Sunita Grote

Sunita Grote leads the Ventures team within UNICEF's Office of Innovation and co-founded the UNICEF Venture Fund — described as the first fund in the UN system to provide seed funding in both fiat currency and cryptocurrency. In this role she manages a venture-style portfolio that identifies, invests in, and grows open-source technology solutions using emerging technologies to expand children's access to information, opportunity, and choice, with a deliberate emphasis on rebalancing capital flows toward under-represented founders and markets.

Before moving into innovation and innovative financing, Grote spent more than ten years working on HIV and global health, collaborating closely with community groups pushing boundaries on difficult human-rights issues, primarily across the UK and South Asia. That experience led her to explore how new financing models and partnerships could better achieve social outcomes — the throughline into her current venture work. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and is based in New York City.

Beyond the Fund itself, Grote co-leads UNICEF's participation in the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder network for the discovery, development, and deployment of open-source solutions. She is a frequent public speaker and judge (including for Women in Tech competitions) and has developed a FemTech investment strategy for the Venture Fund, launched in 2025, motivated by the fact that FemTech represents only about 2% of all health-tech investment.

• Invests up to US$100,000 in equity-free funding in early-stage, for-profit startups; the Fund takes no equity and seeks no financial return — the open-source code or hardware the company builds is treated as UNICEF's "equity."
• Focuses on frontier technology clusters — AI/ML, blockchain, data science, and drones — building portfolios ("cohorts") around a technology so UNICEF can shape markets and learn how these tools can serve children.
• Requires companies to be registered in a UNICEF programme country, have a working prototype, and commit to open-source licensing as a public good.
• Deliberately backs women-led and historically excluded founders and startups from emerging markets, to counter concentration of VC funding.
• On what earns a "yes," Grote's advice to founders: *"Make sure that you are very clear about the problem you are tackling and how your solution is the best one to solve it."* She looks for agile teams that "recognize and can build for complexity and diverse needs" and business models that are sustainable.
• Offers a growth tier of up to US$400,000 (fiat and/or crypto) to accelerate the strongest portfolio companies.