Swae for Cities

Soushiant is a social scientist and entrepreneur. His career spans the fields of policy making, management consulting, and entrepreneurship. He is a rising leader in the decentralized governance field whose work has gained international recognition. He is a recognized global practitioner in the fields of business innovation, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability having led global institutions (The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford University) and having built a successful innovation consulting practice (Tribeca Impact Partners). He earned his Masters in Public Policy, has published in The Guardian, The Financial Times and Bloomberg Business Week on those topics, is on Harvard Business Review and MIT Technology Review's Advisory Council’s, and a board advisor to Biocarbon Engineering, a reforestation startup replanting a billion trees per year with drones. His career has been focused on creating and supporting scaleable ventures advancing social and environmental impact. 

As we enter an uncertain era due to COVID-19, we’re facing new decisions everyday. We're in a time where people value and understand that coming together to listen to all of the relevant solutions and perspectives is imperative to success. Top-down decision making, where leaders are the only ones who have a say, is outdated and leads to biased and poor quality decisions. 

Swae transforms how citizens participate in complex decisions that affect them and their communities. It is an AI-powered platform for idea creation and inclusive decision-making - we deploy it inside companies and cities to increase unique perspectives, boost inclusion, and enable a bottom-up and merit-based competition to select the best ideas from. Swae's AI and methodology debiases decisions, brings more voices to the table, allows you to source brilliant ideas from citizens and turn them into winning policy decisions efficiently.

Today's most important decisions are made top-down, through hierarchical process and representatives. But research finds that top-down decision-making is more likely to have unchecked cognitive biases because small, closed, non-diverse teams suffer from more groupthink than diverse and open teams. Bias limits the quality of solutions available to all of us. Citizens who experience decision-making behind closed doors are disengaged, mistrustful, and frustrated with government. They feel excluded and want to have a say in the evolution of their city's policies and services. Most cities don’t have the processes or technologies to include everyone’s voices equally or to try to ensure that inputing ideas are relevant and actionable.

In a world where everything is accelerating, this outdated status quo fails to move at the same pace, and doesn't leverage distributed expertise in sourcing solutions to challenges, leaving everyone feeling that governments are slow and unresponsive. In 2019, the Pew Research Centre found that 51% of people across 27 countries are dissatisfied with how democracy is working and resentful of democratic outcomes. In 2017, the Edelman Trust Barometer a decline in trust below 50% across all social institutions. This problem affects billions and threatens the health and prosperity of democracy everywhere.

Swae [Sway] is an idea management platform and decision-making workflow augmented by AI. Using Swae cities can harness the collective intelligence of citizens, collaborate, and grow ideas into decisions like never before. Swae enables teams and organizations to make collective decisions over the internet quickly, conveniently, and safely.

Swae can can turn the problem on its head, by creating an inclusive and competitive process to select the best ideas from, increasing the diversity of input, helping governments remove bias in decisions and boost engagement through a bottom-up, inclusive, and data-driven decision-process. 

Swae’s AI helps people turn their half-baked opinions into well written proposals. 

Swae platform provides collaboration, debate, and voting features to help users add their expertise to proposals, uncover risks, and improve the content to make ideas more decision ready. Proposal engagement acts as signal for determining an idea’s merit.  Administrators can configure metrics to allow ideas with the most engagement to organically escalate to a review. 

By combining anonymity, artificial, and collective intelligence, Swae’s protocol and technology help cities and organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders, discover new unrevealed ideas, collectively build bottom-up solutions to the policy challenges we face, improving overall decision quality. 

Swae’s platform helps provide people who are traditionally marginalized or excluded from participating in important and consequential decisions – often due to lack of strong language and presentations skills, lack of time to participate physically, lack of influential networks to access decision-makers or lack of expertise in navigating complex bureaucracies – giving them a chance to be heard, ensuring their unique insights and expertise are articulated effectively and stand a fair chance to influence the agenda.

