 My name is Sarah Sterling. I'm the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship at SoCAP Global and I'm so incredibly excited to present the first half of our 40 person cohort who will be presenting to you all their stories of impact today. We'll go over who they're going to be in a second. The SoCAP Entrepreneur Program has been around since the inception of SoCAP, so since 2008. But last year we did a concentrated effort to listen to our founder alumni community and really hear about the pressing challenges that they're dealing with today and how to create a better holistic hybrid program of support for them. So with their feedback and with them helping to co-design our program, we relaunched the SoCAP Entrepreneur Program this year with a cohort of 40 entrepreneurs, all of whom are actively looking for funding. They come from all over the globe. They're slightly different stages, all different sectors, and all with innovative and scalable solutions to the most pressing challenges of our time. The entrepreneurs go through a very rigorous application process. Only 10% are accepted into our program. We got over 400 applications this year. They then have access to six months of virtual programming led by facilitators from our SoCAP community. On the topics of holistic founder wellness, team leadership and growth, development, impact measurement, investment readiness, and founder self-advocacy. And then we wrap up right before SoCAP, helping them with storytelling, marketing, communications, and networking. We also have developed specific partnerships to add additional value to our entrepreneurs that go through this cohort and also to our partner cohorts that are joining us also at SoCAP today. This includes impact measurements from proof.io, as well as tonic, investor matchmaking, and then at SoCAP, they get to present to all of you network. We also provide blind introductions via email. So if you haven't gotten an introductory email from me, you might still yet. We've sent a lot. We've made over 52 individual connections between funders and our founders already for this year. The purpose of the entrepreneur program is really to help facilitate connections and the flow of funding in the impact ecosystem. Before we present the entrepreneurs that you'll be hearing today, I just would like to take a quick moment to thank all of our partners who helped make this program possible. Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, CAR TA Women's Initiative, Kellogg, and the Canadian Consulate and Dream.org. I'm so excited for you to hear about these stories and I want to thank all of you for your support and interest in the entrepreneurs that you'll be hearing speaking today. We also have our partner cohorts who will be presenting all day Tuesday and then the second half of our entrepreneur cohort will be presenting on Wednesday at 9 a.m. in this theater. I also want to pause and take a special moment to thank a very new partnership that we've created, which I mentioned previously with Tonic in helping us create curated direct matches between investors who are joining us here at SoCAP and our entrepreneurs as well as entrepreneurs coming from the CAR TA Women's Initiative. I'm going to hand it over to Adam to explain more about Tonic. Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you, Sarah. So I'm Adam Bendell. I have the privilege to serve Tonic as CEO and if you don't know about Tonic, we are a global network of wealthy individuals, family offices, and charitable foundations who are active impact investors. Really, really truly global from around the world. And it's folks who represent a specific demographic in the impact investing ecosystem, which is they're moving their own money. So they're investing their own money across all 17 SDGs, searching for positive impact, social, environmental, mixes of those, and often across every asset class, but with a special love in our heart for these early-stage entrepreneurs. The amazing ones that you're amazing entrepreneurs that you're about to meet. So I'll just tell you a little bit about Tonic, and then I'll tell you why I get to stand up here with Sarah and tell you about Tonic. So we do a few things for our members, right? It's a exclusive community that has events and connections with one another. We do online educational material for our members. We have a platform that we built called Tracer, which is an impact portfolio management platform where our members put their portfolios in and then can basically do impact measurement and management from that platform, collecting metrics from the enterprises and funds in which they are invested. And we do a fourth thing, which is investment matching, which I will come back to. So the, you could see it's sort of a full suite of services for the kind of private impact investor. And I know that the emphasis on private can be a little off-putting at times, and so I want to, I want to hasten to say that we are also very committed to building the field. And that is why we're here. So we had a conversation with Sarah a year ago now, something like that, about this idea of using the deal-matching platform that we've built over 15 years at Tonic to power connections between the investors at SoCAP and the amazing entrepreneurs. So we, what we normally use this platform for within our community is for co-investment opportunities. So if a member has invested in an enterprise or fund that they think other members might be interested in, then we put it through a little vetting process. And if we think they'll be uptake in the community, then we use this matching process to say, okay, we know this kind of investor is looking for this kind of investment. Let's introduce them to one another and see if there's interest. And so we brought basically that same, we've adapted that same technology to SoCAP. So while in the normal Tonic case, these are just co-investment opportunities among members, what we've done here is different. So SoCAP has brought, you know, with Sarah's leadership here, actually two really amazing cohorts. They're the SoCAP 23 entrepreneur cohort and then the Cartier Women's Initiative as well. So both of those cohorts of amazing entrepreneurs were eligible for our investment matching. And then we invited those of you who attended and indicated that you're an investor and were interested in potentially seeing some matchmaking. We invited you to tell us about your interests a little bit, and then we sent out kind of private connections and then leave it to you and the companies to work it out, right, to see, to basically assess the fit. So if you are an investor and you did not get a chance to participate in that, it's not too late. Well, it's slightly too late for this year. The matching part is over. But we do have a list of all of these amazing companies and little kind of deal memos that you can access. So if you are interested in that, track me down or my colleague, Difty Pratt, or maybe I have other colleagues in the room, Sharnay or John. So anyway, but John Burger, anyway, we're easy to find and we would be happy to plug you into that before we think about how we will do this, what we will have learned, and we'll do next year. So we also invited the investors who signed up for this to a luncheon with us tomorrow. And there are a few slots left. So if you are an investor, you're a private investor and you're interested in learning more about what we do more broadly at Tonic, meeting other Tonic members, because this is mainly a member event, then you are welcome to sign up for that at a bit.ly that is easy to remember because I don't have slides, bit.ly slash lunch with Tonic. That's pretty easy, lunch with Tonic. So I just want to close by talking a little bit about our other field building work, not membership in that, because it's really important to us, right? So in addition to the membership work that we do, we're really keen to lead by example with our field building, and we are moving our own money first and foremost, but we're also, I think, uncommonly open about the details of what we're doing and how we're doing that. We've got this long-term longitudinal study called T100, which is a study of the most committed of our members' practices and behaviors over the course of years as they deploy, in some cases, 100% impact portfolios. We've got a platform called impactterms.org, which is a curated library of innovative terms and structures in impact investing around the