With Britain’s NHS, users visit their local general practitioner before accessing most hospital or other care services, which adds travel and long waits. Babylon created its “GP at Hand” app to cut through that. 

On paper, the firm is the same as every other practice. When new patients register they leave their old GP and then make appointments to speak to Babylon’s doctors and access its healthcare services. The big difference is that Babylon will accept patients across a wide area instead of being rooted in one building in one region.

This permits Babylon to make GP appointments with less hassle. There are also efficiencies in how doctors spend their time, since working virtually means they can work from anywhere too. The company manages some physical offices for when patients require services that cannot be delivered virtually, such as vaccinations or blood tests. 

Founded by former investment banker Ali Parsa in 2013, the service has been wildly successful. The company says that it has signed up 50,000 patients to use its services in London and Birmingham alone, and it is looking to expand into services to other localities and even to other countries, having already opened offices in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Malaysia and Rwanda. 

Investors have taken notice. In April 2017, it raised $60 million, with reported contributors including Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris, valuing the company at $100 million. In January 2016, its Series A round of funding  $25 million, with investors including Hoxton Ventures and the founders of Google’s DeepMind. 

NHS Stress Test

There is a backlash to the company’s success. The problem isn’t that the upstart is using new technology – the problem is that it is breaking the existing NHS funding model with two structural challenges.

The way funding works is that GPs receive income via regional Clinical Commission Groups (CCGs), which they fund all of the GPs in a given locality – even if registered patients live outside of the area. This means that, as noted by Wired, Hammersmith and Fulham CCG, where Babylon happens to be based, ends up being on the hook for paying for the many thousands of Babylon patients who are based elsewhere, rather than the handful of outside patients that would be expected in a traditional GP practice.

The other challenge is one of demographics: In 2017 the average GP received about $188 per patient. But obviously the cash would be distributed unevenly, with healthy, younger people contributing cash that could be spent on people who are older with more complex needs.

Unsurprisingly, this younger demographic are the ones being lured away by Babylon – leaving traditional GPs with a funding blackhole and the most difficult patients to deal with.

The company has also faltered in its aspirations. In 2018, it failed to land the $400 million of funding it was seeking in talks with Softbank, according to Algorithm X Lab, and the company is still spending more money than it makes: reportedly its workforce costs the company $75 million but are only generating revenue of $10 million. The Financial Times reported this year that its fundraising efforts were continuing as it burns through cash.

Given how aggressively Babylon is expanding, into both new products and new markets, it is surely inevitable that video consultations and AI triage will become an increasingly prominent part of the future of the NHS

The post Babylon: HealthTech Startup Challenging Britain’s Health Service appeared first on Karma Impact.

With the launch of a new $100 million fund, Maniv plans to at least double its portfolio from the 24 investments made from its first $44 million fund.

Maniv’s portfolio includes Revel, an electric moped-sharing company that launched in Brooklyn and Queens in May; Bipi, a Spanish car subscription service; Phantom Auto, which enables car-buyers to test drive remotely-operated vehicles; and Autofleet, a software platform that helps ride-hailing networks. Other investments include software, sensor, camera and cybersecurity start-ups focused on the automotive industry.

“We are extremely passionate about how mobility innovation can change our world for the better,” says Olaf Sakkers, Maniv’s general partner. “We’re in a critical moment of change.”

The automotive industry certainly thinks so. It invested $120 billion in start-ups in 2017-2108, according to an April survey by McKinsey & Co. The report also said that $220 billion has been invested in more than 1,100 companies since the decade began. 

“The demand for innovation in mobility will increase in coming years,” predicted a recent report from Viola Ventures, one of Israel’s leading VC firms. 

Michael Granoff, Maniv’s founder and managing partner, first became interested in better mobility after witnessing the 9/11 attacks in New York. He created Securing America’s Future Energy, a non-governmental organization, a moving force behind the 2006 energy bill.

“It had the first fuel economy standards increases for the first time since the 80s, and the first electric vehicle incentives in the world,” Granoff says. “It was really that process that introduced me to the idea that the only scalable way to break the monopoly of oil in transportation was to get electric.”

Granoff’s interest in electric vehicles brought him into early contact with Elon Musk and Shai Agassi, who were each working on battery-powered cars in the U.S. and Israel. He joined Agassi’s Better Place electric car start-up but the company collapsed in 2013 after burning through $1 billion of investors’ cash. 

Granoff moved to Israel in 2013, which coincided with a burst of activity in the country connecting technology with the automotive sector. This included Waze, which was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion, and Mobileye, which raised $5.3 billion in an IPO in 2014 before being acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion.

Dozens of start-ups began popping up in Tel Aviv. While General Motors was the only major auto manufacturer with an R&D facility in the country in 2015, today it’s been joined by VW, BMW, Ford, Yandex, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Honda and Porsche.

“I began to come into contact with some of these very exciting ideas. I backed them in an informal way personally and then set up the fund doing it in a more formal way,” Granoff says.

Granoff says venture capital is “the most effective way for us to be able to help companies and to match incumbent industry players with start-ups that have technology that is changing the industry,” enabling Maniv to create a bridge between fast-moving, undisciplined tech geeks and large, slow-moving industrial giants.

Maniv’s “sweet spot” is about $2 million at an early stage, but the fund also expects to participate in follow-up rounds.

While 18 of Maniv’s investments in its first fund were in Israeli companies, Granoff expects the new fund to have a more global range. Two of its first five investments were in Revel, in the U.S., and Bipi, in Spain. Three more investments have not been announced publicly.

“We’re seeing that there is an increasing interest in digitization of transportation in entrepreneurial communities around the world. We’re seeing a surprising number of interesting deals from Europe,” he says. “We’re seeing the same amount of deal flow from Israel as we have in the last number of years but we’re now seeing global deal flow at a much higher value.”

