a|cube: 2026 EU|BIC Award finalist

Welfare systems across Europe are under growing pressure. Ageing populations, new forms of vulnerability, shifting family structures, and rising demand around mental health and work-life balance are straining public provision.

The welfare sector has historically been slow to attract entrepreneurial innovation. Private investment has been scarce, and startups with solutions struggle to find structured support that takes their business model and social impact seriously. Personae is the welfare accelerator of the CDP National Network, an initiative of CDP Venture Capital SGR, and was jointly set up by a|cube and SocialFare.

What is Personae

Personae is a programme that takes welfare startups seriously as businesses while holding them accountable for their social impact from day one. The programme is implemented by a multidisciplinary team of managers and senior consultants from a|cube and SocialFare, with expertise spanning startup acceleration, social innovation, and welfare systems.

Personae is a multi-stakeholder ecosystem initiative. Philanthropic foundations support the programme’s activities. Welfare experts are engaged as speakers and mentors. Investors and financial actors are involved to facilitate access to capital. Startups benefit from opportunities with the wider welfare ecosystem, including potential partnerships with corporates, public institutions, and third-sector actors.

Personae is a four-month acceleration programme for early-stage startups developing innovative solutions in the welfare sector. It focuses on four domains:

• individual wellbeing, including physical and mental health, prevention, and healthy lifestyles;
• family and community care, including support for vulnerable groups and community-based services;
• workplace wellbeing, including employee empowerment and corporate welfare solutions;
• economic wellbeing, including financial literacy, access to credit, and tools for managing personal finances.

Each year, up to ten startups are selected from a competitive field to join the programme. They receive €100,000 in initial investment in exchange for equity and four months of intensive support. The most promising ventures are eligible for follow-on investment of up to €300,000.

The programme is delivered through intensive in-person workshops held every two weeks, individual advisory sessions with the acceleration team and external mentors, and periodic sprint reviews. It combines lean startup and agile methodologies with human-centred design tools. These include customer discovery, user interviews, problem validation, personas, and user journey mapping. These methods are applied not only during early product development but also during product optimisation and go-to-market strategy. This is still relatively uncommon in startup acceleration, and in the welfare sector, it matters enormously.

Without methods that consistently place people at the centre of technological development, there is a real risk of generating solutions that grow but lose their focus on social problems. That misalignment is a contradiction of the programme’s core purpose.

Each startup is supported in defining a clear impact vision. They develop a Theory of Change, setting out clearly how their product or service is supposed to improve the lives of the people it serves. They set measurable KPIs which monitor and guide the venture after acceleration ends. The human-centred KPIs tracked include: increased access to care; a reduction of time or barriers in accessing welfare services; improvement in users’ wellbeing; increased employment; and improved financial stability.

Impact

Across three editions, Personae received 511 applications. From those, only a small cohort was selected each year. Two of the ventures it supported illustrate what the programme can produce.

Lilac Centro DCA is an integrated virtual care hub for eating disorders. Their online model bridges the gap between clinical expertise and the patient’s home environment. Through the programme’s focus on technology-driven personalisation and scaling, Lilac successfully expanded its digital infrastructure and connected over 1,000 patients with a network of more than 120 dedicated specialists.

Develop Players focused on transforming neurorehabilitation through a gamified assessment model. The team developed digital games and AI-enhanced tools to make clinical testing a stress-free experience. The programme supported them in refining their AI-automated reporting and adaptive training algorithms, allowing clinicians to dedicate more time to human empathy while personalising cognitive enhancement for users in real time. This led to low-barrier access through free digital screenings, enabling earlier entry into specialised clinical pathways for families.

Future

The organisations behind Personae are now designing the next evolution of the programme. The guiding principle for this evolution is that welfare innovation cannot be addressed through isolated technological solutions. It requires systemic approaches that integrate technology, services, institutions, and communities.

The future model will operate through a network of territorial hubs across different regions of Italy, including Piemonte, Lombardia, and Sicilia, functioning as living labs where startups, local institutions, and ecosystem actors collaborate on real use cases. This distributed model supports local adoption of welfare solutions while enabling knowledge exchange across territories. It will also integrate structured open innovation pathways with corporates and public institutions, facilitating pilot projects, innovative procurement opportunities, and long-term partnerships that help startups access markets and scale their impact.

Looking further ahead, the programme aims to engage corporates more structurally in open innovation and contribute to policy discussions on welfare innovation in collaboration with national and international networks dedicated to social impact and welfare transformation.

Replicability

The Personae model aligns closely with how EU|BICs already operate: territory-anchored, multi-stakeholder, combining startup support with ecosystem development. Its modular structure allows regions to replicate the methodology while adapting thematic priorities to local social challenges. Any EU|BIC ecosystem seeking to strengthen impact-driven entrepreneurship in sectors such as welfare, health, or social care has a ready blueprint in this programme.

a|cube will pitch Personae on stage at EBN Congress 2026 in Trentino on 18 June. The audience votes for the winner.