Symmitree

Over half the world lacks the digital connectivity that enables strong, prosperous and inclusive communities.

Symmitree is an integrated platform designed to remove the barriers to connectivity for displaced and deprived families by intelligently connecting them to the resources they need to survive and thrive.

We deliver this through biometric, rugged and AI-enhanced handsets with long battery lives and the latest mobile technology connected to cloud and physical resources. The system is standardized and is designed to constantly upgrade and improve itself, leading to superior usability.

We leverage existing supply and distribution chains, transforming smartphones into scalable, last mile infrastructure through a new financial model, greatly improving access.

By capturing the future value of connecting end users to the resources they need to survive and thrive - while preserving privacy - we can drive the cost of intelligent connectivity to zero for billions of people, fundamentally transforming communities.

The proliferation of smartphone technology, cloud infrastructure and digital identity has transformed the world over the last decade.

However, with half the world lacking connectivity and only 1.4 billion with access to decent quality handsets (iOS/Android 7 or above), the digital divide is growing primarily due to affordability.

This is particularly acute for women.  GSMA estimates women are 23% less likely to use mobile internet than males in low-income countries, a gap, that if closed, could provide an additional $700 billion in GDP growth for these countries over the next five years.

Smartphone proliferation was accelerated in high income countries through the post-paid subsidized model: funding for phones were secured against user’s identities and credit scores.  Given World Bank estimates that over 1.1 billion lack formal identity, and billions more have identity insufficient to access smartphone financing, far too many cannot access the potentially life changing potential on offer.

In the next few decades, intelligent connectivity will be ubiquitous. But we firmly believe the tools and technology exist today to reduce costs, remove friction and bring this forward. Symmitree will do this, and help billions help themselves.

Our target population are the billions who are prevented from digital inclusion due to affordability, usability or availability.

To prove the model and scale our initial target population is refugees and those that help them. This group has an overwhelming need to re-establish their identity and defined aid against them that is looking for efficient infrastructure.

We contributed to the Global Broadband Plan for Refugees collating the research showing the benefits of connectivity for this group and believe the Symmitree platform can make an outsized economic and social impact.

To this end we are working on pilots in three different environments: camp (Kenya); refugees in transit (Mexico) and refugees looking to integrate (Germany) to map the full lifecycle of refugees and provide a foundation of resources we can steadily increment and optimize with local input from partners and end users.

We believe this end-to-end, evolving, process can be expanded to other groups in need, helping them help themselves.

This is what we refer to as intelligent connectivity – the ability of the platform, using our phones (or the users’ own hardware), to connect them to the resources they need to progress and achieve their “jobs to be done”.

The core of Symmitree is a good quality smartphone (handset) which biometrically locks to the user, providing a digital identity that allows access to a curated set of apps, all specifically designed to help our users progress.

We aggregate funding sources, financial inclusion and aidtechs, plus logistical functions to provide the handsets and basic data to the user for no up-front fee.

This is economically viable.  The commodification of Android handsets means that through our ODM suppliers we can now obtain a fast, rugged phone, with 3 Gb RAM, 32 Gb ROM, advanced connectivity, biometrics, the latest Android and long (3-4 day) battery life for under $80.  We have waited two years to reach this price point.

Now, many manufacturers can build to our minimum specification, minimising device and software fragmentation. There is no app store (only our curated app set), but the OS and apps will consistently update on a modular basis.

This is a bundled model that can disrupt the existing feature and low quality handset market, providing a bridge until users have the ability to have their own smartphones.

Our model is to provide Symmitree handsets to the female heads of disconnected families to provide a bridge for them to access financial, health, educational and other resources, as well as the tools needed to build a connected, self-sovereign, digital identity.

This solves a core need of most MIT Solve participants:  how to efficiently reach those that need their innovative and impactful services.

It also potentially saves the public sector resources in service delivery, while improving impact through better data.

For the private sector, this is a market-creating innovation that opens up a new group of verifiable potential customers who they would not otherwise access for years or decades.

Note that valuable apps often fail, due to device fragmentation.  The standardized nature of our platform  potentially solves this for our focus communities.

The value, social and economic, generated by these connections and tracked using these technologies form the basis of an innovative financial model that removes the friction from capital flowing to the area of highest ROI globally – investing in making the poor, not poor.

