RebelBase: The Innovation-Enabling Platform

The potential to remake inadequate systems is present in our organizations and communities, waiting to be released. But most of us never get the chance to build our muscles for civic innovation. We lack accessible platforms for learning by doing. If we do get the chance to try, we’re left to hunt and peck for critical resources, then access them in isolation from one another, as we strive to figure out how to get a project off the ground.

Tech, used differently, can change this: by putting the tools within reach, guiding us through key steps, and connecting us to collaborators and supporters. The capacity abounds, but time is short. If we don’t bust open who gets to try their hand at fashioning the way we do things tomorrow, with access to resources and networks and the chance to try and fail, then all our good intentions for diversity and broken glass ceilings, can only fail to change the game. Unless we equip organizations everywhere to democratize innovation, we forfeit the future.

Until now, schools, employers, and community organizations have lacked the wherewithal to open up project-based learning for potential changemakers on a systematic basis. Canned videos combined with a few brilliant instructors or coaches can only go so far. Everywhere, real-world opportunities remain severely limited for people who imagine a better way to practice launching needed solutions.

Communities need the experiments civic innovators create, and civic innovators need experience creating them. Our research with young people in eight countries, supported by the Open Society University Network, has shown that there is intense demand among learners for real-world experience tackling broken systems around them. This should be no surprise. In the face of this rapid skills obsolescence, now compounded by automation (Yang, 2018), the capacity to respond flexibly to changing problems becomes vital.  Across the economy, the “shelf life” of skills is rapidly shortening (Tishko, 2018), as job requirements change. Eighty-seven percent of managers now say they either are experiencing skill gaps now or expect them within the next five years, according to a McKinsey report. This puts a premium on the capacity to reinvent systems and solve emerging problems. 

Fortunately, the skills that enable learners to thrive in the face of change can be inculcated systematically through opportunities to practice civic innovation. Unfortunately for conventional learning methodologies, this requires not just new material, but a radical shift: from regurgitating existing knowledge, to the systematic application of flexible, future-ready skills through projects with purpose.This points the way forward. Make project-based learning in civic innovation—the kind where teams develop real-world solutions of their own—widely accessible in education and on the job. 

Like a pack full of tools and maps for uncharted territory, our SaaS platform guides users as they collaborate on problems that don’t have preset solutions, building their capabilities as they go. The secret lies in our “building block” modules, which guide users through the process of building out a solution, module by module.  

Here’s how it works. The building block modules walk innovators and innovation teams through each part of the process of developing an innovation that solves a problem. These building blocks require no prior knowledge. Each one includes simple explanations, examples, and worksheets users can fill out to help them with an essential activity. This makes complex tasks like market assessment or financial modeling accessible, by breaking them down into easy-to-follow parts. It transforms innovation into a guided adventure. 

The way the building blocks work is easy to see concretely in this 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqvgdib3w6E. To understand this from the perspective of an innovator, consider Stacy Burnett, a RebelBase user working to create a new organization to better serve formerly incarcerated people like herself, After winning a recent competition round with her project, called Just2Disrupt, she wrote:

"RebelBase facilitated collaboration on business building that cannot be duplicated via sharing a GoogleDoc. The templates are designed to keep early-stage entrepreneurs focused on key elements of a strong business case, saved us a lot of time—when standing in a vortex of questions and fragmented knowledge, the RebelBase builders enabled us to prioritize tasks, develop concepts, and formalize our knowledge into manageable blocks. RebelBase converts our theories into something workable like a Lego set, where each piece can stand alone, build a block, and be moved around to be part of something new."

[Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7049802749466562560?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop] 

The “Lego set” Burnett describes becomes a shared structure for collaboration and support. As users complete the building block modules on RebelBase, they flesh out projects and engage with others to refine their solutions and model their impact. In this way, the platform facilitates connections between innovators and mentors who possess complementary skills, fostering collaboration, idea sharing, and mutual learning. The platform also supports collaboration across participants, alumni communities, and the larger community to support civic innovators well after they have launched their first experiment. This creates a dynamic and supportive ecosystem that fuels innovation.