Maniv’s investors include Carasso Motors, one of Israel’s largest car importers and leasing companies.

“We are in a changing business environment,” says Avi Kenet, Carasso’s chief commercial officer. “We want to be in touch with the trends, with innovation, with novelties — anything that can help us plan and think how we want to adjust for the change in the industry.”

Kenet says the industry is feeling changes from four directions: connectivity, autonomy, sharing and electrification. Carasso’s involvement with Maniv “gives us a very good tool, a platform to understand better what the changes are and when they are supposed to take place,” he says.

As traffic chaos threatens to paralyze ever-growing cities, Granoff is convinced that the technological revolution in mobility will help solve the growing problems of urbanization, pollution and overcrowding.

“Humanity has engineered itself out of every difficulty that it’s faced,” he says. “The creativity and imagination of these founders is inspiring and without a doubt will create the solutions to the problems of modern mobility.” 

The post Maniv VC Firm Doubling Down on Future of Mobility appeared first on Karma Impact.

Founded only two years ago Joshua Posamentier and Abe Yokell, Congruent has discovered opportunities in everything from geothermal power to coffee roasting. 

The firm focuses on four main sectors: energy transition, food and agriculture, smart cities and mobility, and industrial/supply chain, which also includes advanced materials and efficiency technologies, said Posamentier, who’s also a managing partner at Congruent. 

“We are looking at no-compromise solutions to big problems,” Posamentier said. “We are generally not expecting people to change their behavior.” 

Posamentier spoke with Karma contributor Mark Shenk.

Mark Shenk: You have invested in a vast assortment of startups. Can you tell me if there’s one that’s especially exciting at the moment?

Joshua Posamentier: Emergy has been cause for a lot excitement internally as it was an alternative meat deal. Unlike Impossible and Beyond, Emergy foods will be competitive outside of the high-end sector here. First-world countries eat a high-protein diet while in much of the world wants more. 

People in other countries such as India and China want to consume more protein, with the middle class specifically desiring animal protein, and there’s not enough arable land in the world to support developing regions eating like the U.S. Emergy will be competitive in those markets in addition to domestically.

It’s delicious. It has a lower-cost base than others in the field, has great mouth feel, and looks good on the plate.

Shenk: High-end coffee shops are proliferating. Bellwether Coffee allows them to roast their own beans, beans that are sourced ethically. How does it work?

Joshua Posamentier: Bellwether Coffee has a product that allows a cafe to roast their own coffee. It’s electric and ventless. It streamlines the supply chain so much that it drops both the cost and the carbon footprint. This literally cuts the carbon footprint by half. Bellwether also manages the green coffee supply chain, which allows the company to influence growing practices. And there will be an option for the consumer to tip the grower.

Shenk: There’s a great deal of interest in solar and wind, but one rarely hears about geothermal power anymore. It’s interesting to see that you’ve invested in Fervo Energy, a geothermal startup. What attracted you to this project?

Joshua Posamentier: Fervo, which we just closed a few weeks ago, is exciting. Nobody has heard about geothermal in years. The last significant geothermal startup was Alta Rock, which had limited success. 

Fervo is applying unconventional oil and gas technology to geothermal. They’re using horizontal drilling and the other tools developed by the oil and gas industry and leveraging them for geothermal.

Shenk: Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures also invested in Fervo. Did you pair up with them? 

Joshua Posamentier: Yes — we co-led that deal alongside BEV. They’re a unique shop with a really deep technical bench and are one of the few groups that’s not shy about hardware with deep technical challenges in the energy space. We’d expect to do more with them over time.

Shenk: You are very active in the solar sector. The companies you back are in niches I haven’t thought about, not in building the panels themselves. Can you explain what attracts you to these startups?

Joshua Posamentier: Omnidian takes care of operations and maintenance of residential and small commercial solar, while Raptor Maps looks at the other extreme at utility scale arrays, analyzing drone data to identify and diagnose issues on large-scale projects. They both are all about making solar more cost effective.

Shenk: Is there an average amount you invest, a range?

Joshua Posamentier: We focus only on early stage companies and have a typical first-check range of $150,000 to $1.5 million, but there’s not really a typical or average number.  We also hold deep reserves. Deals where, for our investment, we’d only own a de minimis piece of a company, are typically out of scope. We want to be a material part of a company — not just a checkbook.

Shenk: Do you often partner with other venture capital firms?

Joshua Posamentier: Because of the breadth of our investment areas, we don’t often overlap that much within any one firm. We’ve co-invested a few times with Closed Loop Fund on some of our circular economy companies. We’ve co-invested a few times with my old shop, Prelude Ventures, given the general alignment. I think we’ve got a couple each with 8VC and Wireframe Ventures. 

We’ve syndicated rounds with over 75 funds. One of the things we’re passionate about is building the right investor groups for companies we’re involved with — it can make a huge difference to companies over time.

Shenk: If you bring in partners, who are they? Family offices? Other venture firms? 

Joshua Posamentier: If you mean syndicate partners in deals, it’s mostly other venture firms, but also strategic corporate investors and family offices we’ve worked with in the past or have some specific value add in a sector the company is focused in.

Shenk: Your projects all share the aim of sustainability. Do you expect with this ethical-investing strategy you can match the returns of your peers?

We aim to make venture-grade market returns in sustainability. At the end of the day we want there to be more capital and drive the virtuous cycle of investment.

The post Congruent Ventures Backs Ideas Promising Sustainability Without Compromise appeared first on Karma Impact.