These people are the primary beneficiaries and they exist in organizations, communities, cities and countries. Other beneficiaries include decision-makers - be they politicians and public policy experts or executives in companies and non-profit organizations - giving them access to collective intelligence and a pipeline of coherent, well-articulated bottom-up proposals, to help make more informed strategy, policy, and resource allocation choices.

To date we have worked with a over 20,000 users across North America, South America, and the Middle East (UAE) in a number of bottom-up decision making scenarios. Some of the organizations we have worked with thus far include: 

• MSF / Doctors without Borders (Canada) 
• Association of Cities and Mayors across Chile (Chile) 
• Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) 
• Etihad Airways (UAE)
• Bosch Foundation (Germany)

Swae seeks to elevate the voices of all people in a community or organization. The platform’s algorithms help enhance the quality of writing by pointing out biases, suggesting evidence and improving the language structure and grammar used. We’ve deliberately designed our AI to be used this way in order to level the playing field so that those with poorer language skills can also have an equitable chance at making their insights and ideas heard. We want to reverse the notion that only those at the top can have a say in the decisions that affect all of our lives.  

Soushiant (CEO) began working on Swae in 2016 because he lived the problem. He survived the inefficiencies and missed opportunities resulting from poorly designed decision-making processes while working in senior management roles inside small and large organizations. While working, he regularly witnessed how poor quality ideas, often motivated by politics and subjective opinions, gained institutional support and became policies/decisions that negatively impacted the organization and its stakeholders.

While researching the problem, Soushiant realized most of our decision-making processes are designed this way – top-down, driven by executives and optimized for efficiency. They consequently include a lot of cognitive biases that are unchecked and diminish the quality of the ideas coming from these processes, which are a disservice to the organization’s potential and the available but untapped collective intelligence that resides within them.  Given the times we live in, technologies we have access to, and the modern science about the potential of open innovation, collective intelligence, and diversity improving decision quality, he became inspired to try to “upgrade decision-making” and began experimenting with a new model to do things differently, to produce better outcomes.

We are motivated by our own experiences of living through biased decision-making processes in the workplace and in society at large and wanted to address these issues that millions of others experience daily.

My career has been focused on finding inventive and scaleable solutions to social progress. I’m driven to help citizens participate more directly in policy making and society's big decisions. Social injustice and abuse of power bother me deeply. Designing solutions that challenge dysfunctional institutions and systems that keep people out - one’s that allow elites to make decisions (often with impunity) and prioritize a narrow set of economic and social interests at the expense of the majority’s interests disenfranchising segments of society, and excluding people from having a meaningful voice – gives me purpose.

We’re passionate about leveraging technology to create a more inclusive society. We built Swae in order to push society forward, to introduce an important evolution in how we organize ourselves, and to help push past the current status quo of decision making via HIPPOs, representatives or through hierarchies. We imagine a world where 7 billion people have the opportunity and the tools to create powerful technical solutions to the problems we face.

Swae’s core team consists of political scientists, philosophers, technologists and entrepreneurs with expertise in governance innovation, game theory, organizational change and innovation management.

Soushiant, the CEO, is a successful entrepreneur and social scientist with strong domain expertise in governance and organizational design, decision-making, and policy creation - stemming from his BA in Political Science and Economics and his Masters degree in Public Policy. He launched his first company at age 19 and experienced his first buyout shortly thereafter. His thought leadership in social entrepreneurship and impact investing has been cited by thousands, and his work in the field of decentralized governance has earned him the top global recognition amongst over 14,000 other global applicants. His career has been laser focus on finding scaleable solutions to address social injustice. His drive, self-motivation, commitment to personal improvement have helped him understand his own biases, shortcomings that may be preventing growth. He is on an unstoppable mission to improve democracy. 

Su Yon Sohn is the CTO and in charge of charge of technological development, strategy, product improvements, recruitment and management of development team. Su Yon is an accomplished software engineer with over 11 years of experience in delivering cutting edge technical solutions for diverse sectors. She has led a core engineering team in a bootstrapped startup to growth and successful exit in the past. She joined Swae as CTO in June 2019 inspired to “upgrade decision making” and “replace unnecessary layers of management.”

