8 Reasons Aseel Won the First-Ever PeaceTech Demo Day

Big congratulations to Aseel 🎉

Yesterday in Arlington, VA, Aseel was named the winner of the inaugural PeaceTech Accelerator Demo Day! They received a SAFE investment from our good friends at B Ventures Group.

We are so happy for them that we decided to dedicate to them our first-ever "X Reasons to Y" blog post.

So... here our 8 reasons why Aseel Deserved the PeaceTech award

1. They serve the most vulnerable, hardest-to-reach populations in the world.They don't shy away from the challenge. They started in Afghanistan, and their newest region is Gaza.

2. They took THE biggest challenge in aid today, trust, and built it into the product.Aid on Aseel is verifiable and trackable. Every delivery can be proven.

3. Their model is built around and for local people. A network of agents from the communities they serve, earning income while making aid possible. Dignity on both sides of every delivery.

4. They built a model with the incentive to get people out of poverty. Traditional aid gives providers an incentive to keep serving charity. Aseel built a transition model, from Do Good to Buy Good, moving communities from receiving aid to participating in an economy: their Atalan (hero) agents earning income, their network of artisans selling their work, and Afghan women building careers in tech through their HQ.

5. Founder–problem fit on a new scale. Aseel was founded by a team that knows this problem through lived experience, through their families' scars, and through decades of practice in the field.

6. Nothing was handed to them. They weathered challenges extreme on every level: a country's collapse, natural disasters, impossible operating conditions, threats to their personal safety, funding gaps, and a sector in upheaval. And they went through all of it with optimism, humanity, and grace.

7. And they're genuinely fun to hang out with. Hard-working, collaborative, lovers of good food, full of life and optimism.

8. They will stop at nothing, and at some point the world will have no choice but to tag along :)

Congratulations Layma Murtaza, Nasrat Khalid, and the whole Aseel team.