world. These are all free resources that you can find on the web. We do work in the catalytic capital space, so if you're not, you don't fit as a member of Tonic. I encourage you to partake of our public goods at tonic.com or impactterms.org. Our members, many of our members are really pioneers and they're actually keen to share what they're learning along the way, and so I hope it will be useful to that. And so to the private investors, I look forward to meeting you at our lunch tomorrow or later today. Again, if you want to get in on that show, bit.ly, lunch with Tonic. And with that, I want to express my gratitude to Sarah and Socap for making this partnership happen and turn it back over to you to introduce the amazing entrepreneurs that we're about to see. You said something to them backstage. I want to say front stage, which is everybody's rooting for them, right? They're nervous. So let's give them that warm Socap welcome, huh? Thanks, Adam. All right, so today we'll be hearing from these specific sectors in our cohort. Economic development, ethical products, education. We also have one entrepreneur who's representing one of the many entrepreneurs that are joining us at Socap from our Indigenous Access Fund. And then also we have a cohort of four coming with our partner organization, the Canadian Consulate. So please give a really round warm applause for all of the entrepreneurs we'll be speaking today. Thank you so much for your time. Hi, everyone. My name is Hannah. I am the CEO and founder of Intrare. And before I get to the boring part where I tell you what we do, I want to tell you a story. This here is Milka. She is 18 years old. She is in Haiti, where she's from, and she's all alone because all of her family had to leave after the last big earthquake. She's scared, but she's also very determined to get ahead and she can't do that where she is right now. So she decides to leave and she flees to Mexico. Getting there, she's really lucky. She gets her humanitarian work permit really fast and she's very excited to start applying to jobs. But very soon she notices that no employer wants to hire her. All she gets is rejections. And again, she's pretty desperate. And in that moment, she hears about Intrare and just decides to sign up. Within 10 days, we get her interviews and she is hired by a local yarn factory as a machine operator. And now, one year later, she is still there. She's in a stable job. She's now out of poverty and she's even saving for her dream, which is to study for her nursing degree. Now, what is really important to me about this story, which is 100% true, is that Milka is really not alone in this position. In the Americas, we have over 220 million people that are diverse, that are in the workforce and that are really struggling in accessing fair job opportunities, meaning that a lot of them are in exploitation, in informal positions, and really can't get ahead. So how do we actually make this jump from a precarious situation into a fair job opportunity happen for Milka and all of these people? Well, at Intrare, we solve the two main problems, the connection between the diverse candidates and the employers and educating the employers. So they are actually able to include them. So we offer companies training where they learn how to really hire people, which they often don't know. And we also offer them training where they learn how to build a really inclusive work environment where people want to stay, which is often the problem. So they can also reduce the turnover that they often create. On the other hand, we also match them with really good candidates that they need. This is the year with the highest scarcity of talent in 17 years in the America. So there is a huge need. So we make this huge talent pool available, but we also match companies with really good talent. And on the other hand, for candidates, we make these employers available that are already inclusive because we work with them. And we match them with really good job opportunities that actually match what they want to do and their profiles. And behind all of that, to make this happen and really make amazing matches between both sides, is an artificial intelligence that we build ourselves to really take the bias out of the matching process. That is pretty innovative with a pretty unique combination of methods. And that also achieves a much higher accuracy in the matching between both sides than most algorithms in the market do. So with that, I would like to invite you, if you're interested in any of that, to join our mission. Right now, we are seeking $2.5 million in catalytic funding, of which we've already received $1 million. We are going to use that very strongly to build the capacity of our artificial intelligence in which we see the huge potential. And then to also start going from reaching thousands of candidates to millions. So if any of that is interesting to any of you, feel free to have a chat afterwards. And thank you so much. All right. Hello, everyone. Yeah, so my name is Danny Feldman. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Fresh. And when I was 17, I lost my mom to drugs and alcohol. I wasn't really sure as a young man how to react to that. And so I did what felt right over that summer. I acted out. I ended up taking a drug charge on my record as a felony conviction when I was a senior in high school. I had a full ride scholarship to NYU, but my probation wouldn't transfer. And like anyone with a criminal conviction in this record will tell you, you can't pass a background check in America to go to college. So I wasn't able to attend university, now faced with the 44,000 barriers that exist for those with criminal convictions in this country. I found myself not locked up, but forever locked out from meaningfully participating in the economy, whether that was housing opportunities, employment opportunities, or banking opportunities. And obviously faced with this challenge, I did what was available to me, which was to be an entrepreneur. I had a great group of mentors in my life who shepherded me and mentored me and built two great companies, a lifestyle business that achieved 30 million in annual revenue in my 20s, a second company in the property tech space, which achieved 100 million in revenue before I exited at the Series B Rays. And so this is my third venture and we are venture backed. And so thinking on my own personal experience and being able to solve the problem that I lived myself, I really with that in mind founded this company called Fresh. And what we look to solve most importantly is financial health and wellness within the justice impacted community and other marginalized communities here in this country. The problem is that there are 77 million Americans with a criminal conviction on their record, holding them back in some way from meaningfully participating in the economy. 600,000 of these folks are being released from jails and prisons every year and 40% of children in this country grow up in a justice impacted home. What that's led to since the time of redlining is that we now have the largest demographic of unbanked individuals in this country. 27% is the total amount of justice impacted individuals, 17 and a half million roughly without a bank account, nine and a half million without health insurance. And the average person coming out of incarceration sees a 69% drop in their credit score. All of this is a barrier to being able to live the American dream. And so we wanted to create a solution. Today we stand as the first financial services company built for and by the justice impacted community, fully led by justice impacted individuals. We offer barrier free banking where no matter what your background, we can get you a bank account and a debit card. We offer health insurance that for anybody that earns below $40,000 a year, you can get health insurance at no cost for your family. And we offer tools to help build your credit. We're a mobile first platform with an underlying bank and thousands of customers today. We're raising $650,000 for an extension on our seed round. We only have 300,000 left in the round. Our anchor investor in the incarceration fund is here at this event. Here are some of the use of funds. We've got some very notable angel investors as well. Our minimum to participate is 25,000. And our mission is to get 500,000 people with health insurance, 500,000 people not having to cash their check over the next three years, which would put