Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Apr 11, 2022 | 4 min read, Blog, DAO & Decentralized Governance, Future of Work & AI, Press Releases

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

4 min read, 11 April 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Swae partners with Rutanio to support their process for broader distribution of RUTA tokens towards innovative entrepreneurial grant projects enabling community-based decision-making

The Vision: A Participatory and Knowledge-based Economy 

Medellín, Colombia, is in the process of engineering its reinvention. In less than three decades, it’s attempting to reposition itself from a hotbed for cartel violence and “the most dangerous city on earth” to the “Silicon Valley of South America.”

At the forefront of this transition is the Ruta N center, an innovation hub responsible for spearheading and coordinating the transition to a more prosperous and future-compatible economy. 

Ruta N’s job is to connect people, businesses, and companies to create new economic opportunities while supporting progressive and innovation-friendly public policy development to encourage digital acceleration and entrepreneurial growth. The organization cooperates with different international organizations to bring disruptive solutions to the city. They’ve created a hub, academy, and Distributed Innovation Platform to experiment with technologies and develop capacities to execute projects in a creative learning environment for innovative initiatives that will connect with global innovation and entrepreneurship communities.

Medellín, the city of eternal spring and the second-largest city in Colombia
(Credit: Rutanio)

Entrepreneurship and innovation have grown to become essential pillars for future growth in the city’s region of Antioquia and nationally in Colombia.

As such, the Ruta N group is trying to shape a model where innovation is the primary driver of the economy and well-being of Medellín, with the mission to transform the city into a “knowledge economy” working closely with the government and other industry-leading stakeholders.

“What makes Ruta N unique is that this is an initiative backed up by public policies, and we are working on innovation and technology for almost 10 years because Medellin thinks that if we have a sustainable economy, this needs to be based on knowledge,” said Sin Kit, CTi solutions developer at Ruta N.

Elkin Echeverri Garcia, the former planning and foresight director at Ruta N, said that “The system we’re searching for isn’t to have more unicorns or to win the Nobel Prize…but to improve the standard of living.”

Rutanio and the RUTA Token: The MVPs of this Future Vision 

The Rutanio Project is an initiative catalyzed by Ruta N, supported by Medellín’s Mayor Federico Gutiérrez and local startup advisors, international Colombian business leaders, and diaspora community members.

The goal of the Rutanio project is to create a “Minimum Viable Economy” through the use and proliferation of an Innovation Token, the RUTA, which will facilitate the exchange of services, force digital adoption and digitization, eliminate high transaction costs, and generate value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio intends to internationalize and accelerate the ecosystem of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity to provide the world with a simple, transparent and reliable way to access resources, capabilities, and talent.

Rutanio has developed the RUTA, a Complementary Digital Token and network that uses cryptographic techniques and provides top security to prevent counterfeit or duplication of token transactions. The purpose is to allow and facilitate, both in public and private sectors, the exchange of services, support of profit systems, elimination of friction in transactions, and generation of value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio has also developed a blockchain ​​platform for the RUTA social token and an exchange market that desires to foster connections and support progressive entrepreneurial development. You can learn more about Rutanio and its mission by watching this video here.

Swae’s Role in Supporting a New Economic System Built on Collective Decision-Making

The Rutanio team initially approached Swae to request access to the platform to begin decentralizing decision-making and helping them include their community in important strategic decisions. Originally, they planned to invite their community members into a grant funding program to request RUTA tokens to build projects and initiatives that improve the value of the entire Rutanio ecosystem, and the usability of the RUTA token, for every member. 

Since Swae was built to provide everyone inside an organization an equal voice to raise solutions and shape decisions to create an inclusive decision-making environment, we chose to sponsor an annual license for Rutanio to help them realize their mission. 

Rutanio will utilize the Swae platform to help them: 

    1. Collect feedback from community members.
    2. Increase knowledge and adoption of blockchain technology in the city.
    3. Generate business opportunities.
    4. Accelerate the development of the technological capabilities of ecosystem members.
    5. Advance regulatory issues for distributed ledger technologies.
    6. Democratize and internationalize the Ecosystem of Innovation Articulated by Ruta N.

