In this pitch presentation, Paloma of Peace Labs outlines a platform that bridges the communication gap between large corporations and social projects, especially in Brazil. She explains that corporations struggle to track their CSR investments because project managers use disparate reporting formats (Excel, PDFs, PowerPoints), leading to lost information. Peace Labs offers an online portal where fund managers select or register projects, commit funding, and receive regular milestone‑based updates via email. The platform incentivizes project managers to input data by releasing portions of funding only when milestones are met, creating transparency and empowerment. Peace Labs charges a 20% fee on the project budget, targeting corporations with over 2,000 employees and at least $2 million annual CSR spend. The company has piloted three projects, the flagship being a Bosch‑funded tech education program for marginalized Brazilian youth. Paloma reports ongoing negotiations with two additional corporate portfolios. The competitive landscape includes firms that map or digitize CSR practices, but Peace Labs claims uniqueness in digitizing the ideation phase and tying funding release to data reporting. The team is developing an API to integrate with tools like Trello, Instagram, and other corporate platforms. They are raising $300,000 for an 18‑month runway, aiming to onboard six large corporations and generate $1.6 million in revenue. During the Q&A, the panel probes the startup’s differentiation, integration possibilities, and the rationale for profiting from CSR management, to which Paloma argues that corporations already spend about 40% of CSR budgets on internal tracking, and Peace Labs reduces that overhead, allowing more funds to reach projects.
Chapters
So my name is Paloma, I'm from Peace Labs. We help large corporations to monitor their social responsibility projects. So for the past 10 years, I have worked with social projects in Brazil, and today I want to share a little bit of what I learned with you guys. So the main issue we identified was that the way corporations communicate is really different from the way social projects communicate. So there's this miscommunication communication between these two parties, and a lot of information is lost through this process. So corporations really struggle to keep track of their social investments. So that's why we created Peace Labs. This is an easy channel for large corporations to monitor their social responsibility projects. So step by step, we create a clear communication channel where corporations have access to information about the projects they invest. So this is how a little bit the product, how it works today. Corporations go online and the fund manager of that corporation would select a project that already exists in their portfolio, or you register a new one, and then you commit some sort of funding to that project. And then we will monthly or weekly send by email the biggest milestones, updates, how the budget's being spent, and any extra information that corporation needs, we are also that open channel for that. And then by reaching milestones, the projects get funded little by little, so there is transparency in the process and it's empowerment for the social project manager. We work with a 20% fee on the budget of the project. We do not work with only one project. Our main focus is to get portfolio of large corporations So this 20% will come from corporations that have over 2,000 employees and that are already spending about $2 million or up every year in social responsibility programs. So it's a big market. We're already with 3 pilot projects today. We have as a— so this is the 3 projects we've done so far. One of them, it's our main customer, it's Bosch. The German multinational. We taught kids technology, hardware and software in a marginalized community in Brazil. And PeaceLabs monitored that and kept 20%. So right now we have as direct sales our project. We have been in this first quarter negotiating with two new customers portfolio. And there is a few competitors out there. Most of them focus in mapping social focus and co— digitalize social progrime so we can know best practices and help them get better. Our team has really been working for a few years already as volunteers in parallel projects. That's the first time we came together to take Peace Labs to the next level. And we are right now raising $300,000 for a runway of 18 months. We plan to reach 6 large corporations in the next 18 months and the potential revenue of $1.6 million. So thank you very much for this opportunity, Adil, and we're really excited to hear about your questions.
Well done, well done, Paloma. Jason, so again, I'm gonna pre-answer your question. How does $300,000 last so long? Long. When you leave America, $300,000 goes a long way. So let's maybe flip it around to you, Jason.
What—
do you have any— you're muted right now. Okay, now you're not muted. Do you have any questions on Peace Labs?
Yeah, so for me, I've seen a lot of these products emerge, especially over the last year. I didn't really— I didn't really understand your secret sauce. It didn't really differentiate it that much amongst, you know, a dozen or so other competitors? Can you really highlight your competitive matrix and what's the one or two things that will really make a company that's probably hearing these pitches a lot, why would they choose to further explore you?
So what we have built is a way to incentivize the social project manager to enter all the data about the project online. So what we do is, let's say the corporation wants to invest R$100,000 in this project, we will set milestones with them. And every time they reach a milestone, they will report their progress. And that's the only way they get part of the percentage of the funding. So we're still testing that model. It's still in a prototype phase, right? Like we're doing the pilots, but we've seen that that's a way of triggering the corporate, the social projects to actually give the right data. There is no other competitor we've seen that's doing, being able to digitalize the project in the ideation phase. There's a lot of crowdfunding platforms just in the funding part.