Expanding the power, reach and versatility offered by a virtual learning environment, the platform is based on a modular architecture that offers enormous flexibility. Early adopters brought our first version to 26 organizations in 13 countries. This has enabled organizations using the platform to create distinct pathways depending on the needs of participants in their programs. 

RebelBase serves people who see pressing problems, but would not otherwise have the opportunity to create real-world solutions. So far, it has served 5,000 everyday innovators in 13 countries in places as culturally and socio-economically diverse as Central and South Asia, Europe, and Latin America. By opening up access to the process of civic innovation for these potential problem solvers, the platform enables inclusive and diverse innovation ecosystems.

Unlike applications that focus on enabling people to adopt a specific model or serve only those who already know how, RebelBase empowers regular people to identify problems and gives them the tools to derive their own solutions. By providing a shared framework for building solutions together, it empowers them to guide the rest of us with those solutions. This  fosters creativity and innovation while enabling positive social and economic change. A facilitator who uses RebelBase to enable civic innovation in the Middle East described this in a recent “What’s Next” feature in Stanford Social Innovation Review:

“Whether it’s environmental, gender, education—any kind of project—you can apply it on RebelBase. Whether you are an expert in entrepreneurship or a beginner, it educates you,” says Dalia Najjar, co-instructor of the social entrepreneurship program at Al-Quds Bard College Palestine (AQB). She has worked on the platform during the past two years in the roles of user, teacher, and trainer.

“It is giving access to entrepreneurs all over the world who don’t really have access. You can introduce investors and funders to this platform when your project is ready or grant access to team members for a specific role and build a team,” she adds.

Najjar gives the example of a young person who participated in this, and what it did for him:

"One of the platform’s success stories belongs to AQB student Ahmad Hijawi, who created CleanPalCo, a project to address the problem of pollution and lack of building supplies in Palestine by using discarded rubber tires, stone waste, and water to make products such as bricks, tiles, and rubber flooring. The project, built on RebelBase, won Best Student Company 2021 at Arab regional competition INJAZ (meaning “achievement” in Arabic) and was nominated to compete on a global level, attracting investors and seed money to start a company."

(Source: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/democratizing_social_entrepreneurship. Accessible at https://rebelbase.co/from-ssir-democratizing-social-entrepreneurship/). 

The platform’s power is simple, really. Equip people close to the ground, who see where the tangles and the brambles are, and can figure out how we're all going to get around them or even make use of them. 

Today more than 2500 projects have been created on RebelBase. To learn more about the stories of these users and their projects, see the recent “video case studies” from the Open Society University Network about RebelBase users, see: https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/newsroom/becoming-a-changemaker-osun-students-and-faculty-use-video-cases-to-spotlight-dynamic-projects-in-palestine-and-bangladesh-2022-12-06

In 2016, our CEO, Alejandro, co-created a youth program near where he went to high school. The mission was deeply personal. As he has said:

Growing up as a nerd of mixed roots in the inner city, I converted my otherness to fuel. I became obsessed with enabling outsiders like me with a space to discover our powers and learn to use them.

The youth program held its demo day in a sweltering classroom in East Harlem. That was the day we swore to build a platform that enabled anyone anywhere to create that space in their communities. The youth program had proved transformative. We had done it where we had roots. Now we needed to enable people everywhere to do the same in their local soil.   