Swae’s collective intelligence, collaboration, and crowdsourcing features will allow members of the Rutanio community to create proposals anonymously with the support of AI that will improve the quality of those proposals and then open them up for the input of the larger community. The crowdsourcing feature will enable the proposals to be debated on their merits, edited with others’ perspectives, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision by the Rutanio Community Council to fund the projects with RUTA tokens.

Using Swae, community members can apply for 3 streams of funding:

  • Less than 250,000 RUTAs
  • Between 250,000 – 750,000 RUTAs
  • More than 750,000 RUTAs

The process set up by Swae helps Rutanio’s Community Council gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve proposals to drive distribution and usability of Rutanio without creating a tremendous burden of added work for the members.

This new space facilitates community-driven decision-making, giving their community an intelligent decision-making platform combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence to help the organizations unleash the creativity of their members and make better quality decisions.

How Swae’s Technology Supports Tokenized Communities and Facilitates Bottom-Up Decision-Making

As more and more tokenized communities/Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) seek to build genuinely community-driven programs, Swae is poised to become the platform to support these efforts. The uniqueness that Swae brings is that it’s much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform; it’s a robust, community-driven, and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making driven by collective intelligence. 

The world of Web3 and the explosive growth of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) will be a hotspot for experimentation around community governance. 

The features and functions that Swae offers that benefit tokenized communities includes, but are not limited to, the following: 

  • Rich formatting options when creating proposals
  • The affinity with AI-supported tooling, such as the NLP writing tools built-in
  • The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments, and Suggestions anonymously, allowing the difficult things to be said openly and discussed 
  • Interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked to allow for open community-based interactions
  • The team at Swae can collaborate for customized developments within the platform that can enhance roadmaps and allow for the co-creation of more elaborate new features as desired.

Today provides a unique opportunity for Swae to become the grant management and governance platform of choice that can support progressive DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) across the globe. 

The blockchain business models of DAOs are forging a promising new ecosystem for the exchange of services (internationally), entrepreneurial projects, and other digital startups. Swae strengthens a DAOs community by allowing more people to have a say in the decisions being made, providing an open and safe space where there’s accountability for the decisions and processes implemented, and a place to document outcomes creating an ongoing learning-based system of what works and what doesn’t. 

Swae sees the city of Medellín and Rutanio’s innovation and development center as progressive concepts. Many regional and local systems can mirror this approach to help solve real problems that provide a benefit to society and generate value through an open, collaborative and multidisciplinary approach. 

Swae is a powerful tool for bottom-up and community-led governance to structurally and culturally prepare governments and organizations for a management philosophy that is less hierarchical and where everyone can be included. 

At its fundamental essence, Swae provides organizations, government agencies, and DAOs an end-to-end proposal development and collective decision-making system, helping the collective users make sense of their members’ desired wants and needs, revealing hidden opportunities for consideration, and turning these into positive implementations.

As more and more tokenized communities & DAOs seek to build genuinely community-driven programs they need more sophisticated and transparent systems to help build trust and progression. 

Swae is much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform; it’s a robust, community-driven, and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making driven by collective intelligence.


Soushiant Zanganehpour Swae Founder and CEO

Swae_io_Logo

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…
Swae Sessions | Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Swae Sessions | Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Swae SessionsCan Democracy Save the Environment [A Talk to the Council of Europe & World Forum for Democracy]Live on Crowdcast and On Demandby Soushiant Zanganehpour @Soushiant Founder & CEO of Swae During this free webinar, you will learn:xLast year, The...

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Mar 29, 2022 | 8 min read, Blog, DAO & Decentralized Governance, Press Releases

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Swae’s platform will also support SingularityNET’s plans for progressive decentralization and community-driven governance for their DAO

7 min read, 29 March 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup operating a bottom-up idea management and decision-making platform, has been chosen by SingularityNET’s executive team to support their Deep Funding grant allocation program, which offers their token holders from around the globe a chance to apply for up to $1M in grant funding for winning AI projects.

The Deep Funding program intends to distribute up to $1M USD equivalent value in AGIX tokens (valued at 0.11 USD per token) in the first funding round between March and May 2022. These rounds are expected to grow in size and scale after this initial implementation.

