Severiyos Gabriel

Six Questions for Severiyos Gabriel – Founder and CEO of AIDONIC of Switzerland

Severiyos is Aramean, an ancient Christian minority and ethnic inhabitants of Mesopotamia, whose history is scarred by persecution, expulsion, and genocide. His parents fled southeast Turkey in the 1970s, seeking refuge in Switzerland, where Severiyos was born. He was the usual tech geek teen growing up building web-based platforms. He eventually moved into a natural Swiss occupation – finance, logistics and trading – becoming the youngest commodities trader in Zug, CH. But as the crisis in Syria deepened, he left his lucrative career to help his fellow Arameans facing another genocide and founded ARI – Aramaic Relief International, a Swiss NGO that has delivered over 470 humanitarian projects, impacting more than 500,000 lives in conflict zones. Severiyos’ groundbreaking efforts have been recognized globally, with speeches including at the European Parliament and Vatican. Seeing bottlenecks and inefficiencies in this work first hand led him to found AIDONIC to solve them. AIDONIC has won multiple international awards, including the prestigious Swiss International Cooperation Award in 2024.

1. What problem is AIDONIC solving and how?

AIDONIC addresses a critical issue in the NGO aid landscape: inefficiency and lack of transparency in delivering humanitarian cash and voucher assistance. Meanwhile, agencies and donors are relying ever more on cash distribution as countless studies have shown it to be the most efficient means of assisting people in emergencies. The NGO sector is globally aligned on this strategy with many BPKs around helping people with cash versus a food or clothing box. In my own NGO myself, I have experienced firsthand how cash can empower and help people in a much more efficient and effective way. However, traditionally, NGOs face alot of manual work just identifying local bank-equivalents and then delays, high transaction costs, and outdated data management challenges, with limited real-time monitoring and accountability. AIDONIC solves all this by providing an integrated fintech platform that simplifies and streamlines aid distribution.

2. What is your background that led you to founding AIDONIC?

Well, I was not a regular Swiss kid growing up – building websites at home and then going into the commodity trading sector. When war flared up in Syria, I naturally wanted to participate in helping my communities through my church network and eventually formed an NGO to distribute aid. I spent over 12 years working on the ground in war zones and crisis regions. There I saw firsthand the many inefficiencies of emergency aid operations, including financial, and I was able to envision that I could uniquely contribute in developing the digital solutions that became AIDONIC. Then, as I got into the thick of it, I saw that this problem was worldwide and hence also a much bigger opportunity. I formed the best team I could ever imagine – like-minded and purpose-driven innovators, together we scaled AIDONIC to new heights globally.

3. What is unique about your technology and what is its
validation status?

First, it is tailored to the particular needs of the NGO and Aid community. It’s our combining the very latest technologies of AI, blockchain and payment aggregations to provide an end-to-end solution, not only expediting money transfers on the field end, but also providing transparency, tracking, accountability, and performance metrics that are increasingly demanded by donors who are much more business-tough-minded than perhaps 50 years ago. . NGOs can seamlessly send mass payments to mobile wallets, banks or other institutions in over 200 nations, all while receiving real-time updates and tracking on every transaction.This helps NGOs not only to deliver more efficiently, but also increase their trust towards donors, ultimately gaining much more attention and awareness about the impact that they’re generating. Which leads as well to higher and better fundraising strategies for an NGO.

4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?

First, we are not a consumer app, we are B2B, focusing on transfers to established aid providers in the emergency zones, they are the ones who have the downstream relationships with the local community. Like any transaction platform we earn a fee on the throughput and agencies have found this a fine bargain because our platform saves them enormous resources previously used to manually annotate ledgers and audit downstream distributions. Our vision to not only innovate in the last mile of aid delivery but also in the first mile of donors has resulted in an interesting partnership with UNICEF pioneering our donor loyalty app, and another major UN agency to pilot our blockchain traceability solution, which allows donors to track and trace their donations across the whole value chain, down to the very final recipient – what you might termed tailored beneficiary management tools. Today we have 15 customers, including the world’s largest NGOs and UN Agencies..

5. What is next?

We currently have three large organizations in the pipeline which will put AIDONIC in more than 100 countries as well as a POC and pilot phase with the largest humanitarian UN organization. We are working on very interesting new features and functionalities that we plan to roll out in the coming months to make their entire process much more seamless, efficient, and effective. We are working on an interesting “localization” pilot with the Swiss government to develop features that empower local actors and national NGOs to be more equipped to serve local communities with AIDONIC services. This is an exciting journey we are in right now and the world, if you look out, I mean, the crises, the disasters are unfortunately increasing. They’re lasting longer, they’re getting more complex and more expensive. So the donor community, the NGOs, and public sectors all require solutions that help them efficiently to cope with this huge increasing demand coming from all these emergencies.

6. Tell us about your experience with XTC?

Well, the entire process and experience, as well as the communication, was very well organized with great pitching sessions. And the highlight was the final event at the UN Summit of the Future at the UN Headquarters in New York in September. We had the opportunity to attend insightful sessions and connect with a wide range of interesting people and organizations. Most of them are directly within our target market, so it was fantastic to showcase AIDONIC and further promote our solutions to the space. And even after the event, we’ve been approached with several organizations expressing interest in using our platform and exploring different collaboration opportunities. So we are very honored to win the first place and XTC really helped us to accelerate our business development.