IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds

IDEMS is raising £400,000 in low-interest, long-term debt with IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds (SEIBs).

Designed for individuals who can’t afford to give money away yet want to contribute to building an alternative digital future, IDEMS SEIBs allow us to build a more inclusive community of financial supporters.

IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds are an investment offer for innovation loans for six years at a fixed interest rate. Aligned with the timeline and interest rate of impact loans in the UK, Social Enterprise Impact Bonds allow IDEMS to secure capital from mission-aligned individual investors.

While our ability to secure and repay cash flow loans has built our confidence in offering this financial instrument to investors, investment in IDEMS is a form of unsecured debt with inherent risk. IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds cannot be traded (as with listed stocks) and are not covered by statutory guarantee or compensation schemes.

Overview

Data and sensemaking siloes, gaps and power imbalances are among the most significant impediments to delivering impact in local contexts and to scaling impact globally, as needed to address UN SDGs and bring millions of low-resource and “left behind” communities into equitable systemic participation. Yet by design, existing digital technologies not only fail to address, but often reinforce and exacerbate, these siloes, gaps and imbalances.

In CommonTech, IDEMS is developing the groundbreaking enabling digital frameworks and infrastructure needed to develop digital impact programs and products that meet and match (rather than reduce, flatten and “optimize”) offline social complexity and contextual variability to address these local and systemic data gaps, siloes and imbalances.

The IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bond (SEIB)

IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds are a mechanism for raising mission-aligned risk capital to fund ambitious technology innovation for public good, the kind a for-profit venture would typically raise through equity investment.

As a nonprofit with no shares to sell, IDEMS is raising funding to support our work as patient, low-interest debt from individuals who want to support public-good innovation but can’t afford to give the money away.

Individuals can invest between £2,000 and £50,000 in IDEMS with SEIBs.

SEIBs Support CommonTech Innovation for Real-World Impact

IDEMS CommonTech middleware isn’t innovation we think might work. We’re not in search of product-market fit. It is innovation that has been developed in our team’s collective decades of working to address complex, systemic grand challenges, or “wicked problems”, with a collaborative network of global partners that includes everyone from field-leading researchers to grassroots community stakeholders. It’s through this patient, collaborative work that IDEMS understands how technology needs to be reinvented to work in and deliver benefit to variable local contexts – and do so at global scale.

We also know the opportunity to build a new era of ambitious, competitive public-good innovation is now. Advances in AI make it possible to use complex data sensemaking and application systems that were previously too complex for humans. But the current direction AI is heading isn’t appropriate for, and can’t meaningfully address, social problems at the systemic or local level. With funding, we believe we can build a viable AI alternative that is human-centered, enables local data ownership and control, and can run with small language models on local servers.

This isn’t magical thinking: we have successfully developed the early prototype foundations of CommonTech, already in pilot across multiple impact programs and delivering measurable impact to millions of people around the world. But we’ve reached the limits of what self-funding, or grants designed to fund impact deliverables rather than deeply technical innovation, can support. We need support from funders who believe in our work and our mission.

Proof of Demand and Impact: The IDEMS Impact Innovation “Collaboratory”

CommonTech innovation emerges from and is validated in IDEMS’ Impact Innovation Collaboratories, expert multidisciplinary collaborations focused on developing the novel and frontier socio-technical innovation needed to address systemic grand challenges. In this context, IDEMS develops an understanding of the barriers to, and needs for, data sharing, capture, governance, and sensemaking for scaling impact. We map how these challenges play out across complex global and local social networks, relationships, and behaviors, and the consequences for global and local impact programs.

In this applied context, the IDEMS team is uniquely positioned to conceive, develop, and pilot pioneering community- and human-centering digital innovation, and complementary capacity building, education and training needed, to cost-effectively, sustainably deliver and scale impact in and across variable contexts and communities globally. With partners, we conduct research trials to gather ongoing evidence of innovation impact.

Across Collaboratories, IDEMS gains insight into common gaps and needs, which helps us conceive and develop foundational impact-enabling digital infrastructure. Although focused on different categories of impact, all share common global-local data and enabling technology challenges.

The following represent our most established Collaboratories.

Public Health Collaboratory

The Grand Challenge:
Children at Risk Around the World

250 million children (43%) under the age of 5 in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their full potential. It’s estimated that as many as 1 billion children worldwide aged 2 to 17 have faced physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect within the last year.

Expert Research Partner: University of Oxford’s Global Parenting Initiative
Implementation Partners: Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH), UNICEF, WHO

The Impact Innovation Challenge: Adaptive, inclusive, and cost-effective digitally-enabled scaling of an evidence-based, in-person playful parenting program, designed to empower parents to nurture children’s potential—and proven to prevent child abuse and neglect.

Climate Services Collaboratory

The Grand Challenge:
Community Climate Resilience

Smallholder farmers produce at least a third of the world’s food, but increasingly unpredictable weather is making it harder for farmers to know what crops to plant and when. Without actionable, accurate local climate-based data and insights, farmers are unable to assess risk and make informed farming decisions in the face of climate change.

Expert Research Partner: University of Reading
Network & Implementation Partners: World Metereological Organization, UK Met Office, In-Country Met Offices, Agricultural Extension, International NGOs (e.g. Oxfam), Local NGOs and Farmer Organizations

The Impact Innovation Challenge: Developing the socio-technical solutions to rescue the historic local climate data, often closely guarded by national Metereological Offices, that is at the heart of Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture’s (PICSA) design and success. Designing and developing the technology to enable direct program uptake and localization by grassroots organizations uniquely positioned to access the essential community- and farmer-level knowledge and data that make PICSA work in a given local context, without losing connection to PICSA’s continuously evolving resources, software and data.

