2021 Bridge Funding cohort from UNICEF Innovation Fund

[jwflory]

Summary

Tracker issue to follow DPG nomination process for five (5) incoming teams to UNICEF Innovation Fund

Background

In July/August 2021, the UNICEF Innovation Fund is on-boarding five new companies as part of incoming Bridge Funding cohort. These teams have workplans with the Fund for the next 12 months. The teams are receiving follow-on funding from UNICEF to further scale products created by teams in previous seed rounds with the Fund. The intent is for them to become Digital Public Good nominees as soon as possible.

Details

• Atix Labs (Argentina): A global social platform that connects SMEs with funders in different locations facilitating the investment process, and giving more visibility to use of funds by SMEs and its impact on-ground.
• Pixframe (Mexico): A game-based-learning platform to assess and develop children's cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, planning and organization skills, audiovisual perception, inhibition and flexibility.
• Somleng (Cambodia): A low cost Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and SMS platform, integrated into the RapidPro platform to extend its reach to communities with low literacy levels.
• Dymaxion Labs (Argentina): A platform, which surveys large areas using AI-powered geospatial analytics.
• Ilhasoft(Weni) (Brazil): Open platform for training and sharing Natural Language Processing datasets in multiple languages.

Outcome

Five teams on track to becoming DPG nominees within first two months of re-engaging with the Innovation Fund

[jwflory]

As an update, the contracts recently finalized or are close to finalizing. These teams should be on-boarded to the Venture Fund within the next 1-2 months.

[jwflory]

Today we ran a workshop on DPGs and software development for the incoming cohort together with @iperdomo. All the teams mentioned above were introduced to DPGs, the DPG Alliance, and how the nomination process works. I also shared the link with the teams to their GitHub issues so they can track these conversations going forward, if they wish.