Sphaera and Uncompromise launch systems design lab Armillaria
Systems engineering firm Sphaera, and impact consultancy Uncompromise have merged and relaunched as Armillaria to focus on co-creating critical digital infrastructure to rapidly scale efforts to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs]. Named after the largest living organism on earth, Armillaria combines Sphaera and Uncompromise’s long standing expertise in the social and environmental impact sectors, working with entrepreneurs, advisors and investors for more than twenty years to more ethically and equitably scale their impact.
For the past six years, the two companies have been close partners and allies. Together and separately, their work has been supported and informed by some of the world’s largest public and private foundations (including Gates, Bertelsmann, and Rockefeller), federal foreign aid and economic development organisations (GIZ and USAID) and large NGOs and multi-stakeholder initiatives (Mercy Corps, UNICEF and the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance).
Emerging out of a strong set of shared values, an aligned purpose, and the conviction that no single entity has the intelligence, capacity or capital to meaningfully impact planetary problems alone, Armillaria represents the next evolution of companies aligning their work operationally in pursuit of shared goals.
“We are building Armillaria the way we are building the infrastructure for solving planetary problems: on the basis of a democratic, modular, interoperable, distributed business logic that is very much envisioned as an ecosystem of aligned partners,” says Dr. Astrid Scholz, who founded Sphaera in 2014, and is one of the co-founders of Zebras Unite.
The merger is a direct result of the partners applying the system design roadmap outlined in the 2018 concept paper From Billions to Trillions to themselves. This widely reviewed and referenced document—co-authored with impact finance experts Arthur Wood, a Founding Partner of Total Impact Capital and Dr. Audrey Selian, co-founder of Artha Networks—outlines a transformative approach to addressing the multi-trillion dollar annual funding gap for achieving the SDGs. An updated version of the paper is in the works, and will be published this summer.
“From Billions to Trillions was a result of our deep frustration with the trillions of well-meaning dollars wasted every year in the business-as-usual of social change,” says Cameron Burgess, who founded Uncompromise in 2009. “Armillaria’s core focus is on designing and developing the necessary incentives and mechanisms to eliminate competition for funding, replication of effort, and purposeless innovation - in short, to overcome individual and institutional inertia to achieve cooperation at planetary scale.”
Armillaria has released a set of design principles that it believes are essential for building technologies that are intended to serve the needs of people and planet — asserting that the absence of such principles in much technology development has resulted in digital ecosystems that fail to achieve the emergence and resilience of living systems.
“We need to mobilise knowledge, people and capital at unprecedented scale if we are to successfully address the Sustainable Development Goals,” adds Madelynn Martiniere, who joined Uncompromise as Managing Partner in 2018 to lead community and ecosystem design. “With the right architecture for participation, digital technology can now effectively enable global co-creation across national, organisational, and ideological boundaries. We’re actively looking for partners who recognise that there is no silver bullet for challenges like climate change, and who are willing to work together in service to a cause greater than their own.”
Armillaria will be led by Managing Partners Astrid Scholz (focused on Impact Design & Finance) and Madelynn Martiniere (focused on Platform & Partnerships). Cameron Burgess will lead Innovation and Commercialization as a Senior Partner.
This will be the second merger among founding members of the Zebras Unite Cooperative, following that of Hearken and Switchboard in June 2020. Both Sphaera and Uncompromise have been providing key strategic roles in shaping the growth of the Zebras Unite movement from inception, including the launch of the co-op.