roughly $2.2 billion in fees back into the economy on top of what is a very attractive exit. Thank you. Hello. I'm Rafa Cavalcanti. I'm from Brazil. And this is me helping my mom in her store. I come from a family of small business owners. And my mom was actually successful in her business. It grew into multiple stores throughout the city until she started getting robbed. She got robbed a total of 17 times. And the last time with a gun in her head, she broke. Her business also broke. But she did not want to give up. So she went to the bank to ask alone to reinvest in her business and try to take it again from the bottom up. But the bank seeing the situation thought that she was too risky. Once a top client for the bank was now becoming invisible because her situation, her economic situation changed. Well, my mom did not want to, well, she did not want to let it pass. So she went to throw the second only option, which was loan sharks. Loan sharks charge about 7,000% interest rate, 7,000. And they are very common, normal and used option. Unfortunately, not only for my mom, but for 1.7 billion people that are not included in the financial system. Loan sharks in Brazil, Presto Mogota in South America, payday loans here in the U.S., everyone knows how do they look. Thinking about that, I built clock. Clock aims to facilitate, make it easy to acquire credit. No, no credit is my case. And I made it a mobile platform because I wanted to be in the hands when the people needed the most. We had to develop a behavioral credit score model in order to analyze people based on behavior and not how much money they have on the pocket or in the bank. In this way, we are able to afford or connect them with non-credit to include in the financial system. Then we improve the business, the lives because now they're getting formal credit in the market. And we build for them a credit history, very important in order to bridge them later with all the financial institutions that maybe want to offer microcredit, insurance, and a new name it. In that way, we're creating a lead for public people that were once invisible and now becomes invisible in the market. If you want to talk more about financial inclusion, how we're doing that in Brazil, how we're at the moment with 60,000 people growing mouth to mouth, how we have given more than 9,000 loans and have very low default rates, I'll be here in the event for the time just let me know and it will be my pleasure to talk with you. Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm Atilana Pinyon. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Retorna, a company on a mission to provide financial access to migrants in Latin America and empower them to live the lives they want. Folks, being a migrant is hard. Most of the times you feel like you are no one. Legal status is everything. It guarantees identity but also opens the door for us, for a better future. But without it, you can't have a bank account. You can't rent a place on your name and you can't send money to your family. It is a constant struggle and it blocks any kind of opportunities that you want to achieve in this new country. But being a migrant myself since the age of four and have been living in more than five countries, I have experienced these challenges myself. I had to rely on a friend of a friend to have access to a bank account. He shared his bank account with me, he signed paperwork on my behalf and he charged me more than $50 a month for his services. In a world with so many financial institutions, I was astonished that they were part of the problem. And it's the reason why we decided to create Retorna. To become your ally, your beacon of hope as a migrant, to give you access because with access comes ambition and empowerment in Retorna starts with our remittance. Migrants can use our app to provide food, medicines, or celebrate a milestone with their loved ones. After more than two million transfers being delivered since 2020 and with $1.5 million in our recovery revenue, Retorna is granting financial access to more than 43 million migrants in Latin America. Our app is the way to be fast, reliable, and cost-efficient in terms of remittances. And with many institutions offering these services as competition, I can tell you that its speed and the personal touch that we give is what set us apart. The next 24 months for us, the goal is very clear. We want to empower over 100,000 individuals to provide loans, banking suit, and more remittances. We want to scale our operations from $30 million per year to $140 million per year. And for that, we are asking $1.5 million in catalytic funding. This will support our growth and help us to empower migrants to live the life they want. So, folks, I invite you to join us in this mission to empower migrants, but most importantly, to help them to become someone in their new countries. Thank you very much. I'm here today to share with you my story of building inclusive, resilient, and prosperous communities in Kenya. My name is Vincent Kiarie, the co-founder and CEO of Motor Up Capital. Financial inclusion is something close to my heart. I was born and raised in a rural setup where my mother used to own a small retail shop earning less than $1,000 a year. I witnessed the struggle and pain she went through trying to access financing in order to grow her business. My mother's story is no different from Doris in this picture. Doris is a mother of four and she runs a terrarium shop. She is unable to expand her business and scale because she cannot access the right financing and capacity building in order to scale her business. Annually Doris earns $900 instead of $6,000 or more because a business is still small and she cannot be able to access the financing in order to scale her business. Doris represents millions of other micro enterprises in Kenya that have no access to financing and capacity building. In fact, there are 7.4 million micro-enterprises in Kenya with a funding gap of $19 billion. So these micro-enterprises together with the clients they serve, they are also severely affected by the effects of climate change. Climate change has been very, climate change has been very, has affected these communities that they serve and we are working together to be able to serve these communities providing loan and access to finance and capacity building in order to help these businesses to thrive. So we are working with companies like Adili solar hubs in order to be able to advance climate action in the communities they serve along the fish value chain. So our impact to date since inception we've been able to disperse $1.9 million dollars of loans to 28,000 businesses and we've been able to create over 5,000 jobs. Over 60 percent of these businesses have reported growth. We've also disbarred 0.8 million climate finance and serve 14,000 climate vulnerable communities and saved about 4,000 tons of carbon. So with our capacity building program we've been able to train 14,000 micro businesses and 15,000 farmers have also received training and climate advisory services. So we seek to raise 500,000 in debt financing so we've already received 150,000 so we intend to serve with the funding intend to serve 11,000 and the services 9,000 climate vulnerable communities and create 1,100 jobs. Thank you for listening and looking forward to connecting. Aristotle used to say dignity doesn't lie in having owners but in deserving them. Envision a company that manufactures dignity. My name is Gaston Arostegui. I flew all the way from Hujui, Argentina, South America. I'm a partner and CEO of Warme before social enterprise with a mission to dignify the life in Indian Latin American communities. We craft high quality textile products made entirely from natural fibers served from our heart of our Indian highlands. With 100% of artisanal finish we specialize in two product lines, home decor and imperial. Warme is more than just a company. It's a territorial development model, an innovative model that is not only scalable but also replicable and one that is transforming a region at the core of the Andes. With utmost respect for the culture we bring together and harmonize a diversity of stakeholders to create genuine and dignified opportunities paving the way for the prosperous social, economical and environmental development in Latin America. In this picture we see a typical beneficiary. These women lead their families through encouraging their animals. We are talking about lamas and ships. Poverty rate in Latin America reached 32%. We are talking about like 200 million people. It's the most unequal region on earth. The Puna, which is our regional focus, is the region with the highest multidimensional poverty in Argentina. We are talking about like 4,000 people, 3,500 rural small producer families spread across 127 communities, Indian communities. Our business model incorporates the partnership of the Warme Sallazuncos NGO founded by the indigenous K-Track women. Warme Sallazunco means resilient women and they play a significant role here. Our partner enabled us to understand the needs of the region, secure our raw materials and make a meaningful impact on the area. Currently we are connecting through fair trade the luxury market with over 600 small producer families spread across 19 isolated Indian communities. 