Their solution is a cooperatively owned vacation-stay website called Fairbnb.coop, whose name sums up its aim. Working with local officials to reduce the negative impacts of tourists, Fairbnb plans to launch in six European cities by early August. Software development issues have pushed back the launch date from late June.

“We want to create a market solution that transforms tourism from a problem into an opportunity for local communities,” Emanuele Dal Carlo, a co-founder of Fairbnb, said in an interview with Karma. 

While growing popularity of commercial accommodation sites such as Airbnb has put increased pressure on cities’ services, few hosts on the sites bother to collect the local taxes or other fees that hotels are obliged to pay to offset the impact of visitors. 

Also, the owners of these sites have been reluctant to provide data to city officials so the scofflaws can be stopped or made to comply.  And studies show an increasing number of rooms and homes available on these sites are mini-businesses devoted to short-term rentals, not local residents renting out a room occasionally to make some extra pocket cash.

Leaders in cities from Amsterdam to Barcelona, as well as San Francisco and Tokyo, have been hit by complaints from locals who fear the increased number of apartment dedicated to tourists are destroying the character of historic neighborhoods. Affordable housing advocates say the tourism rentals have led to a worsening shortage of apartments and homes priced for locals. Also, tourist-oriented stores have replaced shops that offering the goods and services needed by long-term residents, from shoemakers to grocery stores.

The basic problem, Dal Carlo said, is that only individual companies and homeowners benefit from the Airbnb-style of tourism, while the entire community suffers from the impact.

Cities are trying to fight back by taking action to restrict rentals, regulate the industry and impose taxes. Even so, more than 100 European cities were found to be “over-touristed” in a European Union report last year, Reuters reported. The article noted that a third of the properties surrounding Barcelona’s popular University Square, for instance, were listed for rent on Airbnb, while the city of 1.6 million struggles to absorb more than 30 million tourists a year, and residential rents have climbed more than 30% over the past five years.

Fairbnb says it can resolve much of that concern.

Its proposition is simple, the company notes on its website: It works together with municipalities to ensure all rented homes comply fully with local laws, and bars hosts who have more than one home for rent in any given city; half of the platform’s brokering fee is donated to a non-profit or community organization in the local community; and the platform is a grouping of locally-based cooperatives with its executives’ salaries capped.

Fairbnb plans to debut with about 500 rental listings in six cities across Europe: Venice, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Valencia, Bologna and Genoa, according to Dal Carlo. The first three are among the European cities hit hardest by the Airbnb trend. A fourth of Venice’s 40,000 homes and apartments are used as short-term rentals, said Dal Carlo, who lives there.

Other pilot cities, including Genoa and Bologna, are not yet overrun, but Fairbnb organizers in those towns want to tackle the problem before it happens, he said.

Fairbnb has been raising money to perfect its technology through a crowdsourcing campaign on Indiegogo, gathering about $12,000 of its $34,000 goal so far. A second crowdfunding campaign, on GoTeo.org, has raised about $8,500 to fund a five-city tour in Spain where the organizers hope to explain their project and sign up additional homeowners.

Dal Carlo and his colleagues launched their quest for a better platform as long-term residents of cities affected by the Airbnb-ification of their hometowns.

“This is not a quick-buck scheme,” said Dal Carlo. In fact, its cooperative structure is designed to ensure no single investor can take control and change the nature of the project, he said,

“We’re open to investors, but more like the impact investors interested in a social outcome,” he said. “Or it could be an angel investor, but don’t come expecting to be billionaires in two years.”

Cities hit by the tourist-rental problem have been eager to work with his team, said Dal Carlo, who added that they are meeting regularly with officials in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Bologna to work out details including how to collect hotel tax.  

Marketing is not a major expense in Fairbnb’s plans. It plans to rely on press releases, conferences and word of mouth, hoping to attract local leaders who will set up Fairbnb “nodes” in major cities and tourist destinations. “We start as a social project,” Dal Carlo said. “It may be slower, but it powers the engagement of people around the world.” 

The project aims to be in 120 cities by the end of 2021, with an average of 35 to 40 homes in each locality. If the project succeeds, they hope to be able to capture up to 5% of the home vacation rental market in about five years. But without the prospect of billions of dollars in profit, they know they can’t displace the existing market leaders. 

“We’re not in this for money,” said Dal Carlo. “We hope the others will see us and say ‘Maybe these guys are on to something, maybe we need to rethink our model and copy them,’” Dal Carlo said. “And even if we fail, we are going to go to sleep with a clear conscience.”

The post Fairbnb Aims to Be Ethical Alternative to Airbnb appeared first on Karma Impact.

Controversy has dogged Uber, from crime, to complaints of driver exploitation, to tangles with regulators and a founder repeatedly in hot water. Things got so bad that the mayor of London, one of Uber’s largest markets, sought to ban the service.

The bad behavior has created an opening for alternatives as customers search for a more ethical operation. Recently seeking to fill the void is the U.K.’s Xooox, pronounced “Zooks,” which started two months ago.

Founders Darren Tenney and Matthew Breretton, both former cab drivers, hope to build Xooox by offering drivers better work conditions and working closely with regulators, rather that at odds with them. Xooox says it’s self-funded, and that it’s app has been downloaded 3,500 times since its founding.

“I wanted to make sure that we delivered a technology platform, which was fair to everyone across the board,” says Tenney, Chief Executive Officer.

A More ‘Fair’ Alternative to Uber

Unlike Uber, which treats each driver as an independent contractor, Xooox works with existing private hire taxi companies. Local private hire operators, which are licensed by local authorities, can sign up to use Xooox as a platform — plugging their business into it. Once signed up, drivers employed by local companies will be listed on the app and will receive pick-up requests from the app. 

It is because of this model as a software layer on top of existing businesses, that the company believes that it can grow sustainably, without the need for cash injections. Still, it says it is in talks with investors about a first funding round.