That’s what we’ve done. A recent article in the Dhaka Tribune describes the project a team there created on RebelBase to serve parents and children in the city’s Korail slum: (https://tbsgraduates.net/do-classroom-ideas-work-in-the-real-world-brac-students-find-out/). Korail might seem far from East Harlem. But the people we call “rebels,” people prepared to tackle what’s broken in their own communities and organizations by launching experiments to replace it, are everywhere.Such rebels depend on our tools being accessible and fun to use. So we’ve built a mission-aligned team (for a quick intro see this 2-minute video) with skills in tech, data, content, experiential learning, UX/UI, and social entrepreneurship 

The people making this possible are not just those making the tools, but also the ones innovating their use around the world. Facilitators using RebelBase to expand access have built a growing global community of practice. (For a glimpse of how that community thinks, see this panel featuring facilitators in Bishkek, Bogotá, and Dhaka). As this community grows, we collaborate to evolve our practice for enabling innovators in their ecosystems. This practice is supported with extensive research and analysis by our data team (see https://rebelbase.co/surviving-the-future-of-work/ and the forthcoming paper “Building Future-Proof Skills through Social Entrepreneurship Experiential Learning” to be presented at the 9th EMES International Research Conference). 

This summer, a dozen representatives of institutions in ten countries will be meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria. We will facilitate workshops on how we’re using the common platform and tool kit to enable rebels to innovate social and environmental change both enterprepreneurially and inside existing organizations. As our cofounder Tuba Erbil likes to remind us, it wasn’t common where she grew up to dream of launching something better, but we need those dreams, and we need to make it normal for people to make them real. Sebastian Groh, a Solver who leads work on RebelBase in Bangladesh and will take part in the sessions in Sofia, puts it this way: “What happens if we miss it? What happens if we only look at the Silicon Valleys and the Tel Avivs and the Berlins of this world?” Using RebelBase to connect and cross-pollinate our work with potential innovators around the world, we’re striving to make sure we don’t.

For the next phase in the climb, we need the network and resources of MIT Solve, combined with the mission-alignment around enabling underrepresented innovators and entrepreneurs.  

RebelBase currently enables underrepresented founders in thirteen countries. We have measurable results that show the impact this has, and are intent on making it available much more widely, which will mean going beyond the DIY approach that got us this far. Though we’re proud of what we’ve pulled off through good will, sweat equity, and the support of a few impact investors, this is the time to go beyond that. The recognition and resources provided to solvers can help us bring the solution to new populations.

We are eager to leverage Solve's resources and expertise to improve our platform. For example, we’re eager to build a connectable database of living cases on the platform. We aim to add new building blocks for topics in demand. To respond to user demand and advance our mission of accessibility and democratization, we plan to expand community functionality and integrate contextual nudges and integrated assessments into the RebelBase system for project-based learning. These elements will guide learners through “next step” activities, support tutors in giving effective feedback, enable assessment of the results, and draw from assessments to improve nudges.

We further believe that the Solve network can help us reach and serve more people crying out for what the platform provides. Our goal is no less than for any employee, student, or community member who sees a better way of doing things to have access to a RebelBase hub, so their organization or community benefits from the solutions they can help create, given access to the platform. We believe that Solve's platform can provide us with the guidance and support we need to refine our strategies and build key partnerships to make the platform accessible to more populations.

As a Solver, we are particularly excited about the opportunity to receive leadership coaching and strategic advice from experts in the Solve and MIT networks. We believe that this advice will be invaluable in helping us overcome any barriers that we may encounter, and in developing the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve our goals.

Finally, we believe that Solve's platform can help us gain visibility in the media and at conferences. This visibility will be critical in raising awareness of our platform and reaching new users. RebelBase is a method and a vision, not just a tool, and we feel responsible for leading with that vision. After a set of recent podcast appearances, our CEO has been asked to host a new, twice-monthly podcast series on ITSP, called “What if Instead?” Increasing exposure will us to connect with potential partners and supporters, as we build a reality in which anyone facing broken systems has the tools and the community to launch experiments to replace the way we do things today.

Our patent-pending (Patent Pub. # 20220044582) building block modules provide a modular approach to launching innovation, guiding innovators as they create solutions that meet urgent social and environmental needs. We patented the system and methods so that we could draw the investment needed to make these tools available everywhere. Experts make their methodology available on RebelBase, with attribution, to make their practices accessible in the rebel way, which means easy for users to learn as they build.