100% of the profit generated are reinvested in the region, supporting productive microenter prices that create a multiplier effect. Warme was born in 2014. We were revitalizing a 100-year-old factory. We produced high altitudes, over 11,000 feet above sea level, making us one of the highest spinning mill in the world. It took us three years to reach the break-even point. Our best-selling products are scarves, shoals, and blankets, like this one. We introduced 12,000 products into the market this year and we plan to double this figure in the next three years. We have just launched our international e-commerce platform and we already have products ready for sale here in the USA in Chile and soon in Spain. We have been preparing for this moment for a long time and we are closer than ever to make a significant change. The opportunity to be part is truly unique, especially considering the macroeconomic variables that Argentina is currently facing. The money invested in the relation to the impact created could be extraordinary. We believe that it's only through the propagation of new business model broader perspective with systemic approaches that we can truly change the course of reality. This is where our passion lies with Warme. I really don't know if my pitch is conventional or not, but one thing you can be absolutely certain of and is that my message is genuine and heartfelt. I'm not here just to ask for money, that's the easy part, but we truly need here social ventures at Socap are dedicated individuals back in any organization who wants to join to our mission and believers that achieving a better world for all is possible. Thank you very much. Hello everyone. My name is Isshu Dhaakris and I'm the co-founder of Neynapal. We are a design-led social enterprise that works with the artisans of Nepal. In Nepal, crafts are not just a means of preserving a rich cultural heritage, but a way of life. An important means of livelihood. Every eighth person in Nepal's working population is an artisan and 46% of total exports done out of Nepal are handicrafts. But in the past couple of years we've seen a decline as more artisans leave these traditional forms of work and move towards office jobs. So what's contributing to this decline? Limited access to resources, training and markets. With the mission to help artisans escape poverty, Tuljai and I started Neynapal in 2018. In the last four years we've worked with 110 artisans and we are very proud to say that we were able to double the income of 40% of our artisans. And in the process also conserves six crafts of Nepal. But we want to take it a step further. We want to build an artisan community center which enables our artisans to become micro entrepreneurs. A place where they can collaborate and get access to equipments, resources and training. And these trainings won't just be limited to crafts base skills, but also basic skills that they might need in order to become entrepreneurs. Our ask today is $500,000 which will be used towards buying equipments, facilitating training programs and running the operations of the center. We aim to support 72 artisans in the first year with an estimated growth of 30% each year. The support offered by the training center can help them increase their income by 100%. This is Shanti Vidhi. She runs a traditional ceramic studio in Nepal and currently employs 10 artisans. She currently just takes orders manually and doesn't have access to a computer. The only way you can find her is at her studio in Thimi and chances are when you get there you can't see any of the work she's done in the past unless she has some surplus that she's not been able to sell. This community center will help her and her team get upskilled, get her basic tools she might need in order to manage her inventory, take orders, build a catalog and most importantly meet potential buyers because currently she's just relying on word of mouth to meet any new potential buyers. So working with our community center will help her meet more clients which might help her increase her income. Together we can ensure that the crafts of Nepal that are centuries old can be preserved and artisans like Shanti Vidhi can make their journey from artisan to an entrepreneur. Thank you so much. Test. Hi everyone. Can you please raise your hand if you know how to read or write? So I assume everyone. So can you imagine a life where you were never taught how to read or write? Would you be able? How different would your life be? Would you be able to send text to your friends, go to the supermarket and read the label to understand what you're buying? Would you be even able to be here today? My guess is no. Well this is the life of Fatima. Fatima was born in the south of Morocco in a family where she never learned how to read or write and because of that she feels that she is so left out of economic opportunities that could really better her life. And Fatima is a weaver and she learned how to weave very young and this is a very complicated work and that takes a lot of time to learn. But because she doesn't know how to sell online or reach international market she will never get out of poverty. But this is not the story of Fatima alone. This is a story of the 50 million of artisans of the MENA region who feel that they are taken advantage by the people who definitely know that when they buy this pillow for $10 they will instantly resell it for $100 online without doing anything. Do you think that's fair? I don't think so. Well don't worry we are here to solve this problem. MyTindi is the first platform that makes it accessible to the illiterate and the unbanked artisan to be able to list and sell their products online directly through our AI-based app that use image and voice recognition to empower them to list and sell their products. Once they have listed their product they are able to get into a virtuous circle when they are able to sell their product on our marketplace, MyTindi.com where we take care of the shipping and we have sold in over 40 countries. They also take advantage of our unique partnership with the Royal Air Maroc which is the national airline of Morocco where we sell our artisan product in the duty free and we are also hosting pop-ups all over the world and the next one is actually going to be in Lisbon Portugal in El Corte Inglis if you can join. And these pop-ups are ways to showcase their work internationally. And this virtuous circle has allowed us so far to formalize over 1400 artisan in Morocco among more than half are women and to generate over almost 11,000 hours of dignified work and we have also been able to sign a partnership with the Ministry of Crafts in Morocco that help us to reach people in rural areas. And today we are here to ask for your support in empowering over one million artisans to sell online by 2035 in the MENA region. We are looking for $500,000 grants to fine tune and make our technology better and available to all the Arab dialects of the MENA region and we are also open to commercial partnerships to develop product line. Thank you very much. Hello my name is Hubert Benfil and I come from Guatemala. I am the founder and CEO of Uts Books. Uts is a Mayan word in five different Mayan languages that means good which helps us explain the consolidation of what we want to do in Guatemala and other Latin American countries. Since 2014 we've been helping a lot of artisans bring high quality products to a global marketplace such as Irma who found a lot of roadblocks to bring her products outside of Guatemala such as soaring shipping costs paying $75 to $100 on her pound. Postal service that ended up shutting down in 2016. A