There is a startup that is making news in the world of FinTech: it's called Cents and it's all Italian (from Perugia, to be precise). His mission? Simple but powerful: make it easy for companies to integrate social and environmental goals into their daily operations. In summary: impact as a service.
With a recent financing of €1.15 million, cents is developing a platform that will allow businesses to connect with over 50 non-profit organizations, turning every digital transaction into an opportunity to do good.
The rise of a vision
What is meant by “impact as a service”? In short, as mentioned, it is about leveraging technology to create a positive impact, uniting the financial world with that of social and environmental initiatives. The startup, born in 2021, has not only adopted this idea as a buzzword, but as a concrete strategy to facilitate the integration of sustainable practices into corporate activities.
The co-founder and CTO Claudio Cardinale underlines the importance of the project from an engineering point of view: developing the entire structure of the platform from scratch, collecting big data and processing it through an artificial intelligence engine based on a proprietary machine learning model. To do what? Make every transaction a vector of social change.
50 NGOs as a bridge between companies and social causes
Cents' vision is based on creating a digital ecosystem where every transaction contributes to a better world. The company aims to connect the commercial world with non-profit organizations, thus facilitating the integration of social and environmental causes into everyday transactions.
The expansion of the group of NGOs participating in the platform, including Telethon, Save the Children and Oxfam Italia, underlines the importance of this collaboration which leads to a future in which companies are not only profit centers, but also agents of change social.
Will it have an impact?
The capital raised from investors in this latest financing will allow Cents to expand its team, hiring talented young managers. The prospect for the next few years is that of rapid growth, with the acquisition of strategic partners in Italy and the aim of positioning the platform as a point of reference at a European level.
Will he make it? A crucial element of Cents' success will be the transparency in the transmission of information on projects supported through the service. The company intends to overcome any type of evaluative prejudice, allowing an increasingly precise match between initiatives and donor values.
I hope so, it's an important topic: in times of greenwashing, pinkwashing and many other "Washings" of turbo capitalism, Cents can build a world in which digital transactions are not just an exchange of currency, but also an act of charity and responsibility social. This means, it must be said, having an impact.
