AI-powered peace

The UN reports the highest number of violent conflicts since WWII, affecting one in four people globally. By 2030, over half of the world's poor will reside in countries marked by high levels of violence. To turn this around, we have to overhaul our traditional approaches and tools and disrupt how we do peace and security. At present, there is a growing gap between how technology is leveraged to wage war compared to how it is used to wage peace. Transcend exists to fill this gap through an easy to use, customizable stack of products that leverage recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our solutions decrease the time and cost required to turn out robust and accurate conflict analysis, evidence-based options for decision-making, and widespread civic participation and leadership, enabling policymakers, diplomats, and individuals to make peace faster and better.As we grow, we will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of peace practitioners across all phases of peacebuilding and peace processes, from prevention to implementation.

We are developing an end-to-end conflict analysis platform that accelerates conflict data gathering, data analysis, and option generation, reducing the time, funds, and human resources needed for peace and security practitioners and governments to make the best decisions towards ending conflicts. Currently, conflict analyses are extremely time and resource intensive. In particular, gathering relevant primary and secondary data and conducting analyses of that data can take several months. As the local context quickly evolves, insights are outdated as soon they are published. Our AI-powered platform will reduce that time from months to minutes, thereby freeing up time for the difficult tasks of convening conflict parties and weighing the pathways of tough decisions

While our conflict analysis platform is designed for multilateral, national, and local peacebuilding and conflict resolution practitioners to use, our solution ultimately serves the one in four people across the world who are at risk, in, and recovering from the devastation of widespread inter- and intra-state conflict. Transcend will address citizen needs by ensuring that the best data informs the best decision-making, pulling nations out of wars sooner while simultaneously engaging citizen expertise on how to get there in ways that have never been done before.

The Transcend team is made up of a mix of conflict analysts, peace practitioners, business operations leaders, and engineers committed to the vision of a world where conflict is mitigated with greater efficiency than war is waged. The Team Lead works every day with people affected by conflict, governments, international organizations, regional organizations, local non-profits, and belligerents. Her daily work includes building technical capacity and leveraging participatory approaches to conduct a variety of peace efforts including designing interventions that bring together stakeholders to end or prevent violent conflict. On a daily basis, the Team Lead includes civilians in conflict countries to design solutions, putting their leadership and guidance before hers. The Team Lead herself is a child survivor of a large-scale war and a former refugee and understands first hand how the inefficiencies in making peace affect us.

Transcend has produced a basic working prototype which requires further refinement and feedback to enhance and customize it to users. The analytical product has been shared with one UN Special Representative of the Secretary General, two other senior UN officials, 14 U.S. government officials, and 5 NGO peace researchers and practitioners for feedback which has been integrated.Many have expressed interest in using the pilot (beta) and are ready to support when it comes to navigating and penetrating complex procurement processes.

We have two goals in applying to Solve. We are looking for financial support to move our prototype into the next stage of development. To do this, Transcend requires working capital to officially support the launch of the pilot and incorporate user feedback. Major cost buckets include building a small team of engineers, development costs, as well as 3rd party software costs (incl. foundational models). We also deeply value the months of personalized support from experts, the ability to lean on talented peers in a close-knit community, and access to pro bono resources.

We are leveraging the recent advances in large language models, RAG technology, natural language processing, and AI-powered polling to completely redesign how peace practitioners carry out their work and increase their efficiency and effectiveness across all phases of the peace-building process, from prevention to implementation.

While there is debate as to whether or not peace and security interventions can be precisely measured, it is worth the effort to try anyway. How do you confirm that activities and outputs lead to outcomes that involve prevention? It’s not easy but here it goes. 