Users eventually graduate from Symmitree handsets, we can then be reused in a circular economy to others in need.  We believe this model can remove barriers to inclusive economic growth as well as the barriers to civic participation.

Symmitree is a classic disruptive innovation.

By bundling resources on top of scalable technology, our solution exchanges the flexibility of an open smartphone or feature phone architecture to instead focus on targeted functions to elevate that half of the world without intelligent connectivity today.

This will outperform existing solutions for users and service providers for these currently marginalized groups.

The standardization of our platform elements will allow for ease and dependability of programming, and thus, significant creativity and innovation in the delivery of customized resources, as seen in areas such as cloud and serverless computing.

This combines several mega-trends from 4G infrastructure rollout, imminent LEO coverage, feature parity of mid-range Android to the maturation of several emergent technologies.

However, the key challenges here are not technological, but organizational.

All of this feeds into the creation of a new market and value network that aggregates both demand and supply in a manner that enables us to allow cheap capital and other resources to flow to funding valuable connectivity and services for those that stand to benefit most from it.

This is a positive-sum equation that benefits all market participants by facilitating the conditions for capital formation and social mobility.

As the platform scales, it is strongly leveraged into network effects supported by the expanding partner ecosystem, aiding coordination and increasing legibility and visibility.  This gives us the platform to attack the variety of large scale, seemingly intractable problems outlined in the SDGs by providing the infrastructure for innovative solutions.

Symmitree combines an array of technological innovation to enable its innovative business model through our core value proposition of removing the friction of intelligently connecting end users to the resources they need to survive and thrive.

At the core of Symmitree is the matching engine, which collates the resources aggregated by the platform and intelligently connects them to end users based on their personal contexts and data. This is being designed to continuously learn without requiring significant user metadata or a fallback to the classical surveillance capitalism model given the vulnerability of our target groups. Our aim is to build a platform that is privacy-first and can’t be evil wherever possible.

Leveraging advances in privacy technology and personal data stores, including differential privacy, homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs, our chosen technological composition enables users to fully control their own data throughout the process yet have resources tailored to them.

We use the latest in Android hardware through our ODM partners with software enabling a range of connectivity modes such as mesh networking and enhanced biometric security for identification, authentication and authorization of resource access, leveraging distributed ledger technology for decentralized, self-sovereign identity, value transfer and impact claim verification.

The Android software has a custom launcher that enables choice architecture development for enhanced behavioural design as well as modularized upgradeability and hardware level locking to the specified end users, reducing resale value.

All of this allows us to bring forward value created in the future to give everyone access, today.

Five reasons. 

One, while our pilots are just starting, the preliminary work and many conversations show that users desperately want the services we can provide, eg, legal guidance they can understand, help finding a job, a digital bank account with UNCHR aid in it, with payroll funds in and remittances out.  But they can’t get such an interoperable package on their existing phones.  We are creating it.

Two, we have deep experience in investing in - and helping structure - capital formation infrastructure in developing markets.  Combined with our on-the-ground operational experience, we’ve seen first-hand how last mile infrastructure is a critical enabler to community development and economic growth.  So we created a business model we ourselves would invest in – we think the data shows it works.

Three, our research for the Broadband for Refugees plan affirmed the clear, granular value that the combination of identity, connectivity and smartphone technology can produce, bolstered by analysis we conducted on Reliance Jio in India.

Four, our conversations with over 30 app developers showed their biggest obstacle to delivering their services was a prohibitively high cost of customer acquisition to specific target markets.  Our aggregation model is specifically designed to impact this.

Five, we did extensive post-mortems on failed infrastructure-based poverty relief ventures, to not repeat their mistakes.  Conclusion: you must have rock solid unit economics to have a sustainable business model, otherwise you are simply equity funding an inherently money losing infrastructure give-away.  We think we’ve cracked it.

We are currently deploying our pilot projects that will impact a few hundred individuals in the coming months as we finalise the platform, focusing on key service verticals such as financial inclusion, aid distribution optimization, employment, education and healthcare.

Our one-year goal is to complete a major refugee camp deployment (100,000 refugees) where every family receives a Symmitree handset and the requisite attendant infrastructure. We will invite our partners together with local communities to see how to best leverage our infrastructure to maximise total measurable impact for these individuals.

We strongly believe that the data from the first pilots and test deployments will show that the measurable value is well in excess of per enrolled user cost, providing strong unit economics that can then lead to this model being scaled into the millions in year five by leveraging existing supply (through multiple ODM partners) and distribution (through local public sector entities/telcos) channels.

