Public Funding for More Human Technology Ltd

I'm Emma and I am one of the founders of More Human. At More Human we're building software to turn anyone into a successful organiser of high-quality well-attended events. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at 29 and since have won awards for my work in awareness, have spoken at 5 TEDX conferences and have shared a stage with people like Theresa May and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. My YouTube content has a total of 1.5M views and I was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in inclusive design. Through my personal experience, I have increasingly understood the value of community and the importance of connection. With continued increasing social isolation and loneliness becoming more and more of an issue for the UK at an estimated annual cost of £8.4bn for older adults alone, empowering communities to address this by giving them the tools they need to create their own solutions is something I'm really passionate about. Organising social events and activities is hard work, the risk of failure is high and the tools available to support organisers are not fit for purpose. We are building a social event engine that helps anyone run events that build connection; the first ever platform to use demand data and machine learning models to intelligently and automatically generate events for an audience from scratch. The engine will create a virtuous cycle of creation and attendance, strengthening communities. Longer term, it will evolve to promote and pre-sell tickets for events BEFORE offering a human the opportunity to step in and run the event, enjoying the opportunity to be the host-with-the-most for a guaranteed turn-out. This will entirely eliminate the biggest barrier to organising something social; the fear that no-one will show up. Imagine a world where 20 people have already pre-paid to attend a crafting event next Thursday evening. When a host is asked to opt in, they just need to turn up.

SMEs account for around half of UK turnover but 60% believe they will be out of business by April 2021\. The sectors hardest hit financially by the COVID-19 lockdown are those that rely on gathering groups of people together, namely the arts, entertainment and leisure industries. We've seen many Activity Providers attempting to adapt their classes for a virtual audience but they have found that their existing customer base doesn't follow them online. Unable to continue to run group sessions in person and with the challenge of building a new virtual following too great, many are left with no income. Almost 70% of gig workers said they now have no income, and only 23% have some money saved. By embracing and encouraging digital as a social medium, we will help Activity Providers find new customers and revenue, and cater to the country's social needs in a way that mitigates carbonisation side-effects. There is a rising demand for high quality virtual events, something we at More Human have seen for ourselves serving our Community Leader customers with our current events listing and ticketing product, but the Leaders don't know how to go about finding the Providers required to run them. So we started manually recruiting, onboarding, and matching Activity Providers to communities on a scale limited by our capacity. Our goal with this project is build a marketplace to automate this process, and in so doing, enable 180 of the most affected small Activity Provider businesses to land new customers fast, and recover £450,000 revenue within 6 months (increasing to £1m within a year of project completion) whilst mitigating a risk of 188 tonnes of CO2 were demand to be met offline. With this project, we will build the first ever 'passion economy' marketplace for services, to connect Activity Providers with established social groups who are looking for online activities. This product build will leverage the demand from our current customers, automate existing manual tasks, and enable us to serve a greater number of Providers sooner, helping them generate revenue before it's too late. Providers will register, list their activities and populate a calendar with their availability. These details will go into our listing catalogue and our existing customers, Community Leaders, will be able to book them and share revenues.