Prior to RebelBase, there was a lack of guided support for students, employees, and community members who sought to innovate and bring their ideas to life. Our tech-enabled methodology changes this, by making it possible for those whose experiments can remake everything—finally, in a scalable way. Unlike other platforms that cater to people who already know how to innovate, RebelBase provides step-by-step guidance, breaking down the entire innovation process and ensuring that every team member has access to the resources and knowledge they need to succeed. This enables “ordinary people” to innovate solutions to remake industries and meet the needs of communities.

Each module is designed to address a specific aspect of creating a solution, like testing a prototype or figuring out how to reach the people you serve. Innovators choose the modules that best suit their project and combine them to create a holistic solution. We continuously update and improve the modules based on new trends and best practices in social innovation, ensuring that our innovators have the most advanced tools to address social and environmental challenges.

This flexible system enables us to overcome geographical barriers and reach a wider audience with our resources. Additionally, it enables us to gather continuous feedback from our users, which we leverage to improve our platform over time. By fostering a sense of community among our user base, we encourage active participation and commitment, which drives engagement and ultimately helps us to build a global network of problem solvers. Through this network, we work to catalyze innovation and entrepreneurship on a large scale, creating positive impacts for individuals, communities, and societies worldwide.

Next, we are developing an interactive set of "living cases" that showcase successful models and enable climate tech innovators to learn from each other. Unlike canonical examples, our living cases will be searchable by various factors such as SDG, model, stage, or other determinants, allowing innovators to refer to experiments already conducted and learn from the experience of others. This will be more than just a referenceable set of wikis or cases, but dynamic sites of interaction where innovators can exchange ideas and insights, creating a powerful network of collaboration.

As Eban Goodstein, RebelBase subscriber and founder of the Bard MBA in Sustainability puts it: "What RebelBase does is it take you through the framework, the rigorous framework that you need to take an idea from an idea to something that has meat on the bones, and can be evaluated as a potential business. There's nothing like it in the world." 

Our guiding star is to enable our users to transform from placeholders trained to operate yesterday’s models, to people who tackle problems by collaborating to develop solutions. This requires driving a change in mindset and access globally. We work to enable more people to experience the world not as a given, but as something they participate in making. We aim to make it normal, when facing what should just work differently, to try one’s hand at building the alternative. 

We know we’re succeeding in two ways: first, when our users tell us in anonymous surveys that their experience using RebelBase has transformed their mindset and capabilities, and second, when they launch thousands of fully-developed projects, like the ones browsable on our site, in their effort to solve real-world problems.

Proud as we are of our initial successes achieving these goals for real people around the world, we see it as highly urgent to broaden access to this. So our goal over the next five years is no less than to make the platform and the space it provides available everywhere. That means making it possible for a range of organizations—governments, employers, schools, chambers of commerce, etc.—to make it available to the populations they serve. There is a narrow window for remaking our industries and communities in this decade, so that they are regenerative and contain opportunities for everyone. In view of that urgency, we must enable tens of thousands of experiments around the world, because the world needs the power this unleashes at scale. Our goal is to make this knowledge available in the workplace, in schools, and in civic life, so that everyone can benefit from an entrepreneurial mindset. We believe that by providing individuals with the resources and support they need, we can create a more equitable and innovative society. It unleashes extraordinary power when instead of just fighting for a seat at the table built yesterday, we expand the chance to hew new tables of our own design.

We use surveys and data analytics to quantify, track progress, and improve user experience. We also work with educators and organizations to integrate entrepreneurship education into existing programs and curricula. In particular, we pay special attention to the skills and mindset our users gained through collaboration-based learning and to the projects they launch. 

Our users describe a transformation in their mindset when they discover their power to reinvent. We measure this in two ways: surveying our users during and after structured programs and also analyzing the platform usage data such as if users continue to use the platform or complete more than assigned content, and so forth.  Each season we survey a growing pool of these users to assess whether they are developing the hard skills, soft skills, and mindset to identify failing systems, prototype, test, build diverse teams, pitch, and conduct other activities crucial for designing and growing real world experiments. We then analyze the skills and mindset our users build as they build solutions in their communities and their industries. Here is a summary of our research and analysis. 

