The Celo Foundation Partners with IDEO to Offer Design Support for Web3 Founders

IDEO’s Last Mile Money initiative will provide real-time, product-specific insights for Celo ecosystem founders

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Celo Foundation is proud to partner with IDEO, a leading global design and innovation firm, through its Last Mile Money program, a five-year initiative led by IDEO and a global network of partners committed to helping transition unbanked people into the digital economy.

Aligned with the Celo community’s mission to create the conditions of prosperity for all, the Celo Foundation and IDEO Last Mile Money offers robust, pro-bono design services from IDEO experts for founders building on Celo’s carbon-negative, mobile-first platform throughout a six-month pilot period.

This partnership includes product reviews for Celo ecosystem partners to promote digital confidence, providing support for product design challenges that improve overall user experiences for new internet users in emerging markets––an effort aimed at making Web3 tools more inclusive, accessible, and intuitive for mainstream adoption.

"The biggest challenges for crypto adoption around the world are ease of use and accessibility, especially for last-mile users,” says Nikhil Raghuveera, the Celo Foundation’s Head of Strategy & Innovation. “Our partnership with IDEO will tackle this problem head-on by helping Celo ecosystem partners build and design more inclusive Web3 solutions."

“We’re excited to partner with the Celo Foundation to scale the principles of digital confidence design to more mission-aligned organizations, advance our efforts to accelerate startups launching products to new internet users, and support potential products in the Celo ecosystem that could benefit from deeper, shared design work,” says Becca Carroll, senior director and co-lead of IDEO Last Mile Money.

This partnership marks an ongoing effort by the Celo Foundation to provide resources and in-depth support for an expanding Web3 founders program, which includes the Celo Camp incubator and a founders residency. It will create additional benefits for startups committed to financial inclusion who are building on Celo, and lead to a higher likelihood of product success and uptake among end users around the world.

About the Celo Foundation
The Celo Foundation was founded in 2017 to support the growth and development of the decentralized, open source, mobile-first Celo platform to help build a carbon-negative financial system that creates the conditions of prosperity for all. The Foundation is guided by the Celo community tenets and contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach—activities that support and encourage an inclusive financial system. For more about Celo, visit https://celo.org/.

About IDEO Last Mile Money
IDEO Last Mile Money is a five-year initiative focused on accelerating the transition of unbanked people to the digital economy, run by IDEO, a global design and innovation firm.