Groundwork advises startups, thesis-driven investors, and organizations addressing human needs, including public health, agriculture and food systems, and better governance. Combining on-the-ground operating experience with strategic expertise, we help clients develop partnerships, enter new markets, and build durable operations across frontier and fragile markets where relationships, local knowledge, and execution matter most.
We help organizations establish and scale operations in markets where standard expansion playbooks don't translate, where regulatory regimes are complex, local relationships determine access, and the path to revenue isn't obvious. This includes market entry strategy, partner and channel development, regulatory navigation, pricing and commercial model design, and building early-stage traction.
We build the operational infrastructure required to execute in complex, frontier environments: governance structures, KPI frameworks, planning and reporting processes, and risk mitigation programs. We also help organizations identify and manage regulatory, operational, security, and geopolitical risks, designing operating models built for both growth and resilience.
We help organizations build evidence-based frameworks to assess the feasibility of novel interventions, direct investment, and evaluate progress. This includes developing theories of change, analyzing local landscapes, mapping stakeholders, and building monitoring and evaluation systems that guide future programming and investment. We are especially adept in fragile and frontier contexts where data sources are unreliable and local knowledge is especially important.
Companies at this stage have proven product-market fit in developed markets and are now scaling into less familiar regions without in-house operating experience. We help them build strategies for emerging, frontier, and fragile markets where regulatory regimes are complex, local partnerships matter, and standard expansion playbooks don't translate.
Foundations, philanthropies, and mission-driven organizations with strong programmatic vision but real operational constraints: limited field presence, pressure to deploy capital quickly, and evaluation systems built for accountability rather than learning. We help them develop program strategy grounded in context, build frameworks that hold up under uncertainty, and manage the risks that determine whether good intentions translate into durable impact.
At the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), we led the team that created the country's first comprehensive treatment strategy for the over 18 million Americans struggling with addiction. After the strategy received Congressional approval, we oversaw its implementation across 35 federal agencies.
Previous ONDCP strategies had been criticized for including too many interventions without prioritization. To avoid that, we started from the ground up: visiting treatment centers, social workers' offices, doctors' offices, and emergency departments to understand the customer journey of someone seeking care. That fieldwork, combined with academic research, helped us identify the key obstacles people faced at each step and understand how those obstacles differed for special populations including veterans, BIPOC individuals, and unhoused individuals. This also helped us understand the highest-leverage actions and programs which would disproportionately improve outcomes.
We then invited academics, nonprofit workers, and experts from over 35 federal agencies into an iterative design process. We identified the highest-impact interventions, the synergies between existing federal efforts, and the policy, funding, and bureaucratic barriers which were impeding progress. This was the first time ONDCP had built a strategy collaboratively with its partners rather than in isolation.
After Congressional approval, we implemented the strategy through five thematic working groups held to clear performance metrics and KPIs, creating forums for partners to advocate for resources and propose policy changes. Through these working groups, we also surfaced opportunities for innovative programming. This included working with social media companies to direct those with addiction to resources, building nationwide social media programs to combat stigma, and creating partnerships with job/recruitment companies like LinkedIn to promote hiring.
Ultimately, we created and implemented the first federal strategy specifically designed to expand addiction treatment at scale and built a cross-agency execution infrastructure across 35 federal agencies, with working groups that identified synergies and drove accountability across a highly fragmented system.
Venteur was an insurance technology platform that enabled employers to provide pre-tax health benefits, allowing employees to purchase the individual health insurance plan that best met their needs. Supporting this model required managing complex financial and operational workflows across hundreds of health plans, each with its own enrollment, billing, and payment processes.
We identified a brokerage that had attempted to offer a similar service but struggled to scale it operationally. After demonstrating our platform, we negotiated a white-label partnership under which we assumed responsibility for the brokerage's end-to-end operations while sharing revenue and retaining commissions. The partnership covered approximately 60,000 enrolled lives and required close coordination across our team, the brokerage, employers, insurance carriers, and employees.
Successfully delivering the partnership depended on more than the technology. We established regular communication and reporting with brokerage leadership, worked directly with their operations teams to manage day-to-day issues, and traveled on-site to strengthen relationships and jointly solve implementation challenges. We also built integrations with the brokerage's HR and financial systems to automate enrollment, eligibility, and payment workflows, reducing manual work while providing partners with real-time visibility into operational performance.
Onboarding that volume with a small team required building both a product and an operating model that minimized manual intervention. We conducted extensive user research to understand how people chose health insurance, what information gave them confidence, and where they became overwhelmed. We found that customers cared most about whether their doctors and medications were covered, struggled with insurance terminology, and were unlikely to trust recommendations they could not easily understand.
Those insights directly informed the product. We iterated through mockups, prototypes, and usability testing to create a simpler enrollment experience centered on the information customers valued most.
During Open Enrollment, we used Zendesk to monitor ticket volume, response times, resolution rates, and the most common customer questions. These metrics allowed us to identify operational bottlenecks, prioritize product improvements, measure whether those changes reduced customer confusion, and continuously refine both the product and our operating model. We also developed dashboards and analytics that kept brokerage partners informed of enrollment progress and operational performance, strengthening trust and creating a shared understanding of success.
