MIT students are renowned for creating transformative technology. Bar Pereg MBA ’17 wants to channel such technology to solve overlooked societal and environmental challenges.

As a young Israeli soldier in 2006, Pereg huddled in a bomb shelter during the Second Lebanon War, trapped with families and kids in need of food and hygiene products. “The municipal system completely collapsed,” she recalls. The following year, she built refugee camps for Sudanese families fleeing the War in Darfur. Having seen societies at their most vulnerable, she wondered: How could better access to technology improve lives?

Now, as the founder and CEO of New York-based PollyLabs, she is finding ways to leverage existing technology to address critical societal challenges, such as improving humanitarian supply chains and supporting rural communities.

PollyLabs’s motto is “Repurposing Technology for Good.”

It’s Pereg’s motto, too.

After leaving the military and obtaining her BA at Hebrew University, where she studied sociology, anthropology, and business, Pereg worked in the tech sector in Israel and sought to enhance her global impact through an MBA. “When applying to schools, I was looking for a triangle: best in business, best in technology, and best in social impact,” she says.

Both she and her husband, Elad Shapira MBA ’17, were accepted to MIT Sloan. She took classes with MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative Director Jason Jay PhD ’10 and studied economic markets in developing countries with Tavneet Suri, the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics.

Suri encouraged her to apply for a MISTI Africa research grant to examine the supply chain among small farming communities in Uganda. After completing a summer internship at Deloitte, she hopped on a plane to Africa the next day. “It was formative,” she said. “I knew I wanted to change the system.”

Galvanized by her experience in Africa and back on campus, she began to explore entrepreneurship at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where she cofounded GetRid, a platform for collecting and repurposing unwanted items, with her husband and two other classmates: Shani Rokman and Liz Lucero, both MBA ’17. They entered the MIT Fuse and delta v accelerators and participated in the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program.

“I basically lived at the Trust Center my second year. It was such a rich ecosystem,” Pereg says. She’s now a frequent guest lecturer and often serves on delta v’s mock boards.

Pereg founded PollyLabs in 2023 after spending five years at Monitor Deloitte, where she served as a management consultant and was the founding lead of the Purpose Strategy Practice. At PollyLabs, Pereg leverages her MIT startup experience to try to transform how technology serves humanity.

“Technology should serve our most urgent human needs—not just our conveniences. It’s unacceptable that we can instantly get cold beer delivered to our door, yet critical aid remains stuck in customs processing due to paperwork errors,” she explains.

To address this gap, PollyLabs incubates and supports ventures using existing technologies. The goal is for ventures both to have direct impact—improving the lives of millions—and serve as case studies that spark systemic change. PollyLabs conducts structured exploration processes to identify high-impact problems, incubates new ventures, and supports existing ventures with funding and capacity building.

For instance, Foresow, a PollyLabs-incubated venture, helps close financial gaps for small and medium-sized farmers in the United States. Another company, Aseel, revolutionizes last-mile delivery for humanitarian aid, enhancing transparency and efficiency in delivering supplies to disaster victims. A third example, Bono, provides donors with a comprehensive philanthropy management app, offering detailed and quantifiable impact updates.

Pereg emphasizes that PollyLabs is helping impact-driven tech founders close the capital gap.

“If you’re an impact entrepreneur, you’re using technology and venture to make the world a better place, which is a Catch-22: You’re too ‘for profit’ to resonate with philanthropy, and you’re not perceived as profitable enough for venture capitalists. Instead of being celebrated for doing good and doing well, you’re stuck between two capital systems that don't understand you. If we want technology to be used for good, we need to support these ventures,” she says.

Photo: Rotem Bechor