In affluent markets, technology has perfected the art of convenience. Customers send packages, access credit and order groceries at the click of a button, enabled by decades of innovation in software and logistics.
Meanwhile, some of the world’s most critical systems, like humanitarian relief, healthcare access and food security, remain stuck in the analog age. Disaster aid is often tracked with pen and paper. Many pregnant women don’t get even basic wellness checkups. And small businesses across the food system struggle to access credit.
Yet it is possible to bridge this gap by repurposing existing technology — like APIs, routing engines, robotics, automation and AI models — and applying it to critical social challenges.
This approach allows organizations to respond to critical needs faster, more effectively and at a lower cost, all while transforming the economics of solving global challenges and strengthening the case for additional private-sector investment. Repurposed tech makes hard problems more investable, unlocking the capital needed to solve them at scale.
Bridging the gap
The underutilization of tech in critical systems is not a result of bad intentions, a lack of motivation or a lack of economic potential. Rather, it is the product of a structural disconnect between the traditional impact world and the modern innovation ecosystem.
In our work at PollyLabs, a nonprofit with an investment arm focused on repurposing proven technology, we have found that three key ingredients are required to bridge the gap:
- Cross-disciplinary teams: It is not enough to have a great engineer or a deep social expert, no matter how strong their expertise. You need a team of people who know the venture playbook of how to scale a business and who possess a deep and nuanced understanding of complex social problems and how to address them.
- Investment in discovery: Success starts with the system, not the software. Investors and founders must spend time identifying the critical bottleneck — the point where a market is broken but could be made viable through better coordination or data. Iterating fast only works if you are iterating in a space where a for-profit business can actually survive.
- Blended capital: Repurposing proven tech does not present an either/or choice between VC and philanthropy. Philanthropic funds can de-risk the initial discovery and validation of a problem. This capital creates the proof points that allow venture-oriented funding to step in and drive the solution to global scale.
Repurposing tech can take many forms. It can be as simple as identifying a useful tool and rebuilding it ourselves for broader use, if the underlying technology is not that complicated. In other cases, it can mean licensing technology or doing knowledge sharing with a team that already has the capacity. We’ve also experimented with running a discovery process in partnership with a tech company that has the capability in-house, which will lead to a deeper partnership or a joint venture if successful.
Putting theory into practice
PollyLabs has put its thesis to work both by building new companies and by backing existing ones that move beyond tech for good into tech for scale.
For example, in the food systems space, PollyLabs’ former Entrepreneur in Residence Sarah Kellogg began with a simple question: Why is it so hard for smaller, specialty agri-food businesses to scale, even when demand is strong?
A major constraint was operational infrastructure. Food supply chains are highly regulated, and the food within them is often perishable. Kellogg found that only the largest industrial players could coordinate and manage these systems effectively. In response, she founded Foresow, a platform that enables businesses to manage supply chain information and documentation. It offers enterprise-grade rigor at an affordable cost by repurposing capabilities historically accessible only to large organizations with dedicated staff and IT budgets. The team built the product by reusing existing technical paradigms and capabilities that have long been used in enterprise settings, yet have been out of reach to most small businesses.
With its first customers, Foresow has helped teams reclaim hours each week and stay ahead of supply chain demands, demonstrating how stronger operations can reshape which products and producers participate in food markets and support more resilient food systems.
In humanitarian supply chains, we studied why a high share of aid budgets is consumed by overhead before goods ever reach the field. This led us to Aseel, which repurposes last-mile software and marketplace models that power global e-commerce and has deployed them in Afghanistan and Turkey.
By applying proven systems to challenging environments, Aseel has achieved two to three times the efficiency of traditional models, while allowing donors to track life-saving packages with real-time precision. To date, Aseel has directed millions in aid to thousands of families while simultaneously empowering local artisans to sell directly into global markets. It has proven that repurposed tech can solve for immediate survival and long-term economic resilience at the same time.
The bottom line
Repurposing tech for good lies in the sweet spot between reinventing the wheel on the one hand and blindly applying existing tools into unfamiliar contexts on the other. It enables faster, lower-cost services in systems marked by limited competition, deep inefficiencies and vast untapped value.
Pioneers like Zipline, which repurposed autonomous drone technology for medical delivery, are leading the charge. The company is now valued at $7.6 billion, with over 125 million miles flown and up to a 56% reduction in maternal mortality in Zipline-supported facilities.
Similarly, the mobile money company M-Pesa repurposed mobile airtime to lift millions into the financial system, moving 2% of Kenyan households out of poverty while processing hundreds of billions in annual transactions.
But we need more of these examples, and we need them faster. To see technology finally fight the fights of our times, we must be intentional, break out of traditional playbooks and repurpose the tools we already have to solve the problems that matter most.
Bar Pereg is the founder and CEO of PollyLabs. Kurt Dassel retired as a Managing Director from Deloitte and now serves as a board member of PollyLabs.
Guest posts on ImpactAlpha represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ImpactAlpha.