local logistic infrastructure in Guatemala has made very hard to things to move around and informal economy of over 70% which makes formal export impossible for most people in the country. These are also some of the problems that we see in other parts of Latin America. Through our business model we've managed to solve this problem by enabling local producers to actually international markets through accessible and efficient logistics catalyzing rural development. We are empowering specifically the informal and on attendance segments of marketing Guatemala through a unique service that combines local careers and international careers along with our personalized services and creating a one one of a kind solution that is impossible for competitors to replicate. Through this model and with no investment in any marketing or promotion we've reached over 1600 entrepreneurs, artisans and SMEs shipping over 72,000 packages around the world which means that's around 760,000 pounds. That puts us in about 1.2% of the all the shipping coming out of Guatemala which means that we can grow a lot as e-commerce is still a growing thing around Guatemala and Latin America. Our impact goes beyond our numbers it's not just numbers it's stories such as Irma who went from one single weaver to having a team of 10 women and shipping all around the world every day. We are helping people move from informal economy to a formal economy and going from just a local market to scalability internationally building resilience in rural Guatemala and Latin America. In order to do this we're looking for $1.1 million in debt that is going to help us finalize our digital tool and creating a customer service personalized in a call center that also speaks Mayan languages helping reaching us to a lot more people and helping us access more places in Guatemala and other places in Latin America. Thank you for listening and for helping us bring e-commerce and use it as an engine for rural development around Latin America. Thank you very much. Human beings are social creatures. We're not meant to walk through this life alone. My name is Ariela Sustere. I'm the founder and CEO of Sequence Collection my company of handcrafted jewelry and accessories with the mission to disrupt the cycle of violence that limits at risk youth. Growing up in El Salvador I experienced the power of community when my brother Andres was kidnapped and held captive underground blindfolded and handcuffed for 347 days. Throughout this time my family experienced what I do not wish for anybody to go through but in the midst of tragedy in and around my country young people started a movement demanding for my brother to be released. People started wearing a yellow ribbon and the local newspaper run his picture every day counting the days that he was being held captive. There were prayers and concerts all over my country demanding for my brother to be released. On the morning of September 13th 1996 my brother was finally released and reunited with my family. This experience showed me the power of community. I once again experienced this power when I walked a lonely path of a social entrepreneur and I launched my business sequence and I started working inside a violent community employing young men and women at risk of joining gangs to handcraft these beautiful products. Through this work I found a community and a network of support through an organization called Vital Voices where I have met the most incredible leaders from around the world and mentors like Diane Bonfussenberg who we have done two fashion collaborations with and corporations like Bank of America and Universal Pictures who we have ongoing partnerships with to create their corporate gifting products and today I'm honored to be part of this amazing community through Socap and Miller Center. I'm here today seeking $300,000 to create and pilot the sequence artisan incubator program and continue to expand the impact that sequence is having in the lives of young men and women living in violent communities in El Salvador. Please join us in our mission and invest in the sequence artisan incubator or work with us to create your corporate gifting products. You can visit our booth at the marketplace together we could create and join a community that could disrupt the cycle of violence. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Lydia Diaz. I'm the founder of Plant Powered. Plant Powered is a food tech company that is based in the Dominican Republic and we help small local farmers export their produce through our brand, through our process products. So we have a wide variety and range of products. We are the pioneers in the Caribbean of plant-based alternatives, plant-based proteins such as burgers and mock meats and we also have an ice cream line that is dairy-free. It's made with local coconut milk and we work with local coconut producers and we also have a snack line where we work with local guava producers. So we've tried to develop a 360 sustainable production model where we take into account every step of the production process starting from the ingredients source with our communication or relationship with the weakest link of the supply chain which are the local farmers and we also have accountability and transparency in our processes. We have a solid waste management program and we try to do a circular production and this ends with a final product that has an inclusive packaging with Braille language with Braille writing and it's also recyclable. So we also have an environmental impact especially with our mid-substitutes and we help our consumers save water, CO2 and usable land by substituting the animal protein for the plant protein. So how you can get involved with our mission. We are looking for commercial partnerships. Our markets are the Caribbean market. We're right now in the U.S. market in the east coast. So we're looking for distribution channels in retail, in food service and any type of partnership that is related to what we do. And if this is interesting to you, you can connect with us. We're in Brella so we can talk during SOCAP and we're also at the marketplace so you can come by and try our guava cookies that are looking free and also vegan. So I invite you to connect with us. Thank you. Hello everyone. So we're going to talk about puppies and dogs. My name is Eric Adams and I'm the founder and CEO of Dog and Whistle. Before we get started I need 100% of audience participation. If you are a pet owner or you love your dogs, you don't have to do it. But I want you to say whoop whoop. Hey, there we go. Excellent, excellent. Well here at, meow. So here at Dog and Whistle pet parents we have a problem. Within the hospitality industry, especially in Las Vegas, 30% of food that is being produced globally is being thrown away. It equates to about 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste from restaurants each year which equates or which can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions as well as overflowing landfills. Now my pet parents, the pet food industry is on pace to hit $115 billion within 2026 and this includes low quality ingredients. We got to do something about this. The growing demand for sustainable and high quality alternatives is at an all-time high so we need to address this market. We have a solution. Here at Dog and Whistle we produce upcycled dog food products which is not only nutritious but sustainable and beneficial to dogs and the environment at the same time. Did you know that every pound of upcycled dog and whistle product it saves 400 plus gallons of water as well as 13 pounds of CO2 emissions. We have a lot of custom things that's coming up that's in the works. If you're hanging around and you want to go and check us out at the city market we do have our upcycled pawdobble toppers and currently we are looking to raise our seed round of $250,000. So this would assist with sales, sales hire, marketing efforts to support a successful target national launch for Q1 of 2024 as well as to hit our line of sight of $2 million in revenue within the next 18 months. Our goal is to sustain and grow our role within not only the pet food industry but also align ourselves with these amazing businesses that you see here today. Thank you so much. Hi everyone. My name is Jamila Mayanja. I'm the founder and team leader at Smart Girls Uganda, a social enterprise study to empower girls and women. Girls like Brittany. We met Brittany at the age of 12 paraded by her single mother with a lot of makeup in the slam areas of Boise in Uganda trying to market her to get a husband. Brittany is like over 50% of young girls that do not complete only complete primary education and only 20% of those actually go on to secondary school. Brittany wanted to become an engineer but because our country is so male dominated her mother didn't want her to go through that. I was like Brittany. I wanted to become an architect but my father was like no you have to be married. So I started what we call our girls with tool scaling program where we train girls in male dominated non-stem skill sets. We train them in trades like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and technology. We make sure they are certified and connected to work. That means we connect them to businesses or help them start their businesses. Using human center design we inspire them to innovate within those trades and our girls in electrical engineering innovated our recycled solar smart bag. A bag they are using to help young girls to stay in school because we notice it's easier to skill them when they have a little bit of education background. To debt we've been able to skill over 456 girls. 