As this research with users around the world now shows, with access to a collaborative space and modular guidance, 90+% gain or retain the confidence to launch something new. Majorities master skills and mindset to collaborate on diverse teams. 

• Eighty-four percent (84%) say they gained or retained a strong capacity to recognize opportunities in business and social innovation, where others might see barriers. 

• Another 84% report that they made leaps or had preexisting strength in critical thinking, defined as the capacity to comprehend social, economic, and political behavior by breaking down ideas in a way that allows for unbiased and informed decision-making.

• When it comes to calculated risk-taking, the capacity to assess the risks and rewards associated with key decisions, 83% say they either made leaps or started out strong.

One of the platform’s surprising benefits is that users across regions compare notes and learn from each other. This is reflected quantitatively: Eighty-six percent (86%) report that they gained or retained the capacity to bring diverse skills and backgrounds to produce innovative thinking in a group or on a team. (In the final case, almost half say they started out with strong collaboration abilities). It also takes shape in a qualitative way that facilitators have captured in reflection boards with platform users. 

In contrast to approaches that seek to disseminate top down solutions cooked up in Washington or Brussels, Users draw on a global brain trust to plant in local soil. In a recent discussion via video, young people from a cohort in the Middle East presented the model they had built on RebelBase for addressing violence against women. A chorus of voices from Europe and Asia responded, describing what they faced in their own communities. A major goal is to scale this opportunity for our users to build solutions from the bottom up, learn from each other, and pollinate and support each other’s projects.

We’re proud not only of the mindset and skills our students build, but also of the projects this has enabled, such as those covered in recent documentaries about our users in South Asia and the Middle East. (See https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/newsroom/becoming-a-changemaker-osun-students-and-faculty-use-video-cases-to-spotlight-dynamic-projects-in-palestine-and-bangladesh-2022-12-06). 

Our impact comes through enabling regular people to launch thousands of civic innovations that would not otherwise be launched. “Rebels” innovate access to fresh food in cities and to airports for refugees. They rethink rural health care and childcare in urban slums, energy amid rolling blackouts and shrinking coasts. 

Enabling our users to launch and grow projects that meet pressing needs is central to our theory of change. Even more fundamental is the mindset change they take away and the “battle-tested” capabilities they build—because these carry over to successive projects and create ripple effects. 

This emphasis on the capabilities users develop is reflected in the questions we ask in our research with users around the world. Did they gain the determination to take on tough problems by launching new solutions, the confidence to start a new initiative or launch an innovation, the capacity to work on teams with people of other cultures? Did they grow in their capacity for collaboration, critical thinking, openness, perseverance, flexibility, opportunity recognition, and calculated risk-taking?

We don’t have the capacity to measure what these experiments achieve, but we can study the “powers” our users build. By studying those powers, we get a window on the potential unleashed. 

To structure the way we invest in enabling change, we use the following logic model. For brevity, we’ll leave out the inputs that make these activities possible, from creating building blocks to engaging partner communities to use them.

ACTIVITIES:

• Building blocks completed and iterated (platform generated data)

• Project feedback and iteration (platform generated data / evaluator ratings)

• Posting on forums (platform generated data)

• Events (platform generated data)

OUTPUTS 

• Projects on the platform (platform generated data / according to due diligence criteria)

• Interactions with peers and mentors: feedback provided, changes made, ratings generated, relationships formed (platform generated data)

• Network density (platform generated data)

OUTCOMES

• Hard and soft skills development (pre-assessment and post-assessment)

• Entrepreneurial mindset development (pre-assessment and post-assessment)

• Quality of projects at the end of the pipeline (as rated by judges / facilitators)

Unlike legacy solutions, our innovation-enabling platform guides teams each step of the way, with plug-and-play functionality and ease of expansion. The modular system lets subscribers start simple, then mix, match, and modify modules for groups within the organization. (See the image below for an overview of the tracks into which these building blocks are organized). We have filed our first patent (Pub. # 20220044582) for Systems and Methods for Launching Innovation. 

