About | UNICEF Venture Fund

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Our approach

Investing in Emerging Tech

We invest in solutions around $100 billion industries in frontier technology spaces, such as: blockchain, drones, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, extended reality and virtual reality.

Our rationale for investing in emerging tech

The core motivation of the Innovation Fund is to identify "clusters" or portfolios of initiatives around frontier technology spaces - so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children.

If you are interested in learning more about our rationale for investing in emerging tech, click below for more details.

Investment rationale

Open Source

The Innovation Fund invests exclusively in open source solutions. The Fund generates value by building open source IP and scalable digital public goods, strengthening communities of problem solvers, and growing solutions that bring results for children and the world. The Fund also invests in early-stage "knowledge products" - operations research that is published in the public domain and supports investment strategies and decisions.

What value does open source bring to the Venture Fund community?

By investing in multiple concurrent teams working on similar problems and technology stacks the Fund can accelerate both the development of products, as well as the building, iteration, and exit of the teams around the technologies.

Open Source is good for business

Community Building

A huge benefit of open source is the vibrant communities that can grow around the open source software. This can bring value for both the producers and the end users because developers can get help in creating the software from the community and get feedback from their users about what works and what doesn’t.

User Growth

The use cost of open source is typically lower than with proprietary equivalents, creating user growth and goodwill.

Talent Acquisition

It is often easier for open source clients to attract top talent within the industry because the community-oriented nature of open source means you likely know who the best candidates are already.

Cost Effectiveness and Optimization

Using and developing open source software can save vast amounts of time and energy because you do not have to reinvent the wheel.

Learn more about Open Source Business Models with the Venture Fund’s free course

This course is designed for companies receiving investment from UNICEF’s Venture Fund, and, in the spirit of open source, it is made available to any startups that are exploring the possibility of going open source. Through this course a startups can:

Describe how open source can help startups overcome some of the challenges startups typically face
Choose between different open source licenses based on the needs of your startup
Identify potential market strategies for your open source business
Design your own open source business model canvas

Free open source course

Smart investing

The Fund launched the Smart Investing initiative to invest in a diverse portfolio of startups from 2019 onwards. Through Smart Investing, we commit to improving diversity, so that half of the new portfolio of startups companies we bring in every year have a female lead.

Learn more about Smart Investing from our community

Building Digital Public Goods (DPGs)

Our ambition is to build successful digital solutions into digital public goods (DPGs), to ensure fair, equitable, and open access to these unique and new tools for human development on a global scale.

Ensuring Impact

The Fund monitors the progress of each investment in real-time. We measure progress on two different levels. First, aggregated metrics for all portfolio companies tracking sustainability of the business and the technology developed. Second, the social impact which is specific to the context and the type of solution that the startup is building.

Equity-Free Investing

The Innovation Fund provides value that can be measured and counted in real-time. We recognise it’s much less important to see direct (and individual) cash flow – and much more important to see communities of problem solvers creating global digital public goods that can be repurposed, adapted, and scaled across a wide range of partners’ needs.

Crypto FUnding

The Venture Fund provides both fiat and crypto investments to emerging technology solutions that meet the needs of children.

Why does the Fund make investments in cryptocurrency?

Beginning in 2019 with the establishment of the CryptoFund, cryptocurrency transactions have allow the Venture Fund to make fast, transparent, borderless investments in portfolio solutions, in addition to fiat transactions.

The Venture Fund team engages various internal stakeholders to determine which startups can benefit the most using cryptocurrency.

Investments made in cryptocurrencies

41

certified dpgs

4.83

bitcoin invested

2419.09

eth invested

Our Partners

We grateful for the generous support provided by current and past Venture Fund investors and supporters. Apart from the strategic partners and supporters listed below, we would also like to thank Mr. Kirill Tatarinov.