Soushiant and his family fled Iran when he was 5, leaving everything behind during the Iran-Iraq war. Arriving in Canada poor, they struggled for years to integrate and move up. Their family’s struggles were amplified when their skills were overlooked by government, an experience many other immigrants went through when integrating. Witnessing first-hand the needs of those left behind go unacknowledged was deeply frustrating but cemented his purpose in life; to fight for those who can’t defend themselves. Since leaving Iran, he’s lived in 4 countries, always an outsider on the margin integrating inwards, making him acutely empathetic towards marginalized people.

His early life experiences gave him the motivation to build Swae, to help people participate more directly in societies key decisions, so they can advocate and gain the justice they may not have been afforded through representative intermediaries. Soushiant is an independent thinker, comfortable defending contrarian ideas and inconvenient truths. From a young age he learned to turn his interests and curiosities into experiments and ventures (first attempt at age 19). He’s launched 4 companies, and experienced his first buyout at 22. Despite set backs, he remains self-motivated and directed, not shying away from risks to pursue his convictions.

Soushiant is an analytical and independent thinker, self-driven community leader, and accomplished entrepreneur. In 2009, following the Iranian Presidential election scandal, Soushiant launched a public advocacy campaign convening the Iranian diaspora to stand in solidarity with the voiceless citizens demanding change inside Iran. The somber and moving images the community standing in solidarity from 14-night silent candle light vigil campaign went viral, attracting crowds of over 10,000 people nightly and gaining national and international recognition.  His continued leadership and public advocacy on Iran’s human rights abuses has earned the trust of thousands in his Iranian-Canadian community and recognition from the Prime Minister of Canada. He is the first Iranian Canadian and only 1 of 4 Canadians from thousands to win the UK Foreign Office’s Chevening Scholarship (a full ride scholarship for Masters in the UK). He was recruited as Head of Strategy and Operations of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford at age 28, managing a team of 10 and budgets of £5M. His thought leadership in social entrepreneurship and impact investing has been read widely, and his work in the field of political innovation has earned him the top global recognition amongst over 14,000 other global applicants.

There are a handful of competitors working on improving organizational decision-making and governance, whose tools aim to reflect the opinions of masses into key decisions. However, when these tools leverage AI, the end product oversimplifies opinions by synthesizing them into their lowest common denominator so they can be absorbed by management. As a result, these tools cannot ensure that management will act on the views or demonstrate the extent to which those views are shared by others in the organization or community, which severely limits engagement in the first place. 

Swae’s tool is the only one that combines three complementary functions - anonymization, AI, and crowd deliberation - to augment bottom-up expression, helping tap into the abundance of collective intelligence in a structured, manageable and efficient way, helping make decentralized input a productive complement to centralized decision-making. 

Swae's NLU/NLP algorithms help improve the quality of the initial solution, functioning as a proposal editor, to strengthen the proposal’s effectiveness. They suggest improved language formulation, internal/external data supporting the user's case, as well as uncover biases that could undermine the proposal's strength. Integrating NLP algorithms provides users efficiency gains in written expression, allowing disparate voices within an organization to augment their communications abilities and enhance their ability to influence the organizational agenda and strategy, levelling the playing field, so those with poorer language skills who do have valid insights can also have an equitable chance at making their ideas heard.

Our theory of change is the following:

1. Citizens are motivated to participate and engage in shaping the city/organization's agenda 
2. They value Swae’s fair rules, process, and trasparency and use it to build ideas
3. Swae amplifies their ability to express ideas persuasively with AI 
4. Citizens, while building their proposals, deliberate on other people’s ideas, providing collective input and scrutiny about ideas’ merits
5. The methodology helps decision-makers distinguish signal from noise (popular and well deliberated ideas vs opinions), graduating ideas up that merit consideration
6. Policy makers provide a public reason why one idea was selected over another
7. The more people use Swae, the more they learn the skills to communicate effectively, strategically, and structure their ideas for feedback and decision-making. 
8. Swae provide more voices and solutions to a problem, increasing the inclusivity, volume and quality of solutions 
9. Swae’s rules reinforce transparency, increasing trust in the decision-making process. Increased trust in the system leads to increased engagement, increased idea generation, increased skills development, and increased innovation capacity to tap into. All of these lead to increased productivity and success for the city or organization - creating a powerful positive cycle that has strong performance impacts.
10. As cities and organizations source all kinds of solutions from Swae, they begin making more consequential decisions this way and learning how to improve any decisions that may have had unintended consequences. Prolonged use increases user autonomy, agency while upskilling users about the decision-making process. 
11. Over time, a protocol for decision-making begins to reduce the need for layers of intermediaries required, leading to increased creativity, faster idea generation and decision-making, and more self-management, generating orders of magnitude of improvement from the status quo

We are currently serving 20,000 people. 

In one year, we’ll be serving up to 50,000-100,000 people.

In five years, that number will be as high as 10,000,000 - 100,000,000. 

Our goals within the next year are: 

• • launch Swae 2.0 web app (in progress)
  • create a natural language processing tool that would act as an AI writing editor to help people turn opinions and feedback into well structured, well written, and well supported proposals. (in progress)
  • Launch a priopietarty bias-detection algorithm  (in progress)
  • launch 10 more pilots with cities in the policy making context
  • Securing 10 paid annual and recurring enterprise clients.
  • raise $1-2mm
  • recruit COO

Our goals within the next five years are:

• • expand the team to 200-500 people
  • 100M daily users
  • Top 40 smart cities globally (in each continent) using Swae 
  • Top 20 leading companies globally (in each continent) using Swae
  • Have a leadership academy and fund / prize for disruptive ideas for governance 
  • Revolutionize decision-making and make it a norm for decision making to be a decentralized, inclusive experience. 

Financial: 

We face financial barriers because we’re still seeking funding. With our burn rate, we currently have enough runway for 1 year, but need more to expand to the magnitude we are aiming for.

Legal: 

The amount of customization and security risk assessments we needed to undergo was well beyond the scope of pilots we had completed to date. For example, we had to spend an addition ~5 months with our engineering team working on customizations including Single Sign-On (SSO) integration, Cyber Risk Assessments and Independently audited PEN Tests, and GDPR legal compliance, all of which we successfully passed prior to launch.

Technical: 

Building a nuanced app with an outsourced tech team 12 hours from your headquarters presents logistical and communication challenges. Communicating nuances has to be done through multiple channels. This often delays the creation of features, but the risk is building features that do not reflect the nuances, creating more clean up work to the code base and UI. On top of this, for the algorithms to reach the level of complexity we are aiming, will require both more time and technical effort as we continue to train the AI engine. 

Cultural: 

While some regions have the right intentions to innovate and develop products and services, there are still legacy systems, cultures and mindsets that constrain potential and limit the extent to which that region competes with global standards when it comes to customer centricity, cost, long-term thinking, appreciation of risk, and innovation tolerance.

Financial

• Identify sources of funding and apply to grants, funds, competitions, etc.

Technical 

• Improve our means of communication so that it is as efficient as possible. 

Legal 

• We will be compliant with legal barriers. As we operate with various governments and legal systems, it is crucial to us that we respect the regulations that apply to us. 

Cultural

• We will continue to gather complementary research that validates our hypotheses. If we are able to show that we understand and have considered the risks and challenges of bottom-up innovation, yet continue to believe in that it is the future of democracy, we will be able to build our credibility.

We have completed pilots with Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors without Borders) in Canada, Bosch Alumni Network in Germany, and Educate forLife (global). We are continuing to monitor how these organizations use Swae and support them where we can. 

We recently completed a company wide pilot with Etihad Airways. They were using Swae to to harness the collective creativity of the organization by allowing employees to propose and innovate solutions to address Etihad’s ongoing business challenges and untapped opportunities. 

