Laura Orestano
Laura Orestano is the Vice-President at SocialFare Seed and President of SocialFare Centre for Social Innovation Italy. She is a dynamic leader combining passion, expertise, and global experience to drive social progress through innovation, entrepreneurship, and impact investing. She is skilled in building public-private partnerships, accelerating impact ventures, advancing fundraising strategies, and fostering collaborative, data-driven solutions that blend creativity with measurable social and economic value. Laura Orestano shared her expert insights for 2025 edition of Startupcity Europe.
Introduction
A profound paradox defines our contemporary technological landscape: while AI's potential for weaponisation captures headlines and drives policy debates, technology's capacity to build peace remains largely overlooked and chronically underfunded. This systematic neglect represents not merely a missed opportunity but a strategic blind spot that undermines global stability and sustainable development.
PeaceTech, which I define as the use of technology and digital tools to prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts, as well as to promote peace and stability, represents a critical and untapped frontier for strategic investment, where socio-technical solutions can effectively support peacebuilding scenarios. My view is that by channelling capital into start-ups that build open, collaborative systems, we can catalyse a new wave of innovation dedicated to strengthening peace while fostering sustainable socio-economic development. The convergence of technological capability, entrepreneurial innovation, and urgent global and local needs creates an unprecedented opportunity for investors, policymakers, and peacebuilders to transform how we approach conflict prevention and resolution, developing a new vision, i.e. “preventive peace”.
The Investment Gap in PeaceTech: An Underserved Market
PeaceTech represents an emerging field focused on leveraging technology for peace and conflict prevention, though it remains underserved in terms of systematic attention and investment (Giovanardi, 2024). It encompasses innovations like early warning systems that detect signs of violence, platforms for dialogue and mediation, tools for countering disinformation and hate speech, and technologies that support post-conflict reconciliation and peacebuilding efforts.
The emerging field brings together experts from technology, conflict resolution, human rights, and international development to create practical solutions for some of the world's most pressing challenges—from monitoring ceasefires to amplifying marginalised voices in peace processes.
While there is significant awareness of AI's potential weaponisation, comparatively less focus exists on harnessing technology's peace potential. This disparity creates a profound market inefficiency and strategic vulnerability in our global approach to conflict prevention.
The underserved nature of this field presents precisely what makes it a prime opportunity for forward-thinking investors. Angel investors, venture capitalists, and impact funds face an emerging market with massive potential for both social returns and sustainable business models. Unlike saturated technology sectors, PeaceTech offers first-mover advantages in addressing some of humanity's most pressing challenges while building commercially viable solutions.
Investment opportunities exist in creating robust legal frameworks and catalysing small-to-medium private sector activity through macro-finance investment (Berdal & Mousavizadeh, 2010). While traditional development finance has focused on sectors like natural resources, the digital realm represents the new frontier for catalytic investment, particularly for private sector actors seeking to combine profit with purpose.
The field encompasses various technological applications, including artificial intelligence; block chain, big data, and geospatial information, to foster peaceful processes. However, these same technologies present risks of disinformation, surveillance, and power concentration (Nicolaidis, 2022), making thoughtful investment and development approaches essential. This dual nature of technology—as both solution and potential problem—underscores the need for values-driven entrepreneurial approaches that prioritise transparency, accountability, and community empowerment.
Current funding mechanisms for peacebuilding remain dominated by traditional donor models that often fail to support innovation, scalability, or sustainability. Grant-dependent organisations struggle to develop the agility and responsiveness required for effective technology deployment in rapidly evolving conflict contexts. This creates a clear opportunity for investment models that can support entrepreneurial approaches while maintaining focus on peace outcomes.
A truly impact-driven investment focus!
Start-ups as the Ideal Vehicles for PeaceTech Innovation
Start-ups represent uniquely suited vehicles for PeaceTech innovation, possessing characteristics that traditional institutions lack. Unlike large, bureaucratic organisations, start-ups demonstrate remarkable agility, risk tolerance, and problem-solving focus. They can rapidly prototype, test, and iterate PeaceTech solutions, whether developing AI systems for early conflict warning or blockchain platforms for transparent aid distribution.
The growing global PeaceTech movement involves engineers, peacebuilders, and C-suite experts using technology to advance peace globally (Bernstein et al., 2021). This multidisciplinary convergence naturally coalesces in start-up environments and innovation labs, where diverse expertise can rapidly translate into practical solutions. Start-ups provide the organisational flexibility to bring together technical specialists and peace practitioners in ways that larger institutions often cannot accommodate.
By moving beyond donor dependency, these ventures can achieve the sustainability and scale necessary for long-term impact. They can identify revenue streams that align with peace outcomes, creating virtuous cycles where business success reinforces social impact.
A Framework for Investing in PeaceTech Start-ups
Successful PeaceTech investment requires a structured approach that balances peace impact with business sustainability. For example, a possible investment framework could identify start-ups that can demonstrate a combination of three core characteristics: first, peace-positive impact with a clear theory of change for conflict prevention or peacebuilding; second, openness by design through commitment to open standards and collaborative approaches, and third, sustainable business models providing paths to financial viability beyond grant dependency.
Macro-finance approaches may "de-risk" this sector for private investors through blended finance models, guarantees, and first-loss capital.
Building the supporting ecosystem requires investment in specialised incubators, accelerators, and prize funds focused specifically on PeaceTech start-ups. These institutions can bridge the gap between engineers and peacebuilders, providing the mentorship, networks, and resources necessary to translate technological capability into peace impact.
A Unique Impact-First Opportunity
The outline I shared here offers some concrete arguments for investors, policymakers, and peace practitioners to engage productively in a unique impact-first vision and opportunity.
Investment in PeaceTech start-ups represents not merely an ethical choice but a strategic imperative for building a more stable, prosperous, and collaborative ecosystem. The tools for peace are within our technological grasp, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem provides proven mechanisms for translating innovation into impact. What remains is the generation of innovative and scalable solutions, along with bold entrepreneurs who believe that technology can serve humanity's highest aspirations.