The result was a repeatable operating playbook that could scale efficiently while maintaining a high-quality customer experience. We successfully onboarded 60,000 covered lives in three months while assigning only a single employee to customer success. The strength of the partnership and the quality of execution led the brokerage to introduce us to peer firms, helping expand our platform to nearly 600,000 covered lives the following year.
Following Burma's initial political and economic opening, we helped design a public-private partnership that connected the Burmese Ministry of Agriculture, international agricultural traders, local NGOs, and farming communities. The challenge was a familiar one: fertile land and a large workforce, but decades of isolation had left the sector underdeveloped, with limited access to modern equipment and little ability to meet the quality, labor, and traceability standards required by international buyers.
We brought together agricultural specialists, international traders, and Ministry officials to define what commercial readiness actually required, then designed a collaborative investment model that aligned incentives across public and private actors. We secured funding commitments from the U.S. government, the Burmese government, and participating traders; established agricultural cooperatives that allowed smallholder farmers to collectively meet the scale and consistency requirements of international buyers; and worked with the Ministry to streamline export procedures that had previously blocked market access.
Recognizing that durable supply chains require resilient communities, we also partnered with local NGOs to expand access to financial literacy, savings programs, and healthcare through the same farmer relationships the initiative had built.
Within six months, participating farms increased agricultural production by nearly 70% and farmer wages rose by a similar amount. The model demonstrated how targeted technical assistance, blended financing, and cross-sector coordination can accelerate agricultural development while creating sustainable economic opportunity for rural communities.
SafeBoda was building a motorcycle ride-hailing platform in Uganda and Kenya, offering riders trained, vetted drivers on well-maintained motorcycles. The value proposition for passengers was clear. The challenge was a classic two-sided marketplace problem: riders would only use the platform if enough drivers were available, and drivers would only join if there were enough paying customers.
Rather than launching everywhere at once, we identified the smallest self-sustaining marketplace where supply and demand could reliably reinforce each other. Field research and customer interviews pointed us toward dense commercial neighborhoods with restaurants, cafes, nightlife, and retail activity that generated consistent transportation demand throughout the day. Concentrating operations in these clusters let us reliably match riders and drivers while building platform trust.
Demand grew quickly, but driver recruitment lagged. Many drivers saw the platform's commission as a cut of already-thin earnings. We conducted driver interviews to understand what they actually valued and found that many lacked access to health and accident insurance that formal employees take for granted. We designed a benefits package that pooled drivers into a single community, using a portion of platform fees to fund coverage that had previously been unavailable or unaffordable. The platform stopped being just a source of rides and became a professional network with real financial value.
This work helped us grow our driver base threefold in a month, and increased driver supply reduced rider wait times and improved reliability, accelerating demand within target neighborhoods and creating the network effects needed for continued expansion.
Thirteen U.S. government agencies administer Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs, which provide non-dilutive funding to early-stage companies developing technologies that address government priorities. The program is coordinated by the U.S. Small Business Administration.
While at the SBA, we partnered with the United States Agency for International Development to design and launch the agency's first SBIR program. USAID's country missions have significant autonomy in setting development priorities and allocating funding, and many were seeking innovative technologies to address persistent local challenges. USAID headquarters approached the SBA to help build a program that could connect these needs with the U.S. startup ecosystem.
We knew there would be strong interest from startups. The program offered non-dilutive capital, opportunities to validate products in real-world environments with fewer incumbent technologies, and a pathway to long-term relationships with government and institutional customers.
The primary challenge was that many startups were hesitant to commercialize internationally. To address this, we worked with USAID country missions to develop clearly defined problem statements and to signal their willingness to support implementation by helping companies navigate logistics such as technology importation, local operations, housing technical experts, and compliance with U.S. government requirements.
Our team helped identify high-priority opportunities across USAID missions, marketed those opportunities through the SBA's startup network, advised USAID on establishing the program in compliance with federal regulations, and managed the proposal evaluation and selection process. After awards were made, we continued to support both parties by facilitating relationships between startups and USAID missions and serving as translators between the cultures, incentives, and operating models of government and early-stage companies.
The program ultimately enabled 12 USAID country missions to fund more than 20 startups across multiple sectors. Projects included deploying circular-economy technologies for plastic recycling in Uganda, implementing drone-enabled agricultural monitoring systems in Madagascar, and piloting ocean-powered hydroelectric technology in Indonesia.
Stratfor provides geopolitical intelligence, forecasting, and advisory services to corporations, investors, and government clients. While at Stratfor, we conducted research and produced strategic assessments across a wide range of industries and geopolitical issues, including Iran's ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the European bank bond market, and the long-term growth trajectory of South Korea's shipping industry.
Our analyses combined open-source intelligence with interviews and relationship-building across academia, journalism, industry, and government. By synthesizing these sources, we developed forecasts that helped clients understand emerging risks and opportunities before they became widely recognized.
