 Live from Washington D.C., it's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to our special on the ground presentations. The Cube coverage in Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon End. Coast of the Cube, we are here getting all the stories on what's happening with the innovation in entrepreneurship in our societal nonprofits and our innovation in government. We're here at Peter Pricks who's the One Relief App founder, OneReliefapp.com. One Relief is your venture. You're part of the PeaceTech Accelerator. We're here at the United States Peace Institute in D.C. Tell us about your opportunity. Great pleasure, yes. My name is Peter, CEO and founder of One Relief, the One Relief app. What we do is we let people like you and me make quick donations, micro donations to disaster relief aid. So after emergency has struck, Harry came in Rio last year in September approaching the Caribbean islands. We all knew about it. We all saw those pictures on TV and we all felt empathy and wanted to help and wanted to give, but there's no easy way. So what we do with the One Relief app is we let people like you and me easily with a click of a button, make quick donations that support certified disaster relief agencies on the ground. And you guys are a startup here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. Exactly. We're a startup here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. Great. Well, I'm really bullish on it. I think crowdsourcing has opened up the democratization of giving, which has been phenomenal, but there's some scale issues. Now there's 10 zillion apps. Certainly GoFundMe, we know about those things. They're kind of peer to peer. You know, a friend has to socialize it up, but a lot of folks are wondering, hey, if I donate to that Haiti situation or hurricane, where does the money go? We heard in Puerto Rico, half the stuff didn't even get there. This is a big fear, cognitive dissonance from the giver. You guys solve that problem? Yes, absolutely. When it comes to giving, at the moment you can choose between giving to the big players, the big charities that we don't trust, as we know. Or you can go on a platform like GoFundMe and there's actually 12,000 fundraisers for Hurricane Maria and you don't know who to trust either. So what we do at One Relief is we provide a marketplace, a platform, that is certifying charities who confirm people on the ground. And when you make a donation through the platform, you actually get an update, you get a status notification, help has been embarked, help has arrived in the community, you get visuals, you get video of what's happening on the ground, and you get feedback at the end of a disaster of what has actually been achieved with the money. So you're closing the loop from the giver, from the journey of the money, to the destination. Exactly, from the... And seeing the impact of it. Absolutely, from the second you press the donate button and you donate and you share a fundraiser, you can see how the money is getting to the country, how the money is being used, what it's being used for, and what the progress of that is providing you information on the impact of your donation and closing the loop and encouraging you to next time another disaster happens to donate again. Crazy reliability. You're essentially verifying the endpoints of where the cash goes. Absolutely. Hi, it's Akon. How far along are you guys? Sounds like a great idea. I think it's an awesome idea. Getting a little dashboard and seeing the impact, make people feel good and know their money's going to work. How do you get this off the ground? You're in the accelerator, what's the status? Absolutely, we're about three weeks away from the launch of the platform. It will be launched on March 1st. So we're in the final push of getting the app off the ground. We have partners, we have contracts signed with, for example, Action Against Hunger, where agencies that have country offices that have been working in the countries that are very often struck by crises for many, many years. So it's not that their money goes to a small charity that we have never heard of and are not able to get any accountability information, but it's going to certified agencies that have people on the ground. And they're excited by this, it sounds like. Oh, they are more than excited. It's changing the entire industry. It's rather than the rich people signing big checks that's people like you and me making small donations that have an impact of changing the world. And what the One Relief app is really special and good at, it's the speed at what has happened. So a disaster strikes within hours, the fund raises online on social media and people can donate. And one of the great things about us covering GovCloud we've observed that bringing a modern stack like cloud, you can actually radically transform these industries that have technology in some cases so antiquated, they can't even, they don't even know what's running on. Oh, no, absolutely. So the platform itself is running on AWS and we use serverless cloud technology that allows us to really scale the platform with a thousand people donate or a million people donate at the same time. It's running on a serverless cloud facility. So you're providing critical infrastructure services for donations, big or small? Absolutely, and it's 100% scalable which wasn't able a few years ago. How is the Accelerator helping you piece tech? Yeah, a really interesting question in multiple ways both through mentoring support that we get through the partners that bring incredible support and help us really in getting the platform off the ground. AWS helps us with setting it up on Lambda. That's wonderful. We have C5 who gives us some really interesting support in how we can operate this as a nonprofit with a tech startup mechanism. We have partners like the PeaceTech Lab that helps us to really operate as a nonprofit. We've been covering AI for social good, Intel among other partners, really kind of look at this not just as a philanthropy opportunity, real change. But what's interesting to us as we've reported on SiliconANGLE is the societal entrepreneurship market is booming in DC. Can you comment about what it's like here? I mean, is that right? I mean, you saw Silicon Valley where we live, you got a lot of the alpha tech guys out there. But here it's like nonprofits. Old ways of doing things are now kind of becoming more entrepreneurial because of cloud. What's your reaction to that? No, absolutely. I think Washington DC is the best place for us to be. It's a mix of government, nonprofits, foundations that come in. There's a lot of actually a lot of young startups coming up, impact startups. There's lots of co-working spaces. And we can really feel that this is the most conducive environment for us as a startup to grow and to thrive, getting support from partners that we need. Societal entrepreneurship as a category, I mean, I don't even know if that's the name of it. What do you call it? It's booming. Can you share any anecdotes of it? Is it booming? Is it just emerging? What's your thoughts? Societal entrepreneurship. Yes, so what the WonderLeaf platform really does, it allows everyone to give. It is enabling every citizen in the world to make a quick donation, an amount that everyone of us can afford. Final question, what's your core challenges as you get through the accelerator look to go to market? Is it the partnerships? Is it the tech? What are your core challenges? I think it's really clearly communicating what how WonderLeaf is different, how it is not like all the other platforms out there, how we are the one-stop shop and a marketplace that is connecting people who want to do good with receiving charities on the ground. And how do you compare and contrast to say these other crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms? Yes, on the one hand, there is the big players, the big charities that we don't trust that we want to give directly to because we don't know what happens with the money and there's peer-to-peer fundraising that we don't trust either because they're tiny and we don't know who's setting up those fundraisers. We're right in between. We're a platform that is connecting the donor with a certified charity. How about emerging technologies like blockchain which has been very popular in supply chain like things because you're basically an end-to-end supply chain of money moving to the endpoint, the relief or whatever. Could you use a blockchain? No, are you thinking about that? Absolutely, we actually have an innovation lab that is only purely looking at blockchain from different angles. One of them is for us to accept crypto donations and to be the first platform on the market is accepting micro donations in cryptocurrency. And secondly, we're looking at blockchain technology and running a hyperlature project at the moment to see how we can accelerate the speed at what, how long it takes to get the donation from when a person makes it into the receiving bank account on the ground in country X, Y, Z in the world. A whole new infrastructure wave is coming. You're seeing it decentralized applications and hardened end-to-end apps like you guys. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, congratulations, Peter. Thanks for joining me here. This is theCUBE conversation on the ground here in Washington DC where emerging markets and nonprofits and just ventures for good are now the new entrepreneurship craze in Washington DC. It's the center of the action and with cloud and modern software and blockchain and things of that nature can make it happen. Thanks for watching.