A budding partnership to power next generation DAO governance and their plans for progressive decentralization and community-driven decision-making

About SingularityNET’s DeepFunding.AI Grant Program

The Deep Funding program is an initiative from SingularityNET to seed the decentralized AI platform. In this program, they will offer a total of $1 Million in grants in round one. The project is searching for AI and app developers working on innovative AI products that will help grow the AI platform, to send in their proposal. The chosen project winners that will receive funding will keep ownership of their AI model, and be able to monetize their intellectual property and contribute to building a global ecosystem of decentralized AI (see DeepFunding.ai).

Hear about the Deep Funding Program directly from SNet’s Founder, Dr. Ben Goertzel

The Community’s Role in the Deep Funding Program

Deep Funding is intended to be a genuinely bottom-up and community-driven program where community involvement is essential for reviewing proposed grants and projects to ensure the best make it to the top.

Community members are invited to submit new grant proposals, read and review other proposals that come in, and help improve them through collaborative edits to help make the proposals cleaner and without errors. Collaboration will include the ability to point out strengths, risks, ask questions, as well as rate them against other idea proposals.

The collection of constructive and collaborative changes will signal to the wider community which proposals are gaining the most traction and are best positioned to be considered for an official vote and potential grant win.

Through the process of collective intelligence and constructive criticism from the community, the best proposals and projects will be prioritized and supported to implementation, and SingularityNET will begin practicing how best to implement community-driven governance for its DAO.

 

How Swae Powers the Deep Funding Program

Using Swae, Singularity NET will invite proposing teams and community members the following top goals: 

  • The program will gather a constant supply of high quality AI project proposals that are a good fit for the Deep Funding Program
  • Create continuous and constructive community involvement
  • Prepare for scalability to support a longer term program potential

AI project teams from around the world will use Swae to introduce themselves and promote their project proposals into the greater community and receive valuable feedback.

The projects that are chosen as grant winners will receive funding through grants to develop their AI project using AGIX tokens from SingularityNET’s DAO platform called SingularityDAO.

Once the winning projects have been funded, the winning teams will launch their AI service on the decentralized AI-platform to start monetizing their service. There are two levels of grants that will be offered in round one:

1) $500.000 USD of AGIX will be distributed for smaller proposals with a maximum of 40.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal

2) $500.000 USD In AGIX distributed to larger proposals with a maximum of 150.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal.

See https://deepfunding.ai for more details. 

 

Why Swae was Chosen to Support the Deep Funding Program

Swae was chosen by the SingularityNET team as they found Swae to have all their desired features and function sets. They’re seeking to build a genuinely community-driven program, and Swae is much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform, it’s a robust community-driven and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making that’s driven by collective intelligence. Swae was chosen for many reasons, including:

 

  • Rich formatting options when creating proposals
  • The affinity with AI-supported tooling such as the NLP writing tools they already have built-in
  • The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments or Suggestions anonymously- allowing the difficult things to be said.
  • The way that interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked is a solid starting point for community-based interaction.
  • The willingness of Swae’s team to collaborate in developing the platform gives the SingularityNET foundation and community an opportunity to enhance their roadmap, or even co-create with them, on the development of elaborate new features.

Pictured above shows Swae’s AI capabilities and reviewing process, whereby users benefit from various NLP AI algorithms to improve the quality of their initial proposal or idea. Some of Swae’s algorithms improve basic grammar, tone, sentiment and emotion, and more advanced algorithms under production will help detect bias in language and suggest evidence to further strengthen their ideas.

“Swae’s bottom-up, self-organizing-creativity based philosophy has proved a great match for our decentralized cross-disciplinary organization. Their active embrace of web3 technologies promises to position them excellently as leaders in idea management for the emerging decentralized tech ecosystem.

We’ve started out at SingularityNET with Swae as a framework for a community-driven grants program, DEEP Funding, but are now exploring further potential uses of the platform within our ecosystem. The miracle of Swae is the judicious product design that provides enough structure to guide the creative collaboration and decision process, but not so much structure as to become constraining and bureaucratic.

My colleagues and I are excited to continue exploring what Swae can enable as the platform grows and adds new features.