Gaining traction in a crowded field will be challenging. Pinar Ozcan, Professor of Strategic Management at the U.K.’s Warwick Business School says the company will struggle against Uber’s overwhelming network advantages.

“As one platform starts to grow, it provides an increasing incentive for both providers and users to join that platform rather than others,” she says, “It’s very difficult for a second platform to actually do really well and grow in the presence of that dominant platform.”

Xooox hopes the app will appear fairer based on a few reasons: drivers can set their own prices per mile in real time, responding to demand, and can choose how to split the fee that gets paid to Xooox — whether they absorb it themselves, or whether the cost is passed on to the customer.

For private hire operators, Xooox has built a fleet management tool, enabling them to see where drivers are and where demand is with ease. For regulators, Tenney thinks they have built something unique that could change the industry in the U.K.’s 350 districts.

“All taxis and private hire vehicles are licensed within their own district,” he said. “It’s very fragmented and they’ve never been able to link up and actually deliver a national infrastructure for passengers,” he explains.

To get around this, Xooox has built a portal for local regulators – a means by which they can share licensing data on drivers that doesn’t actually share personal information – and so remains compliant with the tough, new Europe-wide data protection rules. This conceivably means that locally licensed drivers can operate across boundaries.

The cooperation with regulators also extends to the important safety question that has dogged Uber – especially with regard to its high-profile issues with women. In this case, because Xooox is working with existing firms, it is not taking on any of the rider safety concerns itself – instead Tenney argues that it is the job of local authorities.

Still, can the company compete against Uber, whose app has been downloaded from the Google Play 6.32 million times?

Ethical concerns are among Uber’s weaknesses, from the way it treats drivers, to gender discrimination, to systems built to evade regulators. Since its IPO last May, it has been trying to clean up its image – but the scandals still linger. 

Might there be an opening for Xooox?

Ozcan points to her research, which found that convenience and financial reasons are major drivers for consumers choosing sharing economy services – with environmental and social concerns coming a distant second.

“If a user goes on there and sees that their average time to getting a driver’s 20 minutes, then there’s no way that they’re going to go for that,” she says.

Is there anything that Xooox can do to break out of the chicken-and-egg paradox faced by all sharing economy apps, of requiring drivers to attract riders, and requiring riders to attract drivers?

Co-founder Brereton points to the geographic advantage the Xooox model has over Uber – which is capable of aggregating local operators in geographic localities that aren’t on Uber’s city-focused radar:

“People can vote with their feet,” says Brereton, though the company won’t commit to any specific targets. “We have the potential to be everywhere in the U.K. We’re in 90 districts actively at the moment, we will be in all 350 – nobody else can do that.”

“It’s being able to go anywhere, walk out of Heathrow and use it. Walk into Aberdeen and use it –  go anywhere, you don’t need to know what the taxi and minicab companies are, you can just use Xooox.”

Unfortunately, the only way of breaking out might be to spend some cold, hard cash.

“What I would suggest is that if possible raise a significant amount of money and give serious financial incentives for people to try it, say for a month or so,” Ozcan says. “As soon as traffic picks up, then you can slowly reduce the promotions and then let natural traffic [grow].”

Ultimately, success for Xooox is going to come down to whether it can scale up before Uber reaches down to smaller markets. The model, that enables its software to plug into existing firms could enable the firm to pick up business in areas where Uber is yet to tread. But as for areas where Uber is already the dominant force, it may be significantly more difficult to persuade consumers to make the switch.

The post Xooox, British Ridesharing Startup, Offers An Ethical Alternative To Uber appeared first on Karma Impact.

Investors historically have mitigated market volatility through safe agriculture investments. Trade wars with a host of global trade partners, combined with desertification in some parts of the world and erratic monsoons in others, mean farming isn’t the refuge it once was.

Still,  one can safely invest in agriculture, and at the same time help the environment, according to Chris Rawley, CEO of Harvest Returns. He advocates high-tech and sustainable farm investments through his firm, where farmers who need capital connect with investors interested in agriculture with their online portal. 

For example, investing in organic farms that focus on local supply can protect investments from trade wars, he said. Growing plants indoors in nutrient solutions instead of soil, also know hydroponics, saves water and shields plants from extreme weathers.

“That part of the industry is thriving, and the reason is consumer demands are changing rapidly,” said Rawley. “People want organic, they want farm to table, they want plant-based protein.”

The Fort Worth, Texas-based company has seen investment returns ranging from 8% to greater than 20%, Rawley said in an interview. Farms on the platform typically need to raise $100,000 to a few million dollars.

Harvest Returns will investigate a wide range of potential farms, and select those most financially sound and environmentally sustainable for the platform. It also provides a one-stop and easy-to-follow, in Rawley’s words, investing service, which includes signing legal and financial documents online, transferring money, and as well as keeping investors up-to-date on news from the farm and financial performance.

Scarlett Kuang: How do you come up with the idea of building an agriculture investment platform?

Chris Rawley: One of the things that influenced me was the real estate crisis in 2008 and 2009. I began  looking at ways to diversify my real estate portfolio. When I started to examine farming, it made a lot of sense to me as an investment class. Over the long term agriculture farm land is a really solid investment, because it’s not correlated with the stock market and the bond market.

I decided that I would take a shot with farming and agriculture. What I found out was it’s very hard to do. It takes a lot of capital, a lot of knowhow, and a lot of time. At the same time, I saw that there were new types of platforms coming up to help people invest in real estate.

So, what I did was combine those two ideas. We launched an online investment platform to allow people to invest in farming. We launched the company in 2016 and we’ve been growing ever since.

Scarlett Kuang: Who are the investors?