156 are self funded with approximately 520 that we train them and 200 have been supported by other grants or by our net profits. We've connected those to work and some of we have gotten over 10 who have started their businesses. These are 10 women lead businesses with others. To debt, thank you. To debt we've been able to produce over 10,000 bags and keep in 10,000 girls in school. With each bag we sell we make another we give out for free. We are sinking at least 250,000 to try and skill more than 1,000 young girls each year and also be able to produce over 20,000 bags to keep girls in school. That is written right there in her own garage and I love pink. That's why they're in Pumpo and pink. Thank you so much and hope you can support us. Hi, I'm Renus the founder of Ignis Careers Private Limited. Our story is the story of these girls. When I went to the village in 2010 hardly any girl about 12 was in school. I would find boys walking to the farm when the school bell rang and I asked their parents why are they not in school and they asked me why? What's the point? That's a story of global education crisis where students go to school acquire certificates without any real skills and never employable. We have been dancing with them, singing with them, doing theater, teaching them English and in eight years the school tripled in enrollment. Almost all the girls are in school now. Before I started back to SoCAP, I conducted some of these kids. Many of them are professionals today, engineers, managers, some aspiring to be civil servants, some even want to do social enterprise. This village has 90% of the students enrolling in higher education against a national average of 27% in India and 20 none of the girls get married before 23. It doesn't sound much new to you but most of the cousins are getting married at 14. They have grandmothers below 14. This is what we have been doing since 2014 when Ignis was registered. We are supported by Acumen in 2015. In the nine years we have reached 350,000 students in 1,500 schools, colleges and universities. We have been transforming the culture of learning, reaching 15,000 teachers. Remember, all our kids come from families that are less than $5 a day and this is what we offer, capacity building program for schools that cost less than $10 per child per year. English and life skills lab, STEM integrate with life skills and those kids there they are not on the map. They live in remote forest villages and that's our next target. We work with nonprofits developing programs for them. We are trying to raise $600,000 so that we would be in 18 locations by next year this time. We want to develop digital tools so that we would enhance our programs. We want partners. We want partners who want to help these children dream. We want to reach 2.7 million children by 2028. People say don't give them fish, teach them how to fish. I say no, give them life skills they will figure out. They will learn to dream. They would have a fulfilling life achieving and breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I want you to close your eyes and think of your favorite childhood place. Where did you go to laugh? Where did you go to play? Where did you go to relax? Where did you go to have the most fun? And now imagine that place completely destroyed. That was my story. When I was 11 years old my father would take the family to the beach, my favorite place. I'm from a beautiful island called Trinidad and Tobago and while we were there swimming with daddy one day to open the water, eyes closed and something shocked me in my face and when I opened my eyes it was a loaded diaper. That experience did two things for me. One, I told my daddy never to take us back there again which my 11 year old self was eternally grateful. Two, I decided that I wanted to do something about it because how could they destroy my favorite place? But that opportunity also served as a light bulb moment for me because I wanted to do something about it. I am Shan Kaffey Young, founder and CEO of Sial Environmental with a mission to transform the way you think and act towards waste. Our governments always say we need more public education and awareness but their version of that is to throw more information at you which has resulted in a culture of littering and dumping, a poor understanding of waste as a valuable resource and the lack of the tools and the resources to do better. Fast forward to 2015 and Sial Environmental was formed and we have what I call or three buckets or business model a waste education and literacy program so children and youth of which our children's book is at the core and I am the fantastic author and our program facilitation. We offer waste management courses and training both online and in person for individuals and corporate entities and we also provide waste education consultancy and food waste management strategy which 70% of our income comes from and is our most scalable activity. So food waste in the Caribbean region is the number one waste type that we generate with over 931 million metric tons of food waste generated every year. Trill that down to Trinidad and Tobago with 154,000 tons representing 33% of our waste stream but our goal is to divert 28,000 tons of food waste away from our nation's landfill representing a five billion dollar enterprise and as a result of the work we've done so far we've transformed 10,000 lives, students, teachers, individuals, corporate entities, we've sold over 900 of our children's books and we've diverted over one metric ton of waste away from our already overburdened landfills. So our ask is $400,000 in grant funding which will allow us to roll out our food waste program, develop our education series, build our team and scale our platform because wasting waste is one of the most wasteful things you can't do because waste is too valuable to be wasted. Join us. I thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Yamiche Wilson and I am the founder and CEO of Black Sisters in STEM building the largest talent pipeline and skills database and digital nation of Black women in STEM across the world. Today I want to talk a little bit about my own story. I'm a first generation Ghanaian American who came to this country in my mother's hands hoping for a better future. I got into the University of Virginia through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and I believe that getting a six-figure role was going to change my life and career. Unbeknownst to me, I was the only Black woman in all of my courses and that told me and showed me I was not the person for the job. I didn't belong there and so even after being a star student in my first and second year, I dropped out. And so when you are looking at this chart, I know you're wondering what does this represent? The yellow represents all the Black women who enter into University and declare a STEM major. The blue represents the amount that finish with a STEM major. Much like myself, over 50% of Black women drop out of their STEM degree and it is not about capacity, it is not about skill, it's about support. This becomes a problem when we see the world and the greatest resource of the economy of all of the nations in the world being human resources. Who are going to be the people to fulfill all the jobs