Swae_Dr_Ben_Goertzel
Dr Ben Goertzel CEO of SingularityNET

“Deep Funding is a very important initiative for SingularityNET and the growth of our AI platform. But it is more than that. I see Deep funding as a catalyst and experimentation ground for community governance.

We want Deep funding to become a true community driven initiative eventually evolving into a full DAO. Therefore I am extremely happy with the feature set and capabilities of Swae. We count ourselves lucky to have found such a great partner that feels like an extension of our own team.

With our joint collaborative and innovative approach and the constructive feedback of our community, I am confident we will be able to develop Swae even further into the best tool for governance processes of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.


Jan Horlings, VP of Products at SingularityNET

Swae was founded to give everyone inside an organization an equal voice in raising solutions and shaping decisions – something that is currently foreign and missing from most experiences inside small and large hierarchical organizations.

We want to prove that a bottom-up system of decision sourcing can be as equally good or more effective than the top-down processes we have in place today in most organizations.

Nowhere do we see a greater opportunity for our ambitions and vision to be realized than within the world of Web3 with the explosive growth and mainstreaming of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

Soushiant Zanganehpour Swae Founder and CEO Swae_io_Logo

Deepfunding program is designed to support new ideas in decentralized AI. We are happy to be able to contribute to the benefit of the next generation of projects across the globe. Our NLP work at Swae is truly making the future possible as we observe current AI solutions helping to create new ones.


Vlad Sokol Head of AI & Engineering 

About SingularityNET

SingularityNET is one of the most ambitious web3, blockchain, and AI projects ever conceived in the world. 

Lead by Dr. Ben Goertzel, former Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, former scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; chairman of the OpenCog Foundation; and former Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created Sophia the Robot, SingularityNET intends to combine artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence.

SingularityNET features a decentralized AI platform that enables developers to monetize their AI services on a global market without sacrificing ownership.

The next cornerstone of the AI platform is ‘AI-DSL’, a protocol that allows individual AI services to dynamically find and communicate with each other, forming ad-hoc collaborations that are capable of much more complex tasks than any individual service would be.

This way, the project aims to remove one of the major limiting factors to AI growth today — the lack of interoperability — which severely restricts the ability to leverage the strengths and capabilities of individual AIs. The Sophia robot, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of our first use cases of this vision.

SingularityNET’s vision is to combine AI and blockchain to create a decentralized marketplace for different types of AI. This ecosystem is powered by the AGIX token that enables companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI, but will also facilitate large numbers of autonomous transactions between all individual ai services. This capability will be further enhanced by HyperCycle, a novel Cardano Sidechain protocol, specialized in decentralized AI and capable of supporting the massive number of transactions needed for the future AI economy. SingularityNET’s “AI-as-a-service” aims to become the key open-source protocol for networking AI on the internet. A long term goal is to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence within the market network. It is an ambitious mission but the whole AI field is in its infancy (see SingularityNET.io).

In December 2017, @SingularityNET carried out an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds for its ambitious vision and project. It is reported that their ICO was fully subscribed and raised $36 million USD in just 60 seconds! The Singularity team reported that the crowdfunding was capped after receiving $361 million in investor interest on its white list from more than 20,000 erstwhile investors.

For more info about SingularityNET, watch Dr. Ben Goertzel presenting SU Net at the World BlockChain Forum

About Swae

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to bring all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…
Swae Sessions | Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Swae Sessions | Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Swae SessionsCan Democracy Save the Environment [A Talk to the Council of Europe & World Forum for Democracy]Live on Crowdcast and On Demandby Soushiant Zanganehpour @Soushiant Founder & CEO of Swae During this free webinar, you will learn:xLast year, The...

Rutanio deploys Swae for as a Space for Innovation and Community Decision Making

Rutanio deploys Swae for as a Space for Innovation and Community Decision Making

Mar 9, 2022 | Press Releases

PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

Rutanio adds Swae to facilitate Collaboration and Creation of great Community driven “Use Cases” for the Ruta token.

9 March 2022 | For Immediate Release

With Rutanio new Space for Decision Making now the Community has an intelligent decision-making platform that combines anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to help the organizations unleash the creativity of their members and make better quality decisions.