Rawley: Our investors are a pretty wide range. Most are accredited investors, ranging from individuals to small family offices who just want to diversify their portfolio and see the benefits of using agriculture.

The beauty of our platform is that even if you have never invested in agriculture we let you invest in one or more deals with fairly small amounts, anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000.  

Scarlett Kuang: Harvest Returns is essentially connecting investors and farmers. What is your product and what value does it add?

Rawley: For the farmers we provide an alternative source of capital; for the investors, we are curating deals. We do the due diligence on them. We look at the (farmers’) track record: what they’re producing and their ability to produce it. We look at the impact or sustainability of the project. We have many calls or video conferences with the farmers. If we need to go visit the farm, we’ll do that.

Only a small percentage, less than 5%, of the deals that come across our desks actually make it onto the platform.

In many cases, we also take an equity interest in the offering. We’re basically becoming investors ourselves, so we have a vested interest in making sure that those farming projects perform. Essentially  Harvest Returns is a curated platform for people who want to invest in agriculture.

Scarlett Kuang: Can you give an example of a farm you helped finance?

Rawley: An example of a recent deal was a greenhouse operation in Kentucky. They grow baby bell peppers and tomatoes. It was a large project, over $10 million. They’ve had some bank loans and private investors, and they just needed a little bit of capital, $520,000, to finish the construction and start the operation of the plant.

We looked at their loan payments, financial statements, tax statements and permits with the authorities, the corporate, all those sorts of things. We also took a small equity position — I think we have 3% in this one.

Then we would look at those intangible factors. This particular greenhouse is bringing 75 new jobs; both manual labor jobs and higher value jobs. These greenhouses are very high tech so they have computer controls and irrigation systems, and they require job training so that they can be efficiently run.

It’s a hydroponic greenhouse. This controlled environment agriculture takes very little water. It’s not so reliant on fertilizers and herbicides, those sorts of things that can damage the environment.

Scarlett Kuang: What social impact does Harvest Returns want to achieve?

Rawley: Impact investing means different things to different people. Some (Harvest Returns investors) want environmental impact. Some of the new types of agricultural, like controlled-environment agriculture, is all about sustaining the water table and limiting the use of water.

Others are interested in animal welfare. And we’ve done some grass fed cattle operations. They’re taking better care of animals that are raised in the industrial feedlots.

Some are interested in economic benefits, like bringing jobs to disadvantaged communities.   We’re all about supporting rural areas, whether it’s in the United States or overseas. We recently closed a deal in Ghana, West Africa, that’s going to bring jobs on a scale that farming hasn’t seen there. Women’s equality is another aspect of that because the team that we’re working with in West Africa has already done some projects so they understand the cultural aspect of working in Africa. They know that in order to have women’s job opportunities they have to have child care.

Another aspect is reducing the miles that it takes to get food from the producer to the consumer. That saves energy and reduces the climate impact.

Scarlett Kuang: How does climate change affect your business?

Rawley: Our investments are favorable to that aspect. If you grow indoors, you’re reducing the impact from extreme weather events like droughts or floods. You’re reducing the amount of energy it takes to produce the food.

Scarlett Kuang: What about the trade wars?

Rawley: You hear a lot on the news these days about the impact of tariffs or low commodity prices. We intentionally avoid those commodity crops, but if you look at the more specialized types of agriculture, whether it’s indoor agriculture or people doing things like converting their land to organic or doing grass-fed livestock, they are becoming increasingly popular.

Scarlett Kuang: What’s Harvest Returns’ financial situation?

Rawley: We have taken some investor money, and we’ve also sort of bootstrapped. We have four full time employees, an advisory board, some contract and consulting employees and interns. We are raising a $750,000 seed round. The primary use of funds is to grow our investor base through marketing and scale our underwriting staff.

Scarlett Kuang: What is your path to go to profitability?

Rawley: Continue to grow the platform and get quality deals and grow our investor base. We’re getting larger deals, higher margins on the deals and higher velocity of funding — that’s taking us towards the path of profitability next year.

The post Investing in Sustainable Farms to Avoid Volatility from Climate Change and Tariffs appeared first on Karma Impact.

Michael Kahana, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, and Dan Rizzuto, a neuroscientist, in 2016 founded Nia Therapeutics, where they are trying to develop the memory-restoring surgically-implanted chip. The team has created the prototype for the device and are now in the process of getting the Food and Drug Administration approval to perform clinical trials.

“There has been an explosion in brain stimulation and interface research, whether it be for paralysis, brain injuries, or depression,” Rizzuto told Karma. “We hope we can bring our therapy to others.”

Over the past five years, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has invested $77 million into the development of devices intended to restore the memory-generation capacity of people with traumatic brain injuries.  

Encouraging Memory Generation Research

While Johnson & Johnson is also investing in similar research, Nia Therapeutics says it is the only neural engineering company focusing exclusively on memory generation.

Kahana’s research team and Medtronic, the medical technology company, have published compelling results of tests conducted on 25 patients suffering primarily from epilepsy. 

In the tests, a medical device was attached to the left portion of the patients’ brains at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Stimulating the memory portion of the brain using the prosthetic aid, the team was able to help the patients improve on a memory test. As patients watched a list of words, the computer would record brain activity to predict whether the patients had learned each word effectively by triggering a stimulation, according to the research study.

“We worked with these neurosurgical patients whose brain activities were already being recorded. It was a unique opportunity,” Rizzuto said.

Based on the results, the stimuli improved the memory of patients by an average of 15%. 

“The exciting thing about this is that, if it can be replicated and extended, then we can use the same method to figure out what features of brain activity predict good performance,” said Bradley Voytek, an assistant professor of cognitive and data science at the University of California, San Diego.