Given that the UN has released evidence and research-backed data that one in four people were affected by violent conflict in 2023, we can measure the success of Transcend’s efforts to prevent, mitigate, and end violent conflict by assessing ourselves against this metric in 10 years with updated UN data. If in ten years only 1 in 6 people are impacted by violence in areas where practitioners have used Transcend’s tools, we can pose that Transcend contributed to a reduction in the number of people affected by violent conflict. (However, there are other variables at play that make this impossible to state for certain.) For example, key metrics include the number of government officials and diplomats using our tech in their analysis and directly in their peace and mediation processes; the number of Transcend discovered recommendations in negotiated agreements; the perceptions of citizens impacted by violent conflict pre and post engagement with Transcend’s inclusion tools; etc.

If Transcend produces tools that allow UN and government officials to more efficiently analyze and understand the nuances of a particular conflict and include citizen perspectives and leadership, then the solutions will be more sustainable and the likelihood of a resurgence of violence will be mitigated; thus, reducing the proportion of populations subjected to violent conflict.

Our primary impact goal is to reduce the number of people who are affected by violent conflict. We will measure progress toward this goal by tracking the proportion of populations that are subjected to physical violence and sexual violence (UN SDG target 16.3.1).

Our solution is primarily powered by AI, machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, and AI-powered polling. Another crucial pillar of  our solution is quality data sourcing, production, scaffolding, and data analytics.

4 part-time staff:

• Ola Mohajer, Founder, CEO, subject matter expert. Refugee, war survivor. United States Institute of Peace and United Nations. Columbia University.

• Andrew Long-Higgins, subject matter expert. Center for Peace Diplomacy. Columbia University.

• Vacant, CTO (currently recruiting).

• Marcel Bock, Business Development, Operations. Former CEO U.S. Raisin. McKinsey. Columbia University.

• Kayla Huang. Engineer. White House Office of Science Technology. Various AI for start-ups. Harvard University (2024).

3 advisors: 

• One UN Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General. (Public affiliation pending ethics review). 

• Matt Diteljan, Entrepreneur, Investor. Former CEO Glacier Communications. 

• Allia Mohamed, CEO Open Igloo.

1 year.

Transcend was born out of the observation that a lack of access to the right information when they need it inhibits practitioner’s abilities to efficiently respond to, mitigate, and prevent conflict. Transcend was founded on the philosophy that increasing the success of efforts to end violent conflict is directly tied to the diversity of perspectives included in those efforts. Transcend believes that in order for this effort to be successful, this philosophy and a commitment to the inclusion of diverse perspectives has to permeate our organization’s leadership, workforce, culture and product. Our team includes 50% women, and is led by a woman; five nationalities and three languages; and people with disabilities.  We are well versed on the difference between equality and equity and implement equitable practices in our daily work. For Transcend, diversity, equity and inclusion is a core component of our business strategy, and our success depends on it.

Our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) are peace practitioners and conflict analysts in government agencies, international and multilateral organizations, non-profits, and think tanks. We are a software as a service model, assisted by consulting services.

Our first product is an end-to-end conflict analysis platform which accelerates conflict data gathering, data analysis, and option generation. This platform creates value by reducing the time, funds, and human resources needed for peace practitioners to make the best decisions towards ending conflicts. The platform is provided as a software as a service model, complemented by consulting services.

Currently, conflict analyses are extremely time and resource intensive. In particular, gathering relevant primary and secondary data and conducting analyses of that data can take several months. As the local context is quickly evolving, insights are outdated as soon they are published. Our AI-powered platform is reducing that time from months to days, thereby freeing up time for the difficult things like convening conflict parties and weighing the pathways of tough decisions.

Our revenue model is to charge a monthly software as a service fee per entity per seat, complemented by consulting fees for more advanced engagements and bespoke integrations.

Until now, we have bootstrapped the company in addition to receiving smaller, non-dilutive donations of capital and time.

We are pursuing grant financing to develop the initial product and then are also considering taking on additional forms of financing from private investors (for example, angels and venture capital).

At the core of our financing philosophy lies the strong belief that any form of external finance we take in has to be fully mission-aligned.Profit maximization is not the top driver of progress and ethically, cannot be for Transcend.