How mission-driven impact is strengthened through Gurobi's partnerships

What happens when the technology behind some of the world's most complex optimisation problems is coupled with the power of mission-driven organisations trying to advance progress on some of the most significant current challenges? Progress accelerates. This is the conviction driving Gurobi's partnership with Analytics for a Better World, rooted in years of impactful collaboration.

Gurobi is a global leader in mathematical optimisation software, helping organisations across industries move from understanding a problem to identifying the best possible decision. For them, the Impact Accelerator Program aligns perfectly with their mission, as they are strongly committed to helping people solve complex problems and make better decisions, especially when those decisions lead to positive social impact. As the team put it:

This partnership is a natural fit for our values and the kind of work we want to champion.

Beyond championing mathematical optimisation software, Gurobi also champions progress towards SDG 17, namely through meaningful partnerships. The Gurobi team shares the belief that:

Decision intelligence can greatly accelerate progress toward the SDGs by turning complex challenges into clear, optimized decisions. In humanitarian and environmental work, that level of precision is essential. Through our partnerships, we’ve seen how advanced modeling helps mission-driven teams respond faster and use resources more effectively, creating measurable impact. And that’s why SDG 17 matters: when academia, industry, and social-impact organizations work together, they bring together research, technology, and real-world insights. Those partnerships are what turn powerful analytics into real progress.

Decision intelligence: from insight to optimal action

Many organisations today have data. Fewer, however, have reached the necessary data maturity to consistently steer their strategic decisions based on the data they hold. Gurobi's aim is to use its long-standing mathematical expertise through technological means to help organisations take the next steps beyond understanding the problem towards identifying and acting on the best possible decisions backed by evidence. But how do they do that?

We can help nonprofits model complex challenges, explore trade-offs, and find solutions that are faster, more efficient, and more impactful. Whether they’re allocating limited resources, planning operations, or designing resilient systems, our solver and our team can support them in turning complexity into clarity.

And through our Gurobi Gives Back program, we also provide mission-driven organizations with software licenses, technical guidance, and access to our experts. Our goal is to enable nonprofits with the same advanced decision-intelligence capabilities used by leading companies worldwide, so they can make data-driven choices that maximize their impact.

And Gurobi has extensive experience with this, especially in the non-profit and humanitarian sectors.

In partnership with Gurobi, ESUPS (Emergency Supply Prepositioning Strategy) built an optimization model that helps humanitarian organisations figure out how much relief stock to pre-position and where, in an effort to mobilise after disaster strikes faster than ever. The team shared that, using Gurobi, they replaced a slow, error-prone Excel-based system with an interactive tool. Their model supported decisions around where to store items and when to shift stock.  According to ESUPS, 60–80% of disaster response costs are tied to logistics (moving/prepositioning supplies), meaning optimised stock placement can yield lifesaving response times and big savings in logistics costs.

Moreover, Gurobi has proven the impact it can enable through partnerships in the Gurobi Gives Back Program. Light Up the World used the Gurobi Solver, and it resulted in significant efficiency for their systems - it cut their solar system design time from 1–2 days to just 10 minutes. This allowed them to lower system costs and reinvest the savings in community-focused projects, such as building a computer lab in an underserved rural village.

Cases like this show exactly how optimisation enables mission-driven organisations to make better, faster, and more cost-effective decisions to create meaningful impact in the communities they serve.

What Gurobi hopes to learn — and to give

For Gurobi, participation in the Impact Accelerator is not just about what they can offer. It is equally about what they stand to learn. The team shared that:

We’re excited to learn from both the nonprofits and contributors as they tackle challenges that can have real global ramifications. Understanding their realities helps us apply decision-intelligence tools in ways that accelerate the impact of work they’re already doing. We also want to learn how to make implementation smoother. This includes understanding what support they need and what roadblocks they face, so optimization becomes an accessible, scalable tool that advances their mission.

With our support, we hope the nonprofits can achieve concrete, measurable improvements in the effectiveness of their projects. Optimization can help them prioritize actions, allocate resources more efficiently, and design solutions that maximize impact. Our aim is to better enable their capacity through the optimal decisions required to scale their work, reach more communities, and create meaningful, lasting change.

When optimization meets purpose, impact scales

In partnerships, inspiring each other to do better for the communities we care for is on par with co-creating solutions. And this reflects the nature of the partnership between ABW and Gurobi, as the team shared what inspired them to engage with the social impact sector:

Our partnership with Analytics for a Better World inspired the creation of our Gurobi Gives Back program. After initially working with ABW and being inspired by leaders like Dick den Hertog and Dimitris Bertsimas, we wanted to find a way to extend Gurobi’s optimization capabilities to other mission-driven organizations tackling global challenges.

Gurobi Gives Back provides nonprofits with software licenses, technical guidance, and access to our experts, helping them apply decision intelligence to accelerate the impact of their work. We’re proud that in its first year, the program has onboarded 16 organizations, giving them the tools and support to make faster, smarter, and more effective decisions. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see these organizations put optimization to work for real-world impact. ABW’s work was one of the inspirations behind Gurobi Gives Back, and our partnership continues to guide how we support mission-driven organizations today.

This article is part of ABW's Impact Accelerator series, spotlighting the partners and vision behind data-powered social impact.