“Medical technology investing is a difficult process because it depends on the merits of the technology and what the potential of it is,” says Patrick Brennan, the associate Vice president at AdvaMed Accel, an association dedicated to helping small medical technologies gain regulatory, economic, and legal support.

Other companies in addition to Medtronic have also taken steps toward brain implants.

Paradromics, founded in 2015, has also been leading the way in recording motor signals for patients who are paralyzed. Providing interfaces with the brain, Paradromics wants to provide these patients the ability to communicate.

Still in preclinical stages, Paradromics may find a way to help treat diseases like the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and may restore the person’s ability to communicate through recording data from parts of the brain.

“We are creating an implantable device that exchanges data between a brain and a computer,” said Matt Angle, Paradromics’ Founder and CEO, who completed a $7 million Seed round of financing last year. 

Billionaire Elon Musk entered the field in 2016 when he announced Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup that hopes to one day connect humans to computers, enabling humans to reach higher levels of cognition.

Last year Musk promised to launch a new product that “seamlessly combine humans with computers,” nothing materialized publicly. It still unclear what Neuralink’s objective would be for medical or consumer motives. 

‘Not A Leader Yet’

While the company has shown potential, Kahana agrees it’s still way early. It is one thing to have the data to prove the stimulation works and “it’s another to have the program run on its own and watch it in real time,” he told the New York Times.

“Nia Therapeutics is working on the brain implants, but they’re still waiting on the funding stages,” says Nicole Kratz, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not a leader yet.”

And even then investors will need to recognize that regulatory and clinical tests are still required before any device could become accessible to the public.

The post Biotech Startup Is Vying to Improve Memory Through Brain Implants appeared first on Karma Impact.

In 50 of the country’s largest districts, it would take at least five years for teachers to save for a 20% down payment on a home, according to a study by the National Council on Teacher Quality. And that’s if they made the district’s maximum salary and saved 10% of their annual income.

San Francisco-based start-up Landed wants to help. The company, the brainchild of three Bay area entrepreneurs, provides capital for teachers to make down payments on properties.

“We want to see Landed as an option to ‘the bank of mom and dad,’” co-founder Alex Lofton told Karma.

Typically the company pays half of a down payment (about 10% of the value of the sale). When a homeowner sells the home, Landed takes a 25% share of the gain in the property value. There’s also a buyout option on the part of the homeowner. It also generates revenue through referral fees from brokers.

“We’re more than down-payment support,” Lofton said. “We see ourselves as a set of projects that will help people feel more secure.”

Two months ago, four-year-old Landed completed its third, and biggest, funding round with an investment from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, Initialized Capital. Now, the founders say, they’re thinking about further funding and looking to expand nationwide. 

So far, the for-profit company says it has helped more than 200 educators purchase more than $100 million worth of residential real estate. It has partnerships with more than a half-dozen school districts, which inform educators of Landed’s services. 

It’s currently doing business around its Bay Area headquarters, in Southern California, Denver and Seattle and just signed an agreement with Hawaii’s school district. It hopes to use its new funds to expand out East, and officials say they are in talks with Boston and Washington, D.C., districts.

Capital for the down payments comes from outside philanthropies and other investors, including a $5 million fund that Landed is managing for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a non-profit created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to promote science and education programs, among other initiatives. 

Soaring property values in wealthy areas, as well as the fact that homeowners spend at least a decade in a home before selling, would boost the value of the down payment Landed grants the buyer. In Palo Alto the median home price has more than doubled to $2.93 million over 10 years, according to Zillow’s 2018 Consumer Housing Trends Report. 

Teacher Shortage

Landed’s growth comes as many districts struggle to recruit and retain talented teachers. Citing a 2016 study predicting a shortage of 110,000 teachers by 2018, an Economic Policy Institute report found that there was “no sign that the large shortage of credentialed teachers’’ is going away. 

Cost of living issues, of which home buying is the biggest expense, are a contributing factor to the teacher shortage. The Economic Policy said that “teachers have long been underpaid compared with similarly educated workers in other professions, with a pay gap that has grown substantially in the past two decades.”

“It’s not the driving cause of all shortages, but it is one of the reasons that school districts are having difficulty filling positions,” Hannah Putman, managing director of research for the National Council on Teacher Quality, told Karma. 

History and Workforce

Lofton, Jonathan Asmis and a third co-founder, Jesse Vaughan, have long-time interests in education and social impact issues. Lofton’s mother was a teacher and Asmis has educators in his family, so they understood the profession’s salary limitations. 

After hearing about a Stanford program that helps the school’s tenured professors purchase homes in the Palo Alto area, where the median price can run well over $2 million, they zeroed in how they might provide a similar service for public school teachers. Their idea dovetailed with a recent trend among districts to provide housing incentives to recruit teachers, even building housing complexes where educators can rent apartments.

“There is a lot of interest across the country,” Lofton said. 

There’s enough interest, in fact, that Landed  faces increasing competition from other privately funded firms, including Patch Homes, Point, and Unison Home Ownership Investors, all of which offer versions of home-equity financing. Point and Unison have raised $30 million and $40 million, respectively. 

Lofton said that the three co-founders have complementary skills. Asmis handles the company’s financial management and funding rounds. Lofton oversees outreach to school districts while Vaughn focuses on building relationships in the real estate community. 

Miriam Rivera of the venture capital firm Ulu Ventures, an early Landed investor said she was impressed with the company’s mix of educators, technology and financial services executives.

“They brought different professional and life experiences to a market that hadn’t been looked at in a new way in a long time,” Rivera wrote in an email to Karma.

Landed has raised $11.6 million, including Initialized’s $7.5 million investment in April.  