that AI is creating, not taking? I'm here to argue that Black women are one of the most untapped resources globally around the world. With less than 2% of us in STEM, if we actually bring Black women into the fold, there will be in the U.S. alone a $16 billion economic lift every single year. And so as the fastest growing female youth workforce population in the world, BlackSys is created to bring sisterhood, skillsets, investment to Black women to ensure they make it through and get to where they're going. We have been able to get Black women in top University programs at Harvard, UC Berkeley, John Hopkins and over millions of dollars in earning potential at top companies like Google, Microsoft and more. We are reaching 100,000 women by 2030 and we ask you to join us by being a part of one of our legacy funders who helps us raise $10 million to build the largest scholarship fund for Black women across the world and scale our AI tools and our mentorship software that we have built by ourselves. And so we look to see all of you join us. Thank you. Halli Toh. Hello, my name is Amber Bucher. I'm Choctaw and I'm the founder and CEO of Totem. We're the only digital bank by and for Indigenous people and we exist to correct the inequities that the financial services system places upon the 11.1 million Native American, Hawaiian and Alaskan Natives in the U.S. And those inequities largely stem from the racism of invisibility. It's an invisibility that I experienced firsthand when I tried to buy my first home. My tribe had a down payment assistance program but we couldn't figure out if I qualified or what the next steps were. When I reached out to the lender at my community bank where I was trying to get a mortgage, they politely declined to help call my tribe and intercede on my behalf and throughout the entire time, no one mentioned that I should have had access to Section 184 mortgages that would have given me a lower down payment in the first place. It was clear that the system was broken for Native people. It was clear that our people and our benefits and our tribes were invisible and it was a really painful process that set my home buying journey back by years. And so I got curious and the more I dug, the more I realized that this was actually true. Native people are largely invisible to the modern financial services system. We're eight times more likely to be unbanked than white Americans and that's for a number of reasons for everything from geography to credit invisibility and even plain old bank policies that aren't racist on their face. But once they're applied to the Indigenous lived experience, create barriers to access for our people. I knew that we had the technology and the tools available to create a banking product that would break down those barriers. So I did just about the craziest thing anyone could do in this situation and decided to raise a couple of million dollars and build a company to solve the problems that I saw myself. Luckily, a Native sister introduced me to the folks over at Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, who you probably heard their name. They're a great sponsor of this event. They became our lead investors for our $2.2 million pre-seed round that we closed last year, making me only the second Indigenous woman in the U.S. to ever raise a multi-million dollar round. Thanks. Our consumer accounts launched on July 3rd and we're very excited to see them grow. But now it's time for the next chapter in our evolution, which is to become the only provider of serving the tribal payments vertical. This is a $46 billion a year opportunity where Totem will partner with tribes to help them disperse benefits and payroll into Totem accounts instead of using the expensive paper checks and prepaid cards that most tribes use today. We'll save hundreds of thousands of dollars for tribes and keep money in the Native community and out of extractive capitalist firms longer. And we need your help to do this. We are currently raising an extension round that will close before Thanksgiving on convertible notes. So if that's something that you're interested in, A-B at my Totem app. We're also growing quickly and hiring a lot. So if you know someone who'd like to join our team, let us know. You can also let us know if you have any good sources for salary data or a recruiter that's willing to work on a lower commission. That would be great. And then last, we could not do this work without the support of our communities. And so tribal introductions are the most valuable thing that you can provide for us. But we challenge you to get a little creative with this too. You may not know a tribal leader per se, but if you live in an area that has a high Indigenous population or know people that serve those areas, think university systems, elected officials, government departments that serve Indigenous people, those connections are really valuable too. We appreciate the opportunity to share our story with you, and we invite you to walk with us on our journey to decolonize banking. Yaqo Ki. Annin. Annin Bojo, Jeff Ward, Indigenous Nacaz, Makwan Dodam, Lekwangan Donjibah. Greetings, my name is Jeff Ward, and I'm from Victoria, BC, and Canada. I am Ojibwe and Métis, Bear Clan, and a member of Sandy Bay Ojibwe Nation. I'm CEO and founder at Animiki Indigenous Technology. For two decades, Animiki has been at the forefront of building empowering technologies in service of Indigenous communities. We've worked tirelessly to implement technology in culturally informed and respectful ways with a goal to lower barriers to technology. At Animiki, working closely with Indigenous communities has taught us to understand that data isn't just numbers. Data is sacred and embodies the stories, traditions, and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. And as we consider the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples globally, we see data misuse greatly undermines those rights. This is about rights and sovereignty. In this context, when data ethics are not considered, it places the well-being of Indigenous communities at risk. More often than not, Indigenous data ends up controlled by non-Indigenous organizations and often remains held hostage in colonial systems. The problem is clear. Current data governance models don't give Indigenous peoples control or authority over their own data, thereby stripping them of agency and leaving their voices out of crucial governance decisions. But what if there were a data platform that could be used to support Indigenous data sovereignty? That's what we've built. NEWIN is a groundbreaking data platform. And when we consider these words Indigenous data sovereignty, this also means sovereignty over how data is designed, governed, managed, shared, and stored. With NEWIN's no-code interface, users can design custom tables and relational data structures and then create workspaces that can then further segment data with finely tuned user permissions so that users can decide how their data is governed. Whether you're managing data securely or using it for public digital storytelling, NEWIN is an all-in-one solution to empower digital sovereignty. Lastly, NEWIN can be hosted anywhere. Be that in our cloud solution or any other cloud platform, NEWIN can even be hosted on-premise within Indigenous communities, if that's what they choose. NEWIN isn't just a product. It's a movement deeply connected to social impact and digital sovereignty. We're proud to say that we were the first Indigenous B Corp in Canada, and the second in North America. And this summer, we re-certified for a second time. We align our impact with UN's SDGs and take this even further with the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. No other data platform is doing this. Furthermore, we see investments in purpose-driven Indigenous tech as a way to transition economic development away from resource extraction and towards knowledge-based economies. Led by an Indigenous worldview and values, we've proven, as an Indigenous technology social enterprise, that we have what it takes to receive investment, build a product, gain traction, and get to revenue. We're currently raising $7 million in our Series A, and today I invite you to join us in our mission. The economic and impact opportunities are tremendous, especially considering our impact globally and how this works scales out further. I'll close by saying Indigenous peoples, we've always been inventors, scientists, social