STEM Education Collaboratory

The Grand Challenge:
Secondary School & University STEM Education

With 70% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30, the UN has identified Africa as a global locus of innovation and economic growth. A mathematically-skilled workforce is essential to achieving economic inclusion and for developing innovative solutions to the most pressing social and environmental challenges.

Expert Research Partner: University of Edinburgh
Implementation Partners: Maseno University of Kenya, African STACK Conference, the Open University of Kenya

The Impact Innovation Challenge: Developing and delivering locally adapted, context-aligned open educational resources to improve teaching, learning and assessment in STEM subjects across variable, often limited, local digital, human and economic resources.

Agroecology Collaboratory

The Grand Challenge:
Resilient Food Systems

Climate change, unreliable external dependencies, misguided farming practices, and other forces have normalized food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. Ensuring reliable access to nutritious food depends on production by local communities with the support of farmer groups, research institutions, development organizations and others.

Expert Research Partners: The Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems (CRFS), McKnight Foundation, Cornell University
Network & Implementation Partners: Manor House (Kenya), Farmer Organizations, Local CBOs and NGOs

The Impact Innovation Challenge: Farmer Research Network programming empowers smallholder farmers to be part of research collaborations by putting them at the center of research in a variety of different ways, in contrast to conventional on-farm research. Existing technologies and tools don’t enable local farmer data and research ownership and collaborative research practice with external experts.

At Work in: NIGER | BURKINA FASO | MALI | KENYA

Biodiversity Collaboratory

The Grand Challenge:
Protecting Biodiversity & Food Systems

Novel biological change, as driven by climate change and human behaviors, is creating costly food security, public health, and biodiversity loss risks and consequences. Innovation can help experts and local communities accurately predict, manage and mitigate the risks of novel environmental change.

Expert Research Partners: CASAS Global (emerging from University of California Berkeley), Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA); Topos Institute
Network & Implementation Partners: [in development, including the McKnight Foundation’s CRFS, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, ETH Zurich, mundialis]

The Impact Innovation Challenge: Physiologically Based Demographic Models (PBDMs), validated by nearly 50 years of research, overcome the limitations of the existing state-of-the-field to produce reliable predictions about species change in unprecedented climate and environmental conditions. PBDMs’ groundbreaking bioeconomic modelling innovation introduces the foundations for showing the relationship between all biological life on Earth, as shaped by finite resources, but the complex modelling practice, requiring rare expertise, has been unable to scale beyond a small expert team.

At Work in: GLOBAL

FAQs

Why isn’t your investment offer publicly available? Why do I have to request information?

Under UK financial regulation (Financial Services and Markets Act 2000), IDEMS is not legally allowed to publicly promote or advertise our Social Enterprise Impact Bonds. We are, however, able to share the offer with prospective investors who express interest in receiving information.

If IDEMS is largely funded by grants and philanthropy, how will the company be able to repay loans to private investors? Don’t grants have restrictions on how funds are used?

IDEMS currently secures subcontractor funding on grants issued directly to our academic research institution and NGO partners. As a result, we are often paid as a business, rather than a grantee, and able to use our funds as needed to deliver work and support operations.

We have an established a track record for accessing, and repaying, loan funding to help us grow under this business model, but only a few financial institutions (e.g., the UK’s Charities Aid Foundation) are set up to issue loans to our organization.

We anticipate that CommonTech innovation and productization will allow us to develop new revenue streams—and expand existing, and identify new, paid collaborations. These will support our continued growth over the next six years.

Why is IDEMS issuing bonds? Why not issue shares or simply secure more grant funding support your work?

As a UK Community Interest Company Limited by Guarantee, IDEMS is structured to ensure that financial interests can never override social mission and impact. While we are able to run a profitable nonprofit, our CIC structure requires profits to be reinvested in advancing our company social mission for societal impact. As a result, we are unable to issue shares to private investors.

Yet as a technology social enterprise, we are often ineligible for many foundation impact grants or government research grants. When we are able to directly secure these sources of funding, they often come strict limitations on use of funds, most often for delivering defined impact outcomes—rather than enabling us to fund CommonTech innovation or day-to-day company operations.

Why would I take the risk of investing in IDEMS?

While there is risk involved in any unsecured investment we aim to minimize it. Now in our eighth year, IDEMS has a track record of business and impact success, with proven demand from academic and NGO partners unable to inclusively scale offline impact programs with existing digital technologies. Our ambitious plans are grounded in evidence of demand, global total addressable markets that we are already scaling into, and the sustained impact of and demand for our work to date.

Aligned SEIB investors prioritize social impact over maximized returns or minimized risk. They have the savings to tolerate a small amount of risk with a single investment that offers fair, ethical returns. These investors see opportunity, rather than risk, in supporting IDEMS and our vision for ambitious, frontier technology innovation for societal benefit.

Can I invest in IDEMS SEIBs if I’m based in the USA?

Yes, US investors can invest in UK SEIBs, which are issued under UK law. However, if there is sufficient interest from US investors for a US-based SEIB product, we can explore setting up a separate investment offer under our US subsidiary IDEMS USA.