As our platform is designed to increase data density and measure social and economic value creation, we will be able to see rapidly how we meaningfully affect end users. We have designed the platform to scale with the aim that in the next five to ten years there should be no barrier for anyone, anywhere, being able to access intelligent connectivity and there being an economic incentive for markets to actively reach out to these individuals.

In the next year we are working to put everything in place for the large scale deployment noted above, including an operational structure that can seamlessly plug in partner resources across the pre-existing supply and distribution chains across religious orders, NGOs and local telecommunications companies.

We are a data-led organisation that will succeed if it achieves buy in from as broad a range of high quality partners and innovators as possible.

As such, our goal is for each deployment to bring in more groups to support both the overall platform and its local iterations to show progressively increasing amounts of value across the platform as we add more resources and become better at connecting end users to these third party resources, public and private.

This will necessitate intelligent use of existing technologies and the assembly of a high quality direct team and larger partner ecosystem to help us.

Within the next five years we hope to have all of the foundations in place for an International Finance Facility for Connectivity that will allow this to scale and be accessible to anyone. This will enable funders of each handset and/or enrolled user to be repaid through the measurable value created on each across a biometrically-secured ID, underwritten by governments and multilaterals to enable the system to access near zero funding costs.

We have spent two solid years researching the various facets of the challenge, but there is a large amount of potential local barriers that we are likely to have to contend with as we look to prove and scale out the model.

Partnering with local public sector entities and telcos, who we can help with service delivery and expanding their user bases/ARPUs respectively may help, but in certain locales regulations may prove a barrier depending on how the platform is classified.

On the financial side we are comfortable with the unit economics from our projections to enable non-equity funding to scale this, but this will only be proven through our pilots initially and then ultimately the first large scale, fully-integrated deployment as it is difficult to definitively prove the network effects of an embedded population without this.

On the supplier side we have several ODMs so don't suffer from potential bottlenecks in that regard, but have not as yet come to an agreement with the larger manufacturers with whom we have now started discussions.

In the next year we hope to have a core of agreements, partners and "known unknowns" handled, but as we scale into the next five years we will need the backing of governments and multilateral entities to achieve our ambitions.

We are working on a strong incentivisation model for local partners to help deal with local issues so we can focus as much on the scalable platform as possible, which we will trial and refine over the next year.

This will be particularly important for telcos where we believe we can gain rapid traction from our analysis of the potential core business upside from supporting our model across an array of factors, but we have delayed these discussions until now as we looked to fully understand where we could best position.

The fact that our solution was not fully possible until this year due to technological and structural maturity of several components has meant we needed to balance coalition building with patience and have erred on the side of caution in terms of outreach to potential partners so as not to be stuck in dependencies that could constrain scalability.

Getting to the first major camp deployment will be key and we need champions to help us with this given the understandable regulatory issues around these.

Building the team and extended network and learning intelligently from our experiences in the coming years to adapt will be key to overcome the barriers we can foresee and those that may come up unexpectedly.

However, if the core unit economics are as strong as we have modelled, this should be the key factor that helps align the necessary parties to make a meaningful impact on bringing more people into the global home.

We have a separate for-profit and nonprofit arm. The for-profit is applying to Solve.

4 full time, 4 part time, multiple contractors.

The team has a unique combination of visionary, operational, deep technology, public policy and financial structuring experience which, together, have constructed this new model to redirect abundant global capital towards the areas where it could make the greatest social and economic impact:

A visionary who realised at the Grenfell fire tragedy in London two years ago that smartphone technology could have an immediate, beneficial impact on people in need.

A technologist with thirteen years of experience investing in technology and emerging markets, combined with a Mathematics and Computer Science degree from Oxford, alongside enterprise software development at leading cloud native communications software company.

An emerging market tech startup entrepreneur (with successful exit) turned Goldman Sachs banker who returned to startups, focused on fintech.  He enjoys being airdropped into countries to build operations and get them cash flow positive, and believes no plan survives contact with real-world implementation.

A capital markets lawyer turned head of the largest global pro-bono law firm, focused on aid and human rights-oriented projects.  She has deep contacts throughout the global NGO and foundation / fund-raising universe and gets things done quickly in very difficult and sometimes scary places.

