Alice CEO Raphaël Mazet previously co-founded an online advocacy startup platform. He quickly realised that although people were keen to sign a petition or sign up to a database, they were far less likely to make a donation to the cause. Research showed that this was in part due to an increasing lack of trust in the charity sector, so Raphaël co-founded Alice in 2016 in order to overcome this mistrust and rebuild faith in charities.
Social Purpose
Alice is a blockchain platform that brings together donors, investors and nonprofits to deliver transparent social impact. It works by providing incentives to charities to publish data about the results they achieve, making it easier for anyone to identify and scale truly effective projects.
According to Raphaël: “We are facing huge social and environmental challenges yet current systems are fundamentally broken. It’s extremely difficult to get reliable evidence that social projects actually work, so Alice reboots the system to provide true transparency.”
Team
Raphaël says that the team at Alice are: “an amazing mix of entrepreneurship, technical and commercial expertise”. An ‘Alice’ is someone who is inspired by building tools that genuinely improve people’s lives and protect the planet, based on objective data, engineering excellence and creativity. The team of eight design tools that are open source: they believe the world’s knowledge should be shared with the hope that others will use them and improve them.
Alice collaborates with Imperial College London, the Impact Management Project, K-Three, the Charities Aid Foundation and Google for Startups, among a number of other partner organisations whose missions are closely aligned.
Impact
Alice was the first blockchain donation platform to launch in real world conditions, in 2017. The first pilot was run by St Mungo’s to help homeless people find permanent homes, with milestones validated by the Housing team at the Greater London Authority. The team has since onboarded three additional pilots and have 15 more in the pipeline.
Growth
With funding from the Social Tech Trust, Innovate UK, impact investors, Blockchain funds and angel investors, Alice has bridged the blockchain and impact worlds, and aims to increase the number of projects on its platform. Grant funding from Social Tech Trust enabled them to build the first iteration of the platform and according to Raphaël, also helped open doors, and build connections and credibility.
“The goal over the next three years is to continue to build a thriving ecosystem where people and organisations collaborate to support great projects,” says Raphaël. Alice’s aim is to generate $30m funds for 100 projects by 2020.
Alice was recently awarded a Vodafone Techstarter Award. In addition to a a prize fund of £35,000, winners each receive a 12-month programme of support and value-in-kind from Vodafone Business.
Case study published May 2019.