“We’re in the middle of an irreversible social and cultural transformation, accelerated by new technologies and unreasonable entrepreneurs. We are transitioning from one strong set of operating assumptions about how to manage society, to a new, upgraded set”, said Soushiant Zanganehpour, Founder and CEO at Swae.‍

Swae Platform enables decision-making for future organizations. Their team started as a company to re-image organizational decision-making and build the operating system for future organizations. Rutanio’s partnership with Swae strengthened international cooperation between their communities and it offers members of the Rutanio community the opportunity to receive RUTA tokens for the execution of their projects.

With this new collaboration tool, members of the Rutanio community can now create great proposals anonymously with support of AI, and then improve the quality of those proposals with crowd input. Proposals are debated on their merits, collectively evolved, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision by the Rutanio Community Council to fund the projects with RUTA tokens.

RUTA is a Complementary Digital Token for innovation, which allows and facilitates, both in public and private sectors, the exchange of services, support profit systems, eliminate friction in transactions and generate value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

The new Rutanio Space for Innovation helps our Community Council gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve proposals to drive distribution and usability of Rutanio, without creating a tremendous burden of added work for the members”, added Felipe Cano, Rutanio Co-founder and Community Outreach Lead

About Swae‍

Swae is a collective decision-making software combining AI, anonymized identity and crowd-intelligence to help anyone, in any organization, have a constructive voice in decisions.

About Rutanio‍

Rutanio accelerates and connects communities and people around innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity.

More to explore...
Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities

Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities

Jan 12, 2022 | Announcements, Press Releases

January 12, 2022 | For Immediate Release

SWAE & OPEN AI ANNOUNCEMENT

Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities 

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, has been granted developer access through a rigorous application-only process to OpenAI’s GPT-3, the most powerful artificial intelligence natural language model available today.

Swae’s AI capabilities will be powered by GPT-3, the most powerful language model to date.

Swae: Powered by GPT-3

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is an advanced AI language model that produces “natural language”. It currently generates an average of 4.5 billion words per day, and according to OpenAI, there are 300 or so applications globally that have been granted access to build their AI capacities leveraging GPT-3.  

Swae’s platform utilizes a proprietary process combining AI, collective intelligence or wisdom of the crowd, and anonymity to help more marginalized voices bring ideas forward from the bottom to the top, to reveal trapped insights and solutions, disrupting the traditional and more hierarchical process of decision-making found within most organizations.

Gaining developer access to the API not only gives Swae’s developers the ability to leverage advanced AI capabilities to complement the existing algorithms in the platform, but Swae’s users benefit from this sophisticated technology to further improve the quality of their ideas

Pictured left shows Swae’s AI capabilities and reviewing process, whereby users benefit from various NLP AI algorithms to improve the quality of their initial proposal or idea.  Some of Swae’s algorithms improve basic grammar, tone, sentiment and emotion, and more advanced algorithms under production will help detect bias in language and suggest evidence to further strengthen their ideas. All of these improvements happen to the idea prior to crowd editing and review, to ensure the ideas have the best possibility

 

The specific features Powered by GPT-3  that will be integrated within Swae platform include “title suggestion” and “text generation/paraphrasing”. These enhanced features will allow users to generate more punchy and attractive titles for their creative ideas, while helping them rephrase complicated sentences into more direct and succinct sentences. We believe democratizing access to advanced written editing and communication skills through AI will help level the playing field in terms of ability to create well written proposals. In return, decision makers will be better able to engage their whole workforce and receive diverse and well-written solutions to the biggest challenges their organizations face both today and tomorrow, all from the bottom-up. 

We are thrilled to integrate GPT-3 into our platform. The OpenAI API will allow Swae to continue on our mission to give everyone a voice, allowing organizations to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within. We also have a shared dedication and commitment with OpenAI to developing AI safely and responsibly.


Soushiant Zanganehpour Founder & CEO

AI continues to transform industries and will allow for entirely new ones to emerge. We at Swae are keen on creating and using state-of-the-art tech to to give everyone a voice, transforming how people collaborate and participate in decision-making processes in any organization.