So Paloma, let me just chime in on that and then we'll go to you, Sunil. I would think that you being in a developing nation, that might be the recipient of some of these corporate programs would also theoretically be a competitive advantage versus a company headquartered, let's say, where there's a lot of prosperity in that country or region. I don't know, I'm interested in your commentary before we go over to Sunil.
Yes, definitely. There is a lot of social investments being done in Brazil, and the way corporations do track that, it's usually through Excel sheets, uh, and, uh, you have one organization sending a PDF report, the other one is sending a PowerPoint, and it's really hard for you to compile that information and present to your board in the end of the year. Most of the 80 corporations that invest in Brazil are like multinational, so they already have systems in other cities too.
It's not only Brazil they invest Okay, sorry, Sunil, do you have a question quickly, or do you want to finish your point and then we'll go to Sunil? Let's go to Sunil.
Sunil? Okay, sure. So Paloma, good, good presentation. It was very clear and easy to understand. Um, one thing as you were talking, you know, I think about— there's no question that corporations across the world have this interest in being responsible, in doing, um, activities that relate to the kind of mandate and interest that we all have, it's always difficult for tracking and accountability. So you certainly would be solving problems that do exist in a way. And I think of, you know, if there was ever a way to integrate with large companies like Atlassian or Trello, you know, the way that we look at tracking in the way that we operate our corporations, our small startups, our companies, this is in fact a nice, in a way, feature that could be integrated with some larger purpose if you can do this really well. And you know, as you were talking, I was thinking of some big news yesterday where in one day the world, Americans gravitated towards supporting an organization, the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Organization, $20 million in one day, whereas normally they raise $3 or $4 million in a year because that hot-button topical issue came to mind. So in your case, if we were to look for projects that are supportable that are really contemporary issues, things happening in Syria, happening in Venezuela, happening in Sudan, that can create a beacon or some sort of project that corporations can buy into, can agree to support, and if you can facilitate that, I think you can get a lot of momentum to build your business from a foundation.
So, great idea, Sunil. Paloma, I'd like you to comment on Sunil's first idea, which is integrating with existing corporate communication platforms, because I think you mentioned in the opening, if I recall, of your presentation, that the social stuff is in fact very different from the way the business operates today. And what Sunil's recommending is maybe use some of the tools. So I'd love to hear your feedback on that before we move to the next pitch.
Yeah, so we are looking into the way we're building already the platform. It's already an API that we can integrate with other with other services. We do see that Peace Lab is going to be the showcase of a social project, but it will be integrated with other features. So let's say it's really hard to think that a social project will go into a different service to upload a picture. It already does in Instagram. So if we can mine that and put it in a nice way that the corporation can absorb that information without having to go into all these other channels, It's really important. We did look into Trello. We actually tried to support, we have a lot of mentors that support our social projects to take agile into their development. So we use Trello a lot with them. Right now, there's no integration, but we're already advising them into a few new technologies that's really intuitive and easy to use. And in the future, we plan to, kind of put that all together. The whole idea is to make it easy for the project to report with tools that it already uses and make it easy for the corporation to understand without having to look at a Facebook page.
Okay, Paloma, one question from the chat before we move on. Again, fantastic presentation. Lydia was asking, it seems a bit strange to profit from managing, uh, business social projects and some other people chimed in on that, and again, anyone ask questions in the chat and you'll have the chance to get them answered offline, but do you want to just comment on that before we move?
I didn't see the question. What was the question?
That, you know, it seems strange that you profit from social initiatives of a company, and so I'm sure you've rationalized this, you can explain it, and I'd love to hear your your justification.
So this money is already usually spent through corporations because they have to hire people to manage all those projects. So we have some research we've done ourselves because there's not much number on that in Brazil, but corporations are already spending 40% of their budget on operational costs to make sure that they track everything and they know where that money is going, where to invest. So we're actually reducing the amount that the corporation has to spend so more of it can go to the project. That makes more sense to have.
Yeah, you should bake that into your deck because I don't think anyone got that judging from what I heard in the chat. But in fact, if that's true, and, you know, of course that's your own analysis, that's probably your best unique selling proposition. Well, well done, well done. I would say that that is definitely an amazing presentation, and congratulations on your hard work. We're now
