Themes

SGO is an investor group that finds and funds innovative companies that demonstrate long-term promise in areas that enhance lives. SGO focuses on the intersection between government and society, proactively supporting the development of technology driven solutions with the potential to solve some of the pressing issues of our time. The types of ventures that SGO supports can be grouped into three main themes.

Democracy and Participation

Smartmatic technology supports fair and transparent elections and encourages voter turnout.

Identity and Privacy

Issues around privacy and identity are becoming central to human-human and human-government relationships.

Climate tech and clean air

Air pollution in many cities around the world is now at levels that poses significant risk to citizens’ health.

Democracy and citizen participation

Smartmatic

Since it was founded in 2000, Smartmatic has helped hundreds of millions of voters cast over 6.5 billion ballots in election projects around the world.

Better use of technology in voting systems increases not only the transparency, efficiency and integrity of an election but also makes voting more accessible, allowing societies to reverse declining trends in turnout and citizen participation.

Smartmatic works with election commissions to make each stage of the process more efficient and transparent. Its comprehensive portfolio comprises voter management, polling place voting solutions, remote voting solutions and election management platforms.

What makes Smartmatic’s election work unique is the quality of process and service on the ground, in polling stations and election commission offices, which ensures that what is often a new system can win the confidence of all stakeholders in the election – from the voter themselves, to international observers, to even the losing parties in the election.

Smartmatic custom-builds technological solutions to support electoral process, so its customers can serve citizens in ways consistent with their requirements, their geographic, cultural and social needs and the surrounding legal framework.

For more information, visit www.smartmatic.com

Climate tech and clean air

SGO has made strategic investments in Airlabs to tackle the problems of indoor and outdoor air pollution and disinfection for indoor spaces.

Airlabs, a London-based company with an R&D center in Copenhagen, is a pioneer in air purification to improve the quality of life. Airlabs’ unique nano-filter technology effectively removes all pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, creating clean-air zones across cities – from inside buildings to outdoor spaces.

Its team of atmospheric chemists, airflow engineers and sensor specialists work together to understand air pollution, remove it, and deliver clean air to improve urban living.

For more information, visit https://www.airlabs.com/

Identity and Privacy

Businesses and government need to transform into digital innovators, respond to macro and competitive disruption and create new services that are designed natively for online and mobile.

But, the relics of yesteryear remain fundamental to assert identity today – plastic forms of ID and a visit to a branch are often required to open a new account; paperwork and plastic are still needed to access healthcare, benefits and exercise one’s right to vote.

Consumers are required to produce and assert these identity ‘facts’ over and over again, in different formats and variations for different user cases, different departments, different firms.

Until recently this was the only way, but it is actually hard to imagine how an inclusive, global digital society can properly develop without the cornerstone of good, trusted digital identity.

SGO has conducted extensive research and made significant investments to overcome this problem by providing users with a secure and trustworthy way to prove their identity online in a way that enables them protect third- party access to their personal, private information.

Learn more about Folio.id and how organizations can quickly enable identity verification, using sophisticated biometric processes, with less fraud, with less friction.