AI helps the ideas formed through Swae’s “proposals”, stand a greater chance of being successful/implemented. A range of NLP algorithms help users write a stronger pitch for whatever creative solution or issue they wish to raise with others in their organizations. One of the biggest barriers to having a seat at the table, is a lack of clear and compelling communication skills, and we’re hoping to solve this with our particular use of AI. The addition of GPT-3 into our portfolio of AI solutions will open many possibilities based on text generation. OpenAI’s latest model can create text of unparalleled fluidity and contextual awareness. We are happy to announce that Swae can now create catchy titles for your ideas and paraphrase entire paragraphs at a click of button, thanks to integrations with OpenAI’s newest API. Our engineering team is also prototyping new exciting features that could change the way you think about writing your proposal, so stay tuned for future announcements! 

All this, together with our proprietary AI solutions for emotion, sentiment, readability and bias detection (coming soon) will allow Swae to set a new standard in collaborative ideation and bottom-up decision-making.”


Vlad Sokol Head of AI & Engineering 

GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward.

The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.

-MIT Technology Review

FOFO business leaders not listening
Elon Mush
Elon Mush

Boilerplate

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to brings all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

More to explore...
Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

Jan 6, 2022 | Press Releases

FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT

Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

6 January 2022 | For Immediate Release

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, announces the close of a $750K CAD seed funding round – a 50% increase from the initial $500K offer – to help further its mission of giving everyone a voice, and allowing organizations to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

Swae’s end-to-end idea management and decision-making solution uses a proprietary process to turn voices into decision-ready solutions for organizations, delivering real value for all kinds of customers. 

Over the past 12 months, the results from implementing Swae for various clients speak for themselves: 

– $1M USD average value of innovation ideas revealed over 12 month
– 50% increase in sourcing investable decisions
– 3 month payback period
– 70% increase in engagement (compared to other experiments and efforts to date)

The funding will help the company expand its tech-stack, increase its feature offerings and integrations, and explore new areas of AI while aggressively ramping up its go-to-market and global presence, with the goal of servicing new clients in the North American and UK markets.

“We’re grateful to our investors – small and large – for helping us create a future where inclusion and bottom-up decision-making will be a source of competitive advantage”,, says Soushiant Zanganehpour, Swae’s Founder & CEO. ”We have a shared vision of helping organizations dramatically improve engagement, source unrevealed solutions, and quickly adapt to changing external circumstances. Our thanks go to William Eisenman (his son Eugene and their Family Office), Global Market Enterprises, Tres Monos Capital, VentureSouq (Conscious Collective Fund), Cordelia Capital alongside many strategic angels and senior executives from Fortune 500 companies.”

 

The Future of Work and Need for Swae

The world has changed irreversibly over the last two years – the unexpected and continuous interruption brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic (and all subsequent mutations) combined with powerful social and technological forces have dramatically reshaped the workplace for the long term.  

Remote working is increasingly the “new norm”,  peer-to-peer collaboration has been digitized, inclusion and diversity have transformed into must-haves in today’s workplace, and many organizations continue to struggle with digitally transforming processes while maintaining engagement through this turbulent period. Furthermore, talented employees are increasingly willing to leave jobs and industries that have too often treated them as dispensable or excluded them from meaningful changes and decisions inside the workplace. 

During this period of long term instability and uncertainty, employees increasingly want more transparency around decisions, and want to be heard in their workplace. Unfortunately the current set of options provided to them to have a voice – including surveys, polls, and the like – fall significantly short on fulfilling their demands.   Leveraging the wisdom of Steve Jobs on this topic, “to retain the best employees, organizations have to be run by ideas, not hierarchies,” and have to demonstrate that ideas can turn into action. The best managers and organizations will want to create systems to listen and reveal bottom-up ideas while turning them into appropriate solutions so they can reap the rewards. The best ideas have to win.

As competition for talent intensifies in today’s climate, and social and technology forces continue converging to disrupt organizations and workflows daily, organizations must embrace new concepts and technologies to adapt to the times. Companies and investors are eager for solutions that can help organizations adapt quickly to these ever-changing conditions and facilitate leadership on these issues.

Swae’s Traction and Impact 

Swae’s platform is well positioned to support organizations in these turbulent times, improving the traditional way organizations problem-solve, allowing them to crowdsource and leverage the hidden solutions using the knowledge and wisdom from within by providing a bottom-up approach that fuels innovation to tackle our increasingly complex landscape. 