entrepreneurs, and yes, technologists. For us, this is about bringing Indigenous tech to the world for the benefit of all peoples. And you're invited to jump in the canoe and paddle with us. Thank you, Miigwetch. Hello, everyone. Electricity is the lifeline of any modern civilization. There are 1.2 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, about 600 million of them that do not have access to electricity currently. My name is Wally Awijie. I'm the Managing Director of Watt Renewable Corporation. Watt is a sustainable development company providing electricity and energy access across Africa. Currently, we've got about 10 megawatt of generating capacity in Nigeria. Currently, we've got a pipeline of 102 megawatts, which we're looking to roll out. I'm here discussing an equity. Thank you. Thank you very much. I forgot my clicker. I'm here discussing an equity raise of 40 million Series A for us to be able to turn our 102 megawatts of pipeline into generating asset. Currently, 80 million Nigerians currently generate the electricity through expensive fossil fuel. 100% of the businesses in Nigeria also do have some type of generating asset or generators that they use. It's estimated that electricity generation in Nigeria currently cost about $14 billion annually. There's a massive opportunity. The opportunity that actually does exist is in the CNI space, especially for telecom providers. There's about 40,000 telecom sites currently operational in Nigeria. Of those 40,000, all of them are actually generating the electricity through expensive fossil fuel, which is diesel. We estimate that they're spending about a billion dollars monthly to generate electricity. We believe that a 30% reduction in their operating costs would lead to about 300 million in savings, first and foremost, and it will also create value of about 27% for our investors. So who are we? We're a white renewable corporation. We're a sustainable development company. We've got 102 megawatt of signed pipelines. We're looking to raise $40 million for us to be able to operationalize that 102 megawatt of pipeline. Our business model is fully integrated. We design, own, build, operate, and maintain all of our generating assets. Like I said, we've got 10 megawatt already fully operational, and we're looking to scale. The investment is very straightforward. 40 million in series A is what we're looking to raise. The 40 million would allow us to actually operationalize our 102 megawatt. I would love to talk about the case study, but I'm really running out of time, so I'm just actually just going to go direct to my last slide, which is a high-level summary of exactly what we just talked about. We're looking to talk to any interest at social impact fund, family houses, PE firms or VC firms that will be interested in investing in the African market. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. I'm Tanika, co-founder of OneClick, a creative assistant that helps build your digital presence. I want you to think of Ironman's Jarvis for content creation. Imagine you're a business owner. You share videos for your business every week. The more eyes on your videos, the more customers, sponsors, revenue, but you spend hours editing and use dozens of software just to share those videos with your audience. It's frustrating. It's time consuming, and it's expensive. We've built a personal creative assistant that helps do those tasks with you. Instead of fighting with three different tools and chat GBT, your assistant will find those memorable moments, customize them for every platform, and generate thoughtful copy that sounds just like you. Very soon, instead of fighting with software, you'll just have a simple conversation with your assistant to create, share, and manage your content everywhere. Again, think of Jarvis, but for content creation. Instead of searching for your next idea or staring at your metrics feeling lost, you'll just talk to your assistant and you'll get recommendations, deeper insights, and it'll actually create content with you. This is the future of content creation, and our customers are already doing extraordinary things with their content. They land jobs, build entire businesses, they amplify their digital presence. And we're just getting started. We've nearly doubled our monthly recurring revenue month over month, and we haven't even shared this conversational experience publicly yet. This is our team. I am the prompt engineer. It's like a snake whisperer to these AI models. Nathan is our head of business. He basically dates our customers. Sina and Sina design and code the product and our resident icons, Mano, Mike and Karm, they amplify our mission to the world. We win because we never give up. And we know something most people don't. We are experiencing the greatest technological evolution in human history right now. Bigger than the internet, smartphones, computers, all of that. The days of manually using software are quickly coming to an end. Everyone will call on these assistants, like ours, to do tasks for them. There's never been another moment like this, and no better time to build. And so we are raising, and it doesn't take much to get this into the hands of tens of thousands just to start. We're going for billions with a B, but these funds will double our speed and will tend exit in annual recurring revenue. This round is closing very soon, so if this is your first time hearing about us, you're a little late to the game, but that's all right. You can connect with me on Brella. We can chat at this conference, and please submit your interest through this QR code ASAP, because we ain't got a day to waste. The future is now. The future of content creation is one assistant, one conversation, and one click. Thank you. Hello, I'm Jeff Schneer, the CEO of a company called Jazza. And because I'm in the Canadian cohort, I'll tell you my Canadian background story. So I'm from a town of around 5,000 people in rural Canada, and after graduating from high school, I ended up going to the Canadian North to plant trees. And after planting trees, I would travel and ended up going through Europe, Southeast Asia, India. I rode a motorcycle from Canada all the way to Panama, traveled to Peru, and then ended up in Tanzania. And I made some really good Tanzanian friends that were interested in the tree planting I'd done to finance all of my travel. And we started together a tree planting project that has planted over 5 million trees now with hundreds of rural communities. And somewhere along the line, someone came up to me and said, Jeff, trees are great, but where can I charge my cell phone? And as I started looking at this energy to access problem that Wally just explained a little bit earlier, I heard story and story again that just broke my heart. I heard a story of a woman who actually said she delivered her baby herself in the dark, pushing herself up against the wall. I heard stories of someone who said that their son brought home petrol instead of kerosene, and it exploded and burned the entire right side of their body. And as I began looking into the energy as a problem, I realized that 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are living without electricity, and they spend $44 billion each year on stop-gap solutions, mainly kerosene and generator fuel. And it doesn't make sense that in 2023, there are still 600 million people living without access to electricity. So what do we do about it? Jazz-a-build shops that we call hubs that have solar on the roof, and from these stations, we use solar to charge batteries that our customers come, pick up from the hub, carry, take home, plug in, and use to power their households. You can think of it like a mini Tesla Powerwall for off-grid Africa. And 100% of our operations are run by women we hire from the local communities that we serve, and their job title is Jazz-a-Stars. And we say our mission is to put stars on the map so they can power their communities. To date, we've powered over 100,000 people in 100 communities in both East and West Africa and delivered 3 million battery swaps. And in terms of where we're going now, we've actually just put together a deal that will allow us to build 1,000 locations over the next 18 months. So that'll be 2,000 Jazz-a-Stars and we'll grow to power a million people. If you care about this problem or are interested in joining us as we work to power a continent, please get in touch. I'm Jeff from Jazz-a. Thank you very much.