We have also worked with CMinds, a tech-for-impact organization, and the local government of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. Our goal with this pilot was to give the citizens of Ciudad Juárez more of a voice within their community, and to increase local participation. The city has a history of violence, and we want to help shift the narrative to of the city to one of innovation and community.

Our key customers and beneficiaries are people who are traditionally marginalized or excluded from participating in important and consequential decisions, often due to lack of strong language and presentations skills, lack of time to participate physically, lack of influential networks to access decision-makers, or lack of expertise in navigating complex bureaucracies. These people exist in organizations, communities, cities and countries. Other beneficiaries include decision-makers—be they politicians and public policy experts, or executives in companies and non-profit organizations.

Our product is Swae, a platform that combines anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to give users the tools to participate in consequential and complex decisions that impact them. We give marginalized or excluded people a chance to be heard, to ensure their unique insights and expertise are articulated effectively and stand a fair chance to influence the agenda. We give decision-makers access to collective intelligence and a pipeline of coherent, well-articulated bottom-up proposals, to help make more informed strategy, policy, and resource allocation choices.

We partner with organizations and governments who believe in the mission of Swae, and want to support bottom-up decision making in their community. We build and customize the Swae platform to best fit their needs, and they then distribute it through their channels.

We plan to be financially sustainable by selling access to Swae as a SaaS platform. The price is $5-$15 per user per month depending on volume and duration.  Clients will receive Best Practices Consulting services included in that subscription service. Customers can also opt in for an annual license at a discount. In the future, we will also make money by selling access to our API. 

To date we have had $100K in revenues and over 20,000 users.  We do not yet have ARR to report. Prior to Covid-19,  we were growing our user base by 10%+ month-over-month but Covid-19 has wiped out nearly 60% of our revenues and ARR ($300K confirmed for 2020). 

The company was initially bootstrapped by the Founder, Soushiant. 

In May 2018, we won the Global Challenges Foundation inaugural 2018 New Shape Prize competition (1st place amongst 14,000 participants) for our model, approach, and technology design for governance and 21st century decision-making and were awarded a $600,000 USD non-dilutive grant as a result, which we’ve used to grow the company. 

In addition, in December 2019 we began raising a $500K pre-seed round.  We have closed $175,000 of the $500,000 from Angel Investors.

We will complete the remainder of our Pre-seed fundraising round in 2020 ($325K). We plan to raise a $1-2M Seed Round in 2021.

$500-600K Annually based on current team size, pace of development and footprint. 

We are applying for the Elevate Prize for 3 reasons: 

1. To garner insight from experts who are able to validate our business model and help scale our solution. We are always looking for how to improve our product, and would greatly benefit by hearing from a panel of experts who are experienced in scaling social enterprises.  
2. To gain exposure to new partners and potential future clients. Challenges like MIT Elevate are a great way to bring future global leaders together to share ideas. As a startup based in Vancouver, exposure to the American market would be beneficial to us. 
3. To receive financial support that will allow us to extend our runway and continue to expand. We are an ambitious team and have big goals that we hope to achieve in the coming years. Having a financial safety net will give us more assurance when making investments or taking risks.

• MIT Media Lab – partners to assess the impact of our pilots and implementations inside organizations. Upon successful completion of pilots and use cases, invest in generating academic research to assess the efficacy and quality of Swae's intervention. If we have been useful, turn that research into communications content and marketing materials to act as normative counter examples showcasing the fidelity and security of the process; showing how increased diversity of participation and potential breakthrough creative solutions invented through this methodology leads to particularly creative and strong outcomes. This will act to mitigate cultural resistance to distributed participation  and bottom-up decision making 

• World Economic Forum (WEF) - access to their platform to showcase us as a frontier technology for smarter cities and organizations; help us broker relationships with innovative government entities and companies leaders who are (or want to appear) willing to experiment with bottom-up decision making models in order to catalyze breakthrough innovations, strong cultures and unrevealed solutions. 

• C40 – Access to smart city leaders willing to experiment with this model for bottom-up and inclusive policy design and budgeting

• SideWalk Labs – willingness to experiment with new participatory models that show what the future of society and smart cities should look like.