Impact Investments

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Our Philosophy

We started our impact investing entity a few years ago because we wanted to go beyond advisory, to be directly involved in supporting impact enterprises ourselves, and helping grow some of the amazing ideas we were seeing as part of our consulting work.

Since we knew the funding space quite well, we were also aware of where the biggest gaps were. Adding to this our strong belief in the convergence of business and impact, it became clear to us which gap we should help fill: funding for early stage, high risk, for-profit social enterprises. Our goal was to make our fund sustainable, but we also wanted to make sure we did not make the mistake of taking very traditional investment practices and transplanting them to the impact space thus putting us at risk of mission drift. We therefore truly tried to create a different fund – with a flexibility and selection mechanism that was tailored to the space we are focused on.

Since those early days we have evolved and now fund more developed businesses as well when it helps further the ecosystem, but we have stayed true to our aims of helping truly inclusive and innovative businesses prosper.

Through our most recent partnership with Impact Hub Joburg we now also have access to world-class incubation programmes and support services geared towards social enterprises and we make use of this in the best way possible to help improve outcomes for our investees as well as reduce our own risk.

Invest with us with over 30m funded to date

Equity investments in social entrepreneurs
7
Programmes and projects funded via grants / soft loans
6
Track record number of years investing in impact
5
Sustainable Development Goals impacted*
15

Our Funding Criteria

We play mainly in a high-risk, early stage social enterprise space. Our key funding priorities are:

Innovation

We are looking for totally new, different or disruptive ideas, products, service and business models. Things that others might find too risk to fund.

For-Profit

We mostly fund for-profits on an equity basis as this is what our focus is and what we feel the future of all business.

Impact

The greater the impact potential, and the more integrated into the business model, the more interested we are. We are also fully committed to transformation in South Africa

Scalable

The business model needs to be solid and show potential for scale, expansion and replication.

Team

Since we mainly fund early stage enterprise, the team is very important to us. We look at their skills and passion, as well as their own skin in the game.

Our current projects

Other projects we have supported

Phakamani

Microfinance based organization in South Africa.

Emerging Farmers

Aggregated farming models for small holder farmers.

Microfranchising

A project focused on researching the viability and success factors of micro- franchising models.

Mama Spices & Herbs

Healthy herbs and spices for township markets.

ABCD

Asset Based Community Development focused on bottom-up, sustainable approaches.