Process and Challenges

In its signature program, Landed provides up to half an educator’s down payment for purchasing a home. For example, for a $750,000 house — a little higher than the median for Los Angeles — Landed would provide $75,000 of the 20% down payment. The company sees a return only when the homeowner buys out the investment prior to the ending of a mortgage agreement or sells the home. 

If the property increases in value, Landed receives an additional 25% of the gain on top of its original investment. But if the home decreases in value, the company shares in the loss. For a $750,000 home that gains $100,000 in value, Landed would receive an extra $25,000. In this “shared equity investment, the potential return to investors depends on what happens to the housing market,” Lofton said. 

But the company also earns referral fees from a network of real estate agents who help teachers find homes. This part of the business functions as a separate real-estate brokerage. 

To be sure, the Landed model could create a financial burden for teachers to repay the company at a future time. Landed is banking that the home buyers will earn more as their career progresses and follow sound money management. Landed has consultants to work with families on budgeting and financial wellness. 

In a phone interview with Karma, Dan Goldhaber a professor at the University of Washington and director of the school’s Center for Education Data & Research, raised a different issue about school districts participating in real estate initiatives. While these efforts “can help with retention,” Goldhaber is more inclined to boost teacher pay. “Direct compensation would be a better solution,” he said.

The post Landed, After Latest Funding, Looks to Expand Teacher Down Payment Program Nationwide appeared first on Karma Impact.

But as it stands, dust is the solar industry’s biggest enemy.

Urbanization, industrialization, and industrial emissions have resulted in rising levels of fine particle air pollution worldwide. In 2017, 92% of the world’s population, mostly concentrated in Africa and Asia, lived in areas that exceeded the World Health Organization’s guidelines for particulate matter.

This same particulate matter presents serious limitations to the growth of solar energy because, well, dirty solar panels let in less light and produce less electricity than clean ones. Air pollution and dust cut solar cell output in India, China and other parts of the world by as much as 25%, said Manish Kumar Das, who helped start Skilancer Solar in India to fight the problem.

The two Asian countries in particular accounted for almost 40% percent of total global photovoltaic capacity in 2018.

The Skilancer Solution

While dust and air pollution hurts optimal production of solar power, so too does human intervention by cleaning. The friction caused by human cleaning together with the use of incorrect technique or chemicals can sometimes permanently damage a panel. 

Skilancer’s solution? A centrally controlled, self-powered, robot for automatic cleaning of solar panels that Kumar Das dubs “a blend of cleantech maintenance, robotics and elements of artificial intelligence.” The patent-pending robot eliminates human operating error and water dependency. It also offers users real-time information on the robot’s cleaning activity and panel performance.

“Our robot is equipped with intelligence to sense climate conditions and any fluctuations in panel power production and operate optimally in response,” explains Kumar Das. When it rains, the robot will not operate since the rainfall will have cleaned the panels anyway. Similarly if the wind speed is beyond a set limit, typically 54 kilometers an hour, then it will not operate so as to protect the panels and the robot from damage.  

Capitalizing on India’s Solar Growth Story

The brainchild of mechanical engineer Neeraj Kumar, Skilancer was conceived as part of his college project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Jodhpur. 

In 2014, he met Kumar Das and both were consumed by the device’s possibilities. It was still early days in India’s nascent renewables scene, a good year before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to make his landmark announcement of the country’s ambitious target of producing 175GW of power from renewable sources by 2022.

Earlier iterations of the product benefited from a collaboration with the mechanical engineering department at Amity University, under the mentorship of department head Basant Singh Sikarwar. 

“We knew this idea was going to be capital intensive, not just monetarily, but we also needed intellectual and infrastructural capital,” recalls Kumar Das. The partnership enabled the duo to recruit students to work on the device and granted access to the institution’s R&D facilities. 

Adapting to An Emerging Cleantech Market

The biggest obstacle to Skilancer’s growth continues to be a lack of consumer awareness.

“Solar panels were a new concept for the Indian market, one that was met with a lot of skepticism,” said Kumar Das, who recalled securing their first customer only after promising to replace his solar panels for free in return for conducting a six- month pilot. “Add to that the notion that a robot could clean a solar panel and it was something entirely foreign for the average Indian consumer.”

 By the end of 2017, after only a few months of sales, they had moved only five devices.

A meeting with Indian angel investor and founder of Alfa Ventures, Dhianu Das, proved pivotal for Skilancer. He invested $100,000 in a seed round in 2018 and worked closely with the co-founders to refine their go-to-market strategy. By the summer of 2018, Skilancer broke even and by the end of that year had boosted sales more than 25 times. Since then the numbers have been climbing rapidly.

Priced at $2,150 per unit, the device presents a “marginal cost that is just 2% of the total cost of erecting a standard solar installation” according to Das and promises impressive durability. “The structure is primarily aluminum so it can last for up to 25 years and the team conducts routine annual maintenance checks, where they check a number of elements and change the device’s wheels,” he explains.

The Impact of Climate Change on Cleantech

While much of the public narrative surrounding solar power purely touts its future promise, very little consumer awareness is conducted on the importance of effective cleaning of photovoltaic panels, he explains.

A 2017 study, led by Michael Bergin, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, revealed that the accumulation of airborne particles on solar panels reduces energy output by more than 25%. The study also indicated a 50% increase in efficiency each time solar panels were cleaned after allowing dust to accumulate for several weeks. 

It’s an opportunity that spawned the massive growth of an entirely adjacent market to photovoltaic (PV) panels, that of solar panel cleaning systems, valued at approximately $2 billion in India and $23 billion globally. Between 2018 and 2026, the PV cleaning market is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.5% according to a recent Credence Research report.

