Global public development aid has dropped 37%. For humanitarian NGOs, that statistic is a funding crisis.

Handicap International has spent over 40 years supporting people with disabilities in conflict zones, disaster areas, and extreme poverty across nearly 60 countries. Reaching them requires funding, and increasingly, that funding has to come from private foundations.

Switzerland alone has over 13,000 of them. Identifying the right ones had long consumed weeks of manual work per cycle, with no guarantee of coverage as the landscape kept shifting. H Company built agents that changed that.

THE CHALLENGE

Finding signal in a sea of 13,000 foundations

Switzerland's philanthropic landscape is one of the densest in the world, but that density cuts both ways: with new foundations appearing every week, any static prospect list becomes obsolete almost immediately. For a fundraising team, manually reviewing statutes, assessing mission alignment, and estimating grant ranges consumed time that should have been spent on relationship management.

At large NGOs, up to 20% of full-team capacity is absorbed by prospecting before a single qualified outreach can begin, a cost that only compounds as the funding environment tightens.

"With funding becoming increasingly difficult to secure, automating our philanthropic prospecting process through agents is essential for us." - Damien Garmier, Head of Philanthropy, Handicap International Switzerland

THE SOLUTION

Agents built around their qualifying criteria

H Company sent a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with Handicap International's fundraising team, embedding their institutional knowledge into the scoring logic from the start. The relevance framework covers thematic sectors, geographic focus areas, ethical criteria, historical funding patterns, and foundation accessibility, building a depth of judgment that no off-the-shelf tool could replicate.

"We were surprised to find that some foundations we had previously rejected were still being identified by the agent. After a thorough analysis of these foundations, we realized that the agent's expertise sometimes surpassed our own, which is precisely why it had retained foundations that we, in some cases, had ruled out." - Damien Garmier, Head of Philanthropy, Handicap International Switzerland

The agents run continuously: they navigate relevant sources to extract key foundation data, score each one against this custom framework, and produce structured reports with everything needed to initiate qualified outreach, so the team always knows where to focus first and never has to do manual research again.

THE OUTCOME

30% more estimated revenue and a new operating model

When H Company sat down with Handicap International to assess early impact, the answer was immediate and unanimous: time.

"The time savings are staggering. We used to spend more than 20% of our time on prospecting. At large NGOs, entire teams are dedicated to this task alone." - Damien Garmier, Head of Philanthropy, Handicap International Switzerland

Weeks of manual work per cycle had been reclaimed and reallocated to building relationships, tailoring grant applications, and managing active partnerships.

But time savings were never the real ambition. Both teams set out to push past what was previously possible: a comprehensive, continuously updated view of the entire Swiss foundation ecosystem, and with it, a level of targeting precision that simply didn't exist before. The result is a projected 30% increase in philanthropic revenue, driven not by more outreach volume, but by finally being able to reach the right foundations at the right time.

The agent is now being explored for expansion to additional markets.

"Paradoxically, this AI project brings the human element back into our work." - Damien Garmier, Head of Philanthropy, Handicap International Switzerland

Want to hear it from Handicap International directly? Watch Damien Garmier, Head of Philanthropy, share his experience working with H.