Spring 2025 Newsletter 🌸

Welcome to our Spring newsletter! 🌸

In this edition:

🔍 A quest for digital autonomy

🎯 Balancing purpose and profit

🎉 Celebrating a win

🤝 Alkemio in the community

📑 What we're reading 

🌐 Alkemio on the web

🚀 Platform updates 

Small steps in a long journey 👣

In March, the Alkemio crew gathered for our team offsite, discussed the evolving technology and geopolitical landscape, our role as a public interest technology company, exchanged our reading lists, and brainstormed approaches to help our communities achieve their collective action goals. We also made significant updates to our platform while expanding our partnerships in our home city.

🔍 A quest for digital autonomy

As a European technology company building for the public good, we grappled with the misrepresentation that European companies cannot build scalable products. With the influx of worrying news from the US, we're exposed to unsettling patterns of technology oligarchs influencing the political sphere. There is a growing recognition of the need to be technologically self-sufficient and have control of our critical infrastructure. This month, we looked around to identify leading European companies and asked an important question: Should we create another Silicon Valley, or can we imagine a better technology ecosystem? Read our blog here. 

🎯 Balancing purpose and profit

Alkemio is steward-owned. The governance model ensures that our product development is intimately tied to our purpose while aligning with investor returns. Alkemio's ACE (Appreciating Capped Economic) returns approach is unique as it factors the "time value of money" into the capped returns. Our commitment to public interest does not end with the technology; it includes our organisational structure. Read our blog here. 

🎉 Celebrating a win

Alkemio was one of the seven companies selected for Grants for Impact from ImpactCity. In this programme, start-ups and scale-ups receive guidance to find appropriate funding to grow the company and make an impact. Read the announcement here.

🤝 Alkemio in the community

1. Our CEO, Neil, shared the Alkemio story and why steward-ownership was a natural match for a public interest technology company at an event hosted by SIDN fonds. Read a brief note from Gijsbert Koren at We Are Stewards.

2. Neil contributed at a Triodos Bank event focused on funding for steward-ownership ventures. Neil shared the funding desert analysis for purpose-driven companies, and participants explored ways that societal capital can close this gap.

3. Our Community Champion Denise was at the Startup in Residence Intergov demo day. You can watch the after movie here. 

4. Our UX Designer Jeroen Nijkamp was at the OECD Co-creation Bootcamp in Lisbon. The two-day event centered on "Improving civic participation with emerging technologies". You can read his takeaways here.

📑 What we're reading 

We asked the Alkemio team to share articles that caught their attention. Here are three we enjoyed:

1. How do we make the case for digital technology that benefits the many? | Research - FGS Global

2. The EU urgently needs technological autonomy from the US, MEPs say | News - Science|Business

3. Investors with portfolios 100% allocated to impact are rewriting the investment playbook | Insights - ImpactAlpha 

🌐 Alkemio on the web

Alkemio's unique model for structuring investor returns was featured in a recent blog post by We Are Stewards. Alongside approaches from Sharetribe and Sprinklr Planten, Alkemio's ACE returns model was presented as an alternative which considers the time value of money alongside having capped returns. Read the blog here. 

Alkemio is featured in the OECD report that offers an overview of innovative citizen participation mechanisms within the Dutch public sector ecosystem.

🚀 Platform Updates

Recently, we rolled out several updates to make the Alkemio platform more intuitive and powerful. Read on to find out what's new!

You can now rename Space tabs and customize descriptions, improving navigation and clarity.

Our Virtual Contributors (VCs) also got a major update! A new VC Knowledge Base makes it easier to manage and refine their information sources, while enhanced VC profiles provide greater transparency about the underlying AI engine. For example, you will find information on whether the model that is used is open-weight or not, if data is being used for training, and whether or not the responses are limited to a specific body of knowledge.

Other updates include a streamlined About dialog, better search experience, and seamless copy-paste for images. Plus, our new user documentation is here to guide you!

Check out the full details 👉 Read more here.