Kumar Das explains that dust is a major problem globally, to varying degrees,but especially in the Middle East, particularly the southeastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. A WHO study showed that 50% of the region’s air pollution was from natural sources, mainly dust and sea-salt particles. 

The Duke study indicated that in the Arabian peninsula, about 84 per cent of the loss of energy identified was due to dust, with the average annual decrease in solar cell output due to fine dust deposits at about 12%. However, during and after a sandstorm, energy yield is decreased by about 60%.

In India and China, air pollution presents a significant and steadily growing problem. Yet power losses due to air pollution are not readily understood even though they play a major role when it comes to investing in or maintaining a long-term solar system. In India’s capital, Delhi, it means a loss of up to $20 million annually, losses of $10 million for both Shanghai and Beijing, and a loss between $6 and $9 million for Los Angeles.

Leading Local, Going Global

In late May 2019, Alfa Ventures concluded a follow-on funding round for an undisclosed sum. Das is bullish about the scalability of solar startups, although it’s a view held by a select group of investors and venture capitalists. 

Arun Diaz, an advisor to impact-investing fund Aavishkaar and most recently an angel investor in Zunroof – an online marketplace for solar systems – explains that the Indian renewables sector in general is still heavily influenced by the government. “India’s solar story remains sensitive to government subsidies, tariffs and policies which present additional risks that few venture capitalists are willing or qualified to stomach,” says Diaz.

For now, Alfa Ventures’ investment is earmarked for three specific developments: product design and technology upgrades, recruiting talent and expanding into new geographies namely Africa, Indonesia and the Middle East. 

In India, which is already seeing strong competition in the PV cleaning from homegrown solutions like Solabot and Nocca and global players such as Japan’s Miraikikai and China’s Sol-Bright, Skilancer plans a series of upgrades including increased cleaning speed, power saving by reducing the weight of the robot and doubling the distance covered in a single cleaning (currently 2.1 km).

Partnerships with state governments are also underway with Skilancer signing a memorandum of understanding with the government of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh for the provision of robots. India’s largest independent solar power producer, Acme Solar, has purchased 160 robots. 

The team’s first foray abroad will be arid regions such as Africa and the Middle East. “We have a paid pilot lined up in Dubai, which will help us better understand the geographic conditions and use cases so we can customize the device to this market,” shares Kumar Das. 

What about China, the world’s leader in solar power output? “China has a monopoly on manufacturing and a number of strong homegrown players, so we have no intention of expanding into saturated territory,” he explains.

The post How Skilancer Solar Is Fusing AI and Robotics For Next-Gen Cleantech appeared first on Karma Impact.

Liesel Pritzker Simmons got it coming and going, though she had to fight in court a decade ago for her share as an heiress to the Hyatt Hotels fortune. Awarded a reported $500 million, she and her husband Ian Simmons, heir to the family that built Erie Canal locks and founded retail giant Montgomery Ward, founded Blue Haven Initiative, an early impact investment family office.

Before becoming a social impact investor, Pritzker Simmons had a short and successful acting career under the name Liesel Matthews. (She played the daughter of President Harrison Ford in the 1997 action thriller Air Force One and was in the 1995 hit, A Little Princess. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up). 

She set aside acting to take on the family legal battle in 2002. After a few years at Columbia University and the favorable verdict, she decided that her financial good fortune had to be put to work doing something more than simply making her wealthier. 

By co-founding Blue Haven Initiative, Pritzker Simmons helped fuel the sustainable investment movement, which as of 2018 had over $502 billion in assets under management, according to the Global Impact Investing Network. Pritzker Simmons spoke with Karma Contributing Editor Michael Moran.

Michael Moran: Liesel, you’ve been building an impact portfolio since well before most people knew what “impact investing” meant. How have the reactions from Wall Street and other financial circles changed since you began the process of rebalancing toward impact and ESG in 2010?

Liesel Pritzker Simmons: It’s remarkable to me how much progress has been made in a relatively short period of time. When I was starting to build out our impact portfolio, my husband, Ian Simmons, and I had a mission to look at 100% of our assets and knew it would take us a while to get there. 

We wanted to examine everything and ensure that what remained had an intentional positive social or environmental impact. But we were told by traditional investment advisors that there was no way to do that without losing money. “There’s not enough product, and you’ll give up returns,” they said. The message we got was: “That’s a stupid way to make investment decisions.” That has changed.

Michael Moran: What did they want you to do instead?

Pritzker Simmons: The professional advice was to just go out and make as much money as possible and then give a lot of it away. That definitely wasn’t what we wanted to do. In fact, that’s pretty inefficient. Without an intentional approach to investing, you will likely make a huge mess in your investment portfolio that you then have to go and clean up with your philanthropic dollars. 

In our view, that’s a waste of time and money. Why not align investing and giving? So we wanted to make intentional, informed investments that had a positive impact—or that, at the very least, weren’t making a mess of the world. We saw this as a way to make our philanthropic dollars go a lot further. This sounded pretty radical to some people a few years ago. Now it’s catching on.

Michael Moran: Why has it changed? And where are you seeing the most compelling evidence. Because, as you know, there are plenty of men in pin-striped suits who mock the whole impact/ESG space.

Pritzker Simmons: It has changed for two reasons. First, there are more funds that have been around long enough to have a track record of positive returns, and people can point to those. That’s very important in clearing up what I call the “returns misconception.” Many more people now accept that you don’t have to sacrifice financial returns to do this kind of investing. In fact, in many cases, having an ESG overlay dampens portfolio volatility.

The other big change is that more millennials and ultra-high-net-worth investors want these kinds of products in their portfolio, and this increased demand is getting attention from financial institutions. Today there are more firms offering impact investing strategies. It’s no longer a fringe concept.

Michael Moran: Do you have a favorite study