The tech we use in the frontend is ReactJS and for the backend we use Phoenix Framework as well as .NET. ReactJS and .NET are widely used. Phoenix Framework, which is in Elixir, is an emerging technology and it excels at building concurrent applications. For the database we use PostgreSQL. All our services are hosted using Amazon Web Services. We mainly use EC2 and Lambda services, among others.

When we break wide open who gets to experiment, we gain an extraordinary advantage: what our CEO calls the “outsider’s edge.” 

Everywhere we need to equip people beyond the usual suspects to launch innovation. In the US just 18% of Latinx people say they’re unconcerned about climate change, compared to a whopping 32% of non-Latinx Americans (Pew). In Bangladesh an EV revolution means millions of rickshaws, where they’re parked and how they’re charged. A civic innovator from Kyrgyzstan, who recently won a prize with the project she built on RebelBase, created a project called Not a Shame, about eliminating the stigma of teen pregnancy. The project was deeply rooted in her culture, but it drew collaborators from all over the world. ( https://rebelbase.co/bard-central-asia-university-and-bard-student-team-creates-game-changer-for-teen-pregnancy/). 

At RebelBase, we serve, and are, rebels: people who turn the outsider’s edge into a tool for fashioning something new and better. The company is women-owned, minority-owned, and led by a Muslim-American immigrant woman and a chicano man. Our management team is majority BIPOC. We believe that the tools and the community needed for building real-world solutions should be accessible to all, regardless of background, education, or financial resources. But we must go further than that. We must create a globally accessible infrastructure that makes it possible for people facing the toughest situations to imagine and build something better. 

We work with partners who can bring RebelBase to these populations. As our facilitator at a Belarussian university in exile puts it: “The fewer opportunities our students in Belarus have, the more insulated the regime becomes—and the easier it gets to build self-perpetuating repressive mechanisms that rob the country of any viable future.”

Next, we’re working with partners to develop a climate tech accelerator for women from the global south, that will run on the platform. As our CEO asked it in a recent speech:

The way we do things today is already history. The only question is who gets to replace it with what they dream.

What if we used the tools of the digital age to create a modern circulatory system of talent and ideas? 

I can tell you one thing for sure: unless we change the access equation for who gets to envision the way things work and try their hand at making it real, we won’t make the leap. No chance.

Maybe she’s sitting in a cubicle or working on a job site. Or in some classroom taking notes on the words of a guy who talks the way I do, because she’ll be tested on how he thinks things ought to work. 

If we are ever really going to set the world rightside up, she needs the chance to rebuild it the way she envisions. She’s gotta have a well-designed playground to fashion and test alternatives. She needs talent and partners and resource-providers at every stage. She needs tools for digging and building, for modeling a different way of doing business or of organizing society. 

That’s why we built RebelBase.

The RebelBase software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform equips subscribing organizations with a turn-key solution for both teaching these innovation skills and for administering forums, incubators, competitions and innovation challenges, courses, workshops and trainings. 

By leveraging our platform, organizations can easily configure programs from short innovation events to yearlong accelerators, using RebelBase to engage talent, build skills, and grow cultures of innovation. 

Subscribing organizations draw on our methodology and functionality for showing teams how to innovate, rather than simply providing a place for people who are already good at developing innovations and making the case. This opens up innovation beyond the usual suspects and unlocks the most underutilized asset in any  organization: people who could collaborate to improve how things are done but may not wake up in the morning knowing how to do so.

The organization, such as a university or company, subscribes to RebelBase to receive a private online space (or “hub”) for their members to convene and work together with access to the learning modules, collaboration tools, and networking functionality. All hubs come with a core set of features, including learning modules, event organizing tools, community forums, and ideation boards. Additional features become available at various subscription levels. 