Over time, we conducted research spanning more than 50 countries and industries including shipping, construction, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation. More importantly, we developed a structured approach to forecasting—understanding how geopolitics, technology, demographics, economics, and geography interact to shape the behavior of nations and markets. Years later, we applied the same analytical framework to developing our options trading strategy, using macroeconomic and geopolitical signals to inform investment decisions.
When Russia annexed Crimea and conflict broke out in the Donbas in 2014, a donor program supporting Ukraine's post-revolution transition had to reorient within its first month. We were part of the team that shifted from stabilization programming to emergency response, rebuilding operating systems and maintaining portfolio coherence while the situation on the ground was still being determined.
Staying ahead of a fast-moving conflict required more than periodic reporting. We built a monitoring system grounded in local partner networks and field offices in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk, with daily communication between country teams and Washington. That intelligence directly shaped decisions. When Russia moved into Crimea, we flexed the regional strategy, shifting focus eastward, then pulling back as access and security conditions changed. Programming shifted from longer-term civic projects toward faster, more localized interventions: community support for displaced families, independent media to counter disinformation, and people-to-people initiatives to hold social cohesion under pressure.
The operational challenge was running 10 or more grants per month at approximately $50,000 each, while strategy was still being revised in real time. We stood up decision-making processes to keep Washington and field teams aligned daily, developed partner screening protocols adapted for conflict conditions, and built disbursement methods fast enough to match the pace of need. Security tracking was integrated into funding decisions rather than treated as a separate function. Holding three workstreams together simultaneously, while absorbing a funding surge that contributed to a $50M crisis response, required infrastructure built for pressure from the start.
When Sudan's military seized power in 2021 and conflict escalated sharply in 2023, we led a donor program through two full reorientations in three years, growing the portfolio from $6M to $116M without losing operational control. That growth wasn't incidental. It was the result of building systems capable of absorbing scale while the environment was actively deteriorating around us.
Sustaining growth through compounding crisis required intelligence that moved faster than formal reporting cycles. We combined partner reports, third-party conflict tracking, and field team analysis across all regions of Sudan, embedding community-based field staff in hard-to-reach areas to maintain visibility where others couldn't operate. Local relationships were the real analytical edge.
That intelligence drove the decisions that kept the portfolio moving. After the 2021 coup, we reoriented to maintain civic space under military rule. After fighting broke out in 2023, we pulled out of Khartoum, consolidated from five offices, and absorbed significant partner losses while sustaining coverage nationwide through formal and informal networks. Growth continued through both pivots because the monitoring system made course correction possible before situations became unrecoverable.
At this scale, across 500+ grants and 250 partners, instinct isn't enough. We built iterative learning into the portfolio through cluster evaluations, strategic reviews, and structured reflection sessions that fed directly back into allocation decisions. A mid-stream evaluation of a Darfur pilot showed it was effectively reaching people through regional partners. We expanded it. That kind of evidence-based course correction, repeated across the portfolio, was how we kept $116M of capital working effectively in one of the world's most difficult operating environments.
With Angola at a political inflection point ahead of elections and billions of dollars flowing into the Lobito Corridor, a donor needed to know whether the conditions existed to deploy $10M effectively. We led the assessment, traveling across Luanda and Benguela to answer that question with evidence rather than assumption.
The core challenge was building a reliable picture of a fast-moving political and economic environment where standard data sources lagged behind reality. We conducted stakeholder interviews across civil society, government, media, and the private sector, assessing organizational capacity and independence, media viability and information access, and community-level trust in local governance and economic institutions.
Those findings were synthesized into a program framework that identified where a modest investment could generate real leverage: civic engagement, local elections, Lobito Corridor accountability, and independent media. We delivered a partner map and risk register designed for rapid execution, with a clear view of where the political risks were concentrated and where the openings were.
The most valuable intelligence came from relationships, not documents. We engaged extractive industry companies and corridor investors alongside civil society organizations, media outlets, and local government officials. Understanding how those interests intersected, and where they conflicted, was central to the analysis.
The Lobito Corridor was the critical variable. Major external investment was already flowing in, but whether that investment would create accessible economic opportunity for local communities was an open question. We mapped that gap, assessed where accountability mechanisms could realistically be strengthened, and identified which private sector actors were positioned to be partners in that work rather than obstacles to it.
Allegra has spent fifteen years building and managing complex funding portfolios in environments where most operators don't go. In Sudan, Allegra scaled USAID's work from $6M to $16M and directed 700 grants across three countries to reach an estimated 33 million people. Prior to her time in Sudan, she managed $186M in programming across governance, civic action, and stabilization, applying rigorous evaluation frameworks to assess counterfactual impact and adapt grants in real time. Allegra's background includes briefing the National Security Council and the Department of Defense on crisis response and responsible technology.
Sarmed has taken companies from zero to one and from one to scale across health tech, AI, fintech, and government, serving as fractional CFO, COO, and Chief of Staff for companies from pre-seed through Series B. He has rebuilt commercial and operational systems from scratch, reduced weeks-long execution backlogs to days, and onboarded thousands of customers through infrastructure he designed. His earlier career in government adds a dimension few commercial operators bring: he has led $160M+ in USAID and State Department programs in conflict zones and designed the execution infrastructure for a national strategy across 35 US federal agencies.