25 February 2016, Bangalore: Unitus Seed Fund, India’s leading seed-stage impact investor, released its annual fund and portfolio impact report. Since 2013, the fund has made a total of 23 investments across sectors including Education, Healthcare, Financial Technology, Agriculture, Retail and Ecommerce, Mobile and Consumer. Their new impact report shows doubling of the total portfolio reach, touching more than 6.5 lac low-income lives across 22 states in India.
According to the Global Impact Investing Network, the market for impact capital is currently $60B and is expected to reach $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
In India, there has been a shift of mindset from pure not-for-profit enterprises to establishing sustainable and scalable market-based models to tackle low-income populations’ most pressing needs. These models focus on making the markets more inclusive, efficient and competitive such that the people at the base of the economic pyramid can get affordable products and services and be paid fair wages. Unitus Seed Fund, focus is on a rise in the number of entrepreneurs using scalable market-based innovations to tackle the real issues our country faces. These new solutions have impact ingrained in their business models.
Unitus looks at three types of impact, all of which are measured at company, sector, and fund levels:
- Scale – We track each portfolio company’s progress towards reaching a goal of touching at least 100,000 low-income families in 5 years, and/or directly employing up to 1,000 low-income individuals in the same timeframe.
- Financial – We support investee companies getting on the path to financial sustainability through increased revenues and further capital raised.
- Ecosystem – Our goal is that we and every portfolio company benefits from, influences, and improves the functioning of the overall startup ecosystem.
Half of the Unitus portfolio companies have either already raised follow-on funding rounds or are well positioned to do so. Cumulatively, the portfolio has raised additional capital worth 3.38 times Unitus’ original investment.
Unitus Seed Fund Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Will Poole said, “We believe strongly in accountability and transparency, and are pleased to publish our fourth report on our progress towards delivering scaled and sustainable impact across India via our rapidly growing portfolio.”