PARTNERS

Social Finance is a not for profit organisation that partners with governments, service providers, the voluntary sector and the financial community to find better ways of tackling social problems in the UK and globally.

Our unique method combines data science, financial insight, service design and social issues analysis. We focus our expertise on understanding the needs of service users to create new responses that deliver lasting and widespread change.

Since we started in 2007, Social Finance has helped to pioneer a series of programmes to improve outcomes for individuals with complex needs. Our innovations, including the Social Impact Bond model, have mobilised more than £500 million globally. We have sister organisations in the US, Israel, the Netherlands and India and a network of partners across the world.

In the UK, our work includes support for 2,000 short sentence offenders released from Peterborough Prison, 700 children on the edge of care in Essex and London, 4,500 young people at risk of dropping out of school, 3,000 isolated older people, 2,500 people with severe mental health issues, and 1,400 homeless youth and rough sleepers. Internationally, Social Finance is working with the Global Fund, World Bank, Grand Challenges Canada, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, DfID and others to address challenges in low and middle income countries using Development Impact Bonds and outcomes contracts.

Website: https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/

Village Capital is the largest organization in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage startups. Since 2009 our team has directly worked with more than 1,100 entrepreneurs in 28 countries.

Our affiliated fund, VilCapInvestments, has invested in 110 startups that have gone on to raise more than $4 billion in follow-on capital. Our matching platform, Abaca, has a network of more than 5,000 entrepreneurs and investors. Since 2016 we haveworked with more than 100 other entrepreneur support organizations to unlock high-potential diverse pipeline, globally.

Entrepreneurship is a critical tool for solving the world’s biggest problems. But right now, a handful of people in a handful of cities are deciding which entrepreneurs get a chance to succeed. That means that a lot of impactful solutions are not getting the support and resources they need to scale.

Village Capital is the largest organization in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage startups. Since 2009 our team has directly worked with more than 1,100 entrepreneurs in 28 countries,and our affiliated fund, VilCap Investments, has invested in 110 startups that have gone on to raise more than $500 million in follow-on capital. Our matching platform Abaca hosts more than 5,000 investors and entrepreneurs.

We’re interested in systems-level change that makes impact investing more inclusive and empowers a wider range of entrepreneurs. Since 2009 we’ve pioneered a unique model, peer-selected investment, that democratizes the investment process and has been proven to mitigate bias for female founders. Since then we’ve been designing, testing and sharing new tools, technology and processes to drive capital to a broader set of entrepreneurs, including Abaca, VilCap Communities and alternative capital strategies.

We have team members around the world building out this vision, with offices in Washington DC, Mexico City, London, Nairobi and Bangalore. We focus on innovation that reduces global inequality and improves people’s ability to live healthy and productive lives, with a specific focus on three thematic areas: Financial Health, Sustainability and the Future of Work.

Website: https://vilcap.com/

Knowledge 4 All Foundation (K4A) is the only UK machine learning focused not-for-profit and an advocate of AI applications for reaching the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), especially SDG4 “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

K4A originated from the PASCAL Network, which was an EU funded Network of Excellence comprising some 1000 machine learning, statistical and optimization researchers that ran for approximately 10 years. It has been leading and building the international machine learning community, through its activities that culminated in today’s AI hype, including supporting the NIPS conference and its workshops for 10 years.It has a portfolio of 227 events, 116 projects, 46 challenges.

Among its activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, K4A is actively setting up with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) the Artificial Intelligence 4 Development initiative (AI4D) (link) by building a Network of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence in Sub-Saharan Africa to strengthen and develop community, scientific and technological excellence in a range of AI-related issue areas. It equally worked on connected projects supported by Deep Learning Indaba, The Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, the German development agency (GIZ) and the UN agency UNESCO.

K4A has reached at least 150+ African researchers in AI and various institutions, among others; The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Mohammed V University of Rabat, Data Duality Labs, Data ScienceNigeria, University of Malawi, University of Dodoma, Karabak University, Open Burkina, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Makerere University, etc.

Website: https://k4all.org/