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas, want transparency and equity in decision making and are looking to increase inclusivity within. Swae is proud to have already implemented its platform with the many forward-thinking organizations, a few of which include  LifeLabs, EMC Insurance, Etihad Airways, the United Nations, and Bosch.

Swae customer LifeLabs is Canada’s largest provider of community laboratory services with over 5,700 employees across Canada. 

“Given the circumstances [of Covid-19] that we couldn’t get together as one team physically, Swae gave us the necessary tools to bring all of our teams together in one place to generate ideas, improve ideas collaboratively, and vote on the best ideas, to put forward some tangible and actionable outcomes from the process,” said Haleh Bahrami, VP of Lab Operations.

Haleh Bahrami, VP of Lab Operations at LifeLabs

Creating an environment that facilitates and encourages employees to raise their voices underpins a healthy amount of employee engagement, which feeds natural occurring innovation inside any organization, and the chance to contribute to the innovation agenda in turn drives engagement, boosting productivity and performance. These are all part of a well-oiled flywheel or virtuous cycle –  one cannot be achieved without the others. 

As the link between employee voice, engagement, innovation and organizational performance becomes increasingly clear, companies and investors are eager to find solutions that can help organizations dramatically boost collaboration, source decision-ready solutions, and improve the pace of innovation. 

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas from within, retaining their best talent and keeping engagement sky-high through a transparent, equitable, and inclusive process for decision-making.

 

Investor Testimonials

William Eisenman, the former Head of Engineering at Netflix, along with his son, Eugene, joined Swae’s recent investment round as Lead Investors.

They also sit on Swae’s Advisory Board, bringing a wealth of experience as executives and investors, specifically with scaling and growth of startups.

Not only do they see Swae as the way of the future for government systems to interact, but see the value in how it takes pinch points out of collaboration, and rebalances diversity in the workplace at the same time.

Swae is poised for the current ‘new normal’ that won’t go away, as well as what the future holds. It’s how business will need to be done for companies that want to avoid disruption.

William Eisenman, Former Head of Engineering at Netflix & Lead Investor

“It is imperative for all organizations to reflect on the importance of their workforce and company culture. The rise of employee activism, and recent, very public, examples have shown the demand for more purposeful cultures have grown louder and the adverse outcomes that arise when management fails to acknowledge such, can be detrimental. 

The Swae team has built a powerful tech-enabled product to meet this “future of work” that is required while driving innovation at the same time. All by providing employees the opportunity to voice their ideas in a coherent and structured manner, bringing value that has been thus far overlooked to the fore.”

Sonia Weymuller, Founding Partner Venture Souq VC and Conscious Collective Fund

 

“As a fellow business owner consistently focused on empowering everyone, I couldn’t help but resonate with a product that addresses a large problem I see in the workforce.   When an organization chooses to listen to its people, the results are extraordinary – from retention, attracting diverse talent to impacting the bottom line by being adaptable to disruption and change. Swae levels the playing field giving everyone a voice in an efficient, transparent way through a channel that should exist within all organizations.”

Alisa Kolodizner, Chief Founding Partner, Cordelia Capital 

 

“I invested in Swae as I believe it revolutionizes organizational decision-making and how those decisions are implemented, while revitalizing employee engagement, buy-in and trust. Many people don’t share their ideas because they don’t know how to formulate them or where to start. Swae has the potential to change how governments, businesses and non-profits make decisions.“

Kia Afshari, Product Management Director at Visier

 

“I invested in Swae  because it gives everyone in an organization a chance to participate, in an honest and open way. C-level executives need to be focused on where to go, and that sometimes disconnects them from the people delivering their vision, they need a tool like this to help them uncover the operational bottlenecks that their staff have to work through on a daily basis. If leadership is truly committed to providing visibility, improving operations, and maximizing staff retention, then they need honest feedback from their staff, I believe that Swae can do this”.

Don Sherrah, Business Development Manager at Deloitte

 

“The current use of Swae, working within larger firms, helps remove layers of bureaucracy and provides a much needed voting system and level of transparency that is often missing. An employee survey just doesn’t do the job anymore and Swae provides a voice to those that need to be heard the most”

Ashkan Golkar, Vice President, RBC Dominion Securities

 

“I invested in Swae because I know there’s a need to harness the power of everyone within companies.”

