UNICEF Innovation Fund

The UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking to make $50-90K equity-free investments to provide early stage (seed) finance to for-profit  technology start-ups that have the potential to benefit humanity.

If you’ve got a start-up registered in one of UNICEF’s programme countries and have a working, open source prototype (or you are willing to make it open-source) showing promising results, the UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking for you.

Who we’re looking for?

We invest in frontier technologies that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion person needs. Examples of these include, but are not limited to:

Blockchain: Using distributed ledger technologies to reduce the cost and to increase the speed, transparency, identity and accountability of financial transactions.

Drones: Developing software modules that can improve drone operations, data processing and sharing or supply chain management systems for testing drones in areas with low connectivity.

Virtual and Augmented Reality: Providing new, immersive ways that can enhance our learning experience, expand our understanding of complex systems and improve how we interact with one another

Data Science: Compiling and analyzing large data collections where they are scarce, allowing the visualization of large amounts of data in intuitive ways, or creating new machine learning models and frameworks for using data more effectively.

Artificial Intelligence: Using AI tools (such as optimization or pattern recognition) or the newest Deep Learning or Transfer Learning techniques to address social or environmental problems.

And + Our funding is not necessarily limited to the above. We are interested in companies that apply tech in new, groundbreaking, ways that are scalable and globally applicable. If you are aligned with our general criteria, we want to hear from you.