Investment

This summer Impact Investor talks to investors and entrepreneurs about how the pandemic shifted priorities. This week: Philip Tan, managing director of Polestar Capital.

EKA Ventures, a new €80mn venture capital fund, aims to foster the development of UK-based early-stage consumer technology companies whose businesses tackle social or environmental challenges at scale.

A new impact investment fund, Impact 12, aims to finance mission-led social ventures coming out of UK universities, for which traditional funding models do not provide high enough levels of support during their early-stage development.

This summer Impact Investor talks to investors and entrepreneurs about how the pandemic shifted priorities. This week: Nanouk Grootendorst, programme manager social enterprises at Rabo Foundation in the Netherlands.

In the slipstream of the hugely popular green bonds, social bonds are now also reaching record levels. So what makes the recently launched $177.5mn social bond ‘Financing for Healthier Lives’ special?

BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has raised more than $250mn for its flagship ‘blended finance’ climate fund.

Confidence in the blended finance approaches pioneered over the last decade by companies such as Finance in Motion (FIM) is growing. FIM managing director Sylvia Wisniwski shares her experience with us.

The financial services sector is slowly getting its act together focussing on biodiversity-related risks and investing in nature-based solutions, but policymakers and regulators need to follow suit, says Margaret Kuhlow, Global Finance Practice Lead of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

It’s a new buzzword in Brussels. Social outcome contracting is seen by the European Commission as a tool for orchestrating social change, with the potential to unlock large amounts of private investment.

A $1bn initiative from two powerful philanthropic foundations aims to catalyse investment in distributed renewable energy (DRE) to inject greater momentum in slow market development. We spoke to both foundations to explain their bold move.