Martin Ertl, CEO at Recital Software

 

“Collective intelligence can lead to better outcomes in organizations than our current silos and bureaucracy. With a world rapidly incorporating AI into everything, most applications seek to cut the human out of the process– what I appreciate about Swae is that it seeks to augment rather than replace human input.”

Emerson Perez, Sr Informatics Lead at Aetna

 

“I’ve spent so many hours trying to orchestrate ways to get insights that were locked up in my previous teams. If we had had a tool like Swae, I think the outcomes for our company would have been far better.”

Kahran Singh, General Partner at Tres Monos Capital

 Boilerplate

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to brings all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

More to explore...
EMC Insurance x Swae: Unleashing workforce creativity & crowdsourcing ideas to drive culture and strategic innovation initiatives

EMC Insurance x Swae: Unleashing workforce creativity & crowdsourcing ideas to drive culture and strategic innovation initiatives

Mar 15, 2021 | 3 min read, Announcements, Press Releases, Remote Working & Collaboration

Swae pilot program launched to help demonstrate that employee feedback and insights can drive business performance and that hearing all voices is an essential ingredient for an evolving culture and workplace.

EMC Insurance Companies was founded in 1911 and is built on more than 110 years of serving policyholders and independent insurance agents. EMC employs more than 2,400 employees in 19 locations across the United States and is in the top 60 property/casualty organizations and is one of the largest in Iowa, based on net written premium. (Source: https://www.emcins.com/)

Over the years, EMC developed a perspective about what innovation means to them: it is more than technology: innovation is about building a culture of trust and encouraging innovative thinking by empowering employees and discovering unique ways that strengthen the organization and serve customers in new ways.

To further these intentions, EMC and Swae will be working closely to leverage Swae’s platform and offline capabilities to help crowdsource ideas from a larger pool of employees, empower leadership across the enterprise to drive deeper collaboration efforts, and unleash more creativity for workplace improvement and innovation.

While there are a lot of ways to give employees a voice inside EMC currently — from engagement surveys to learning sessions and focus groups — there are gaps with these instruments in turning voice into action and potential decisions that lead to workplace improvement or innovation. Partnering with Swae is intended to fill these gaps by giving everyone a safe, formal, and merit-based process for expressing ideas, making decisions, and identifying potential solutions that can be prioritized efficiently with the help of the crowd and gain deeper engagement.

According to Mary Harvey, Business Innovation Specialist within EMC’s Innovation Team, “In this pilot, we are bringing team members together to shape the future of how we share ideas across EMC.”

Swae’s mission is to empower unheard voices within organizations to ensure that leaders can identify problems and hear about investable solutions quickly. Another driving goal is to help leaders hear the truth of what’s going on inside their organization so they can better prioritize and reduce the potential biases in important strategic decisions.

Swae’s driving goals is precisely what Angela Noble, Vice President of Innovation and Lead of EMC’s Innovation Team, is hoping the pilot program and platform will help EMC begin to achieve:

“We hope Swae will help us fill gaps by giving team members a voice and highlighting what’s most important to our people. This will also empower leadership to know what’s most important, respond to ideas and make decisions.

We know Swae can have a major impact in large companies like EMC on many levels — from encouraging deeper engagement, boosting morale and trust, to sourcing challenges and solutions to drive workplace improvement and the innovation strategy — all of which can truly transform the way leaders include others in sourcing challenges, finding solutions, and making better decisions faster. Some problems within large organizations can’t be discovered unless you have everyone’s input. From past implementations, by using Swae, leaders were able to hear problems they didn’t even know existed and unleashed the creativity of their own people to solve their organization’s problems.

EMC’s Innovation Leader Angela Noble has high expectations of Swae,

“We hope Swae is the platform that empowers team members to share ideas safely, enables leaders to understand team member priorities, and creates opportunities to respond and make decisions in an efficient, transparent way that supports the innovative culture we’re building at EMC. ”

We’re excited to help Angela, Mary, employees and the leadership at EMC achieve these results at the end of this pilot!

More to explore...
>

Pin It on Pinterest