New America’s new report, “Closing the Adoption Gap: How AI Is Being Built in the Global South,” set out to answer a hard question: why does AI so often fail to actually reach the people it’s meant to help? The authors — Akash Kapur and Gillian Rosenberg — spent five months on 14 interviews, six structured surveys, and 53 real-world case studies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to find out.
Out of all of those deployments, they called 0-LA “the most striking example” of what they term “AI in a box”: a briefcase-sized, solar-powered unit that packs an LLM, a database, and a web server into its own self-contained Wi-Fi network — a full AI deployment stack that one person can carry into a disaster zone with no grid power and no internet.
The report also highlights CEO Evert Bopp’s approach to sustainability: because 0-LA runs models on-device, there are no ongoing token fees and no internet bills — directly solving the cost trap that kills so many AI pilots before they ever scale.
Why this matters:
This isn’t a product pitch or a press release — it’s independent researchers, building an evidence base for how AI policy and funding should work, choosing Crisis Cognition as the standout example of frugal, resilient, edge-deployed AI built for the hardest environments on earth. In a report that repeatedly stresses that “contextual fit” matters more than raw model capability, 0-LA is held up as proof that constraint can drive genuinely novel engineering.
For a young startup working at the intersection of humanitarian aid and AI, that’s a significant validation.
Take a look: 🔗 Read the full New America report: https://www.newamerica.org/insights/closing-the-adoption-gap/ 🔗 Learn more about Crisis Cognition and the 0-LA device: https://crisiscognition.com/
If you’re interested in learning more about backing this work, reach out to the Crisis Cognition team directly to discuss investment opportunities.
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