These customers subscribe to RebelBase to establish hubs that help them build innovation ecosystems that activate people, build community engagement, and launch innovative solutions. Instead of cobbling together incubators, training programs, mentorship initiatives, pitch events, and funding opportunities from scratch, subscribers get an integrated toolset. 

Hub subscribers seek to drive performance at their organizations by training and equipping their members (students, employees, etc.) to be more entrepreneurial. RebelBase provides the tools members need to become entrepreneurial along with a suite of toggles and tools designed to help hub subscribers make the most of their entrepreneurship programs.

RebelBase is designed to be used in a variety of formats, from a single-day workshop to a semester-long course. As they prepare for their programs, hub administrators can select tracks like ideation, validation, and growth — with “builders” that pace employees, students, or community members through each stage of developing an innovation.

The platform also provides add-on services ranging from program design to assessments and analytics that make it easy for rebels, hubs, and alliance members to earn distinction as they launch new solutions, develop entrepreneurial problem-solvers, engage innovative communities, and forge connections within and between hubs. 

RebelBase sells to employers, competitions, and university networks, and chambers of commerce with specific needs in sustainability, social responsibility, and innovation. 

Customers subscribe to make RebelBase’s tools available to users in their communities. All hubs come with a core set of features, including learning modules, event organizing tools, community forums, and ideation boards. Additional features become available at various subscription levels. Analytics add-ons are sold independently and are available to subscribers at any level. 

Our revenue model is B2B subscription. Licenses are charged per organization size and preferences per year on a tier based scale. Standard B2B pricing tiers up from $48K per year, with starter packages available. We charge incrementally for add-on services including advanced analytics and program design. Our model projects total revenues to be $453K in 2023, $922K in 2024, $2M in 2025, $7.9M in 2026, and $43.6M in 2027.

Following predecessors from Bloomberg to Qualtrix, RebelBase pursues a strategy that starts with business education and migrates to enterprise. Our initial marketing targets the overlap space where educational institutions invest in the market demand for project-based learning. This includes not only classroom applications but also incubators and accelerators, competitions, technical assistance, and project-based programs for bottom-up innovation within organizations.

As the innovation platform space has heated up, investors have funded early stage rounds for entrants such as OneValley, IdeaWake, Spigit, and Innocentive. There’s a wider $6.2B opportunity to power the future of work and learning, by taking innovation management mainstream. To unlock this opportunity, we need a platform that breaks open who gets to replace yesterday’s solutions. That’s why RebelBase sold subscriptions in each tier before we spent a dime on marketing. 

Potential revenues may well exceed our estimates, given the acceleration of trends that favor our model. A decade ago, the share of companies with incubators and accelerators surged from 2% in 2010 to 44% in 2015, as more look to bottom-up-innovation to survive and thrive. On the education side, colleges faced with preparing students for today’s workplace went from 400 entrepreneurship, education and training programs in 1995 to over 2,000 in 2012. But these growth trends were prior to the global pandemic, the great resignation, the mainstreaming of AI, and the spread of ESG. 

Our annual recurring revenue is available upon request. By generating quantifiable results for customers we drove 100% retention. Early adopters brought the platform to 26 organizations in 14 countries as early adopters. We currently have $200K in pipeline opportunities with leading organizations. We’ve secured international ClimateTech related accelerator LOI in Q2 2023 from a national development bank, to support women launching clean-tech innovations in South Asia.

To date we have raised $330K in pre-seed from impact investors. We can make the names of these investors available upon request. We have also enabled nonprofit subscribers to raise more than $500,000 in incremental funds for programs created to run on RebelBase. Through the significant commitment on the part of our team we have been able to keep our burn rate low, at $7K/month. We plan to increase that as we raise capital and invest in growth. We’re now raising $1.2M of financing in the form of SAFE notes to reach next product and sales milestones. Proceeds will grow the development team and build capabilities in sales and marketing to support partnerships and integrations.