>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C. It's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. (techno music) >> 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 SiliconANGEL, the host of the Cube. We are getting all the stories on what's happening with the innovation and entrepenuership in our societal nonprofits and/or innovation in government. We hear Peter Prix is the OneRelief app founder, onereliefapp.com, OneRelief 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 OneRelief, the OneRelief app. What we do is let people like you and me make quick donations, micro donations to disaster relief aid. So after emergency has struck, Hurricane Maria, 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 gift, but there's no easy way. So what we do with the OneRelief web app is we let people like you and me easily, with the click of a button, make quick donations that supports certified disaster relief agencies on the ground. >> And you guys are a start up here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. >> Exactly, we're a startup here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. >> Great, well I'm really bullish and I think crowdsourcing has opened up the democratization of giving, which has been phenomenal. But there's some scale issues, now there's ten zillion apps, certainly GoFundMe, we know about those things. They're kind of peer-to-peer. You know, friend has to socialize with that but you know, 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. Do you guys solve that problem? >> Yes, so 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 in OneRelief is we provide a marketplace, a platform that is certifying charities with confirmed 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 a community. You get visuals, you get video of what's happening on the ground. And you get feedback at the end of the disaster of what has actually been achieved with the money you've donated. >> So you close in the loop from the giver, from the journey of the money to the destination, 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's 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 the next time another disaster happens to donate again. >> Create some reliability. You're essentially verifying the end points of where the cash goes. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> How's it going? How far along are you guys? Sounds like a great idea, I think it's an awesome idea. Getting a little dashboard, seeing the impact, make people feel good, 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 are 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've 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 it's people like you and me small donations that have an impact of changing the world. And what the OneRelief app is really special and good at it's the speed at what this happens. So, a disaster strikes, within hours, the fundraiser's online on social media and people can donate. >> And one of the great things about us covering Gov Cloud, we've observed that bringing a modern stack like cloud you can actually radically transform these industries that have technology going in some cases so antiquated they don't 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, whether a thousand people donate or a million people donate at the same time it's running on a serverless cloud. >> 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, PeaceTech? >> 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 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 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 us we've reported on SiliconANGLE is the societal entrepreneurship market is booming in D.C. Can you comment about what it's like here? I mean, is that right? Obviously Silicon Valley where we live you get a lot of the tech alpha tech guys out there. But here it's like non-profits. What 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, D.C. Is the best place for us to be at. It's a mix of government, non-profits, and foundations that come in. There's a lot of, actually a lot of young startups coming up, impact startups. There's lots of coworking spaces. And we can really feel it. 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, is booming. Can you share any anecdotes, is it booming, is it just emerging? What's your thoughts? >> Societal entrepreneurship. Yes, what the OneRelief platform really does, it allows everyone to give. It is enabling every citizen in the world to make a quick donation an amount that every one 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 how OneRelief is different and how it is not like all the other platforms out there, how we are the one stop shop in a marketplace that is connecting people who want to do good with receiving charities on the ground. >> How do you compare and contrast to say these other crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms? >> Yes, on the one hand there's 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 are right in between. We are 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 end point, the relief or whatever. >> Peter: Yeah! >> Good use of blockchain? No? Are you thinking about that? >> Oh no, 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 that is accepting micro donations in cryptocurrency. And secondly, we are looking at blockchain technology and running a hyperledger project at the moment to see how we can accelerate the speed at how long it takes to get the donation from when a person makes it into the receiving bank account on the ground in country xyz in the world. >> A whole new infrastructure wave is coming, you're seeing it decentralize applications and hardened end-to-end apps like you guys. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. >> Well, congratulations Peter. Thanks for joining me here. This is the Cube Conversation on the ground here in Washington, D.C. where emerging markets and nonprofits and just ventures for good are now the new entrepreneurship craze in Washington, D.C. It's the center of the action and with cloud and modern software and blockchain and things of that nature you can make it happen. Thanks for watching. (techo music)