A specialist in self-sovereign digital identity who has been present during the nascent development of identity technology and seen both the good and bad.  He understands both the technology and politics of this space.

There are also strong advisors and part-time people who are filling the gaps in our skill set and providing sage advice.

We are announcing our full partnership list over the next three months as we deploy our first pilots but have core partnerships with the Laudato Si and Humanity 2.0 initiatives seeded by the Vatican. We will be announcing a series of other religious and secular public sector partnerships both on a global basis and in each of our target areas as we finalise some key details.

As we release our final software and cloud infrastructure we will also be announcing some of the defaults for our platform, from identity to payments, where negotiations are currently in the final stages.

We anticipate the core partnership list will be finalised by September.

Our core activity is the provision of an aggregation platform/market place to connect public and private sector resources to users on the one side and to intelligently connect users to the resources they need on the other.

This bundled/integrated model provides a standardized, scalable, infrastructure for an array of potential users on both side, aggregating both supply and demand as they are matched with lower friction and greater assurance.

This provides a range of value propositions to each customer segment within the ecosystem as a multi-sided market but the core value is in that connection while maintaining a tight control on cost structure by leveraging the appropriate partners and key stakeholders and reinvesting surplus in expansion as the value per user increases.

The model has been set up for multiple revenue streams to come in for sustainability once the key resource of the platform is established in each of its key elements.  Today, the core revenue model has three parts:  (1) a license fee per handset when the ODM manufacturer installs the Symmitree software on it, (2) an application developer fee which app providers pay us per user, and (3) a monthly subscription fee per user, to support core infrastructure.

As an aggregation platform we generate fees by connecting users to the resources they need, charging the resource providers, public and private, one off and recurring fees for this channel.

We have modelled this extensively with significant buffers integrated into the unit economics and revenue deflators to ensure feasibility.

There are an array of additional revenue streams, from bespoke solution development to analytics that could be added to this model, but there appears to be significant operational leverage and scalability inherent in it if the partnership process is carried out appropriately, resulting in significant cost shifting.

A key element of this is who pays for the handsets while they are still required. We have modelled equity funding the first deployments, but believe that this will be equity/credit/grant funded with multiple entities being able to fund each handset and ancillary costs of user enrolment and receive a portion of the revenues "live" from the value created by this to repay their investments.

As the data mounts on the value of these cashflows the funding can then be underwritten by multilateral and development institutions, bringing future value forward to today and allowing more of the excess value creation to be put into further accelerating the number intelligently connected.

Thus the model is one where we are essentially making it easier to invest in the displaced and deprived and share in the upside from allowing them to access the tools they need to increase their own prosperity.

Our goal is to make life easier for the variety of great innovations that could help millions, if not billions of individuals around the world.

We have applied to Solve primarily to help expand our network now that we are steadily going public with our model, as well as to invite feedback from those that could help us refine this to help it achieve the long-term potential we believe it has within it.

Specifically we are looking for input and partnerships that can help us answer the question that given the large scale deployments we are looking to do, ie to every refugee family or individual in a camp, what is the maximum measurable value we could create given this new deployed infrastructure?

We are looking for academic partnerships to use our platform, with the appropriate ethical and safety considerations, to conduct research to show the value that could potentially be created through intelligent use of this new infrastructure.

By providing an entire population with a standardised hardware set and software that we can consistently update, we make it far easier to conduct trials, surveys and create feedback loops to inform policy as the data density dramatically increases.

We are also not looking to reinvent the wheel but build on existing research and insight wherever possible in a structured manner to provide a new tool for end users, governments and everyone inbetween to connect to each other.

We are looking for the best partners across our delivery and software ecosystem to enable us to help as many people in as many geographies as possible.

The paradigm of an integrated platform optimised for value delivery is not so much a technological challenge, although new technology enables this, but an organisational challenge as we need to balance a range of private and public sector partners across the world.

We are working on a range of multilateral, NGO and software partnerships but to scale appropriately we will need to make the appropriate governmental and telecommunication company partnerships to remove the friction from deployment as our value proposition is proved out. A formal relationship with UNHCR is core to this, as well as the broader UN given the platform could support the majority of the SDGs.

Specifically our focus is in key refugee areas such as Germany, Kenya, Jordan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Mexico and Turkey as refugees are our initial target market before the model scales to help others in need.

