an equity lens and Equity approach so they should have access equal access to Good Health Care good education Protection Services um that sort of thing how do we transpose equity and Technology to children around the world it's my belief that is kind of that explains our open source thesis so we invest our return on the investment in that technology company is that open sourcing of the project which kind of takes away some of

the barriers that might exist in other people accessing some of that software I don't know if you want to add anything is that that's answer fantastic