The initial pilots of our platform are in targeted verticals, but as we deploy the main integrated platform in the next year our core value proposition is in intelligently connecting our users to the most valuable resources for them to progress in life, from vaccinations to digital employment to educational opportunities.

This is core to the long-term value of our platform as the hardware element becomes standardised, hopefully accelerated by our model.

We believe we provide an ideal infrastructure for data commons initiatives and the integrated nature of our platform means that we can optimise for AI/ML matching through the use of personal data stores, homomorphic encryption, zero knowledge proofs and distributed ledger technology by default.

As all elements of the platform are predictable, constantly updated and present by default, the scope for AI to achieve impactful outcomes is greatly magnified while not requiring the end user to give up more data than is required to be connected to the resources they need. 

Furthermore, as the platform is designed to learn, evolve and improve, we can incorporate any new emergent technologies rapidly to help those that really need it.

We would utilise the prize and the associated benefits it brings to accelerate development of the AI matching engine.

The Symmitree platform removes the barriers to connectivity for underrepresented communities, with 5 million households with children in the US alone lacking  connectivity.

Communities will be able to easily build on our platform, which can reach the displaced and deprived to give them the bridge they need to no longer be invisible and integrate more fully into our global home. We also have several potential partners for  education delivered via the phones, from basic to advanced STEM skills and the phones are being developed to act as dumb terminals for larger screens and keyboards as the ecosystem develops.

This platform can readily foster inclusion and civic participation, particularly as the data architectures we are employing lend themselves directly to superior e-government solutions while preserving privacy in a holistic manner.

This will be particularly pertinent as our platform will become available outside of our handsets in the next few years, for any hardware that meets our minimum specification, as users graduate from our handsets to their own but take their intelligent connected identity with them.

We would utilise the prize to conduct specific pilots focused on underrepresented minorities in the US around the potential educational impact of the platform and prizes for development of appropriate resources on it.

Melinda Gates noted that the most powerful phone is that in the hands of the poorest women.

We noted that the GSMA has estimated the value of closing the mobile internet digital gender divide at $140 billion in mobile industry revenue and $700 billion in GDP growth over the next five years.

Symmitree is the ideal platform for accelerating this and providing access to an array of other innovations to help women worldwide, with our model being that handsets are first provided to the female heads of household due to the higher ROI from doing this, allowing the whole family to have a reliable intelligent connection, before being deployed to each family member in turn as the measurable value exceeds the cost.

We would use the prize to conduct targeted studies alongside our pilots to see the impact on business and capital formation through our unique platform, extending the work of the GSMA, Gates, Cherie Blair Foundations and others in this area.

Our initial deployments are targeted at the refugee population globally and each stage of their journey specifically.

We believe we have the ideal platform, to bring together multiple stakeholders to accelerate economic, financial and political inclusion of refugee communities in this regard and have conducted significant research in this area with live pilots about to be undertaken.

We would use this prize to fund further pilots specifically through handset subsidisation focused on facilitating entrepreneurship and employment.

We are developing the Symmitree platform under the IEEE P700x standards for ethical design and in line with the AI for Good Data Commons for SDGs work being undertaken. 

We have a strong ethical core through our work with major faith institutions and are enabling privacy by default to be compliant with standards ranging from GDPR to HIPAA to ensure global scalability, working with leading global law firms in this regard.

Symmitree's key focus is increasing data density for the displaced and deprived to improve better measurable outcomes by connecting them intelligently to the resources they need via intelligent connectivity.

While our initial focus is refugees, we would use this prize to accelerate our research into the parolee population in the USA as we believe there is significant scope for our integrated solution to reduce recidivism by helping parolees reintegrated into society.

The data for the impact of connecting parolees to the right resources to enable this are stark and we believe this could have a significant, measurable, impact on a vulnerable section of society as well as their broader community.

One of the core drivers for Symmitree was the question: how can we disrupt poverty?

Our solution was focused on giving scalable tools to enable capital formation through intelligent connectivity and we believe that, with a lot of hard work, the right partners and some luck we have the potential to measurably and positively impact the lives of a billion people in the next decade, transforming communities for the better.

We would use the Morgridge prize to accelerate research into our proposal for large scale multilateral structured financing mechanism that could potentially scale this from helping millions to hundreds of millions globally.

We believe that with the right structures, this could allow anyone to invest in helping the displaced and deprived globally, underwritten by capital markets and providing the rails for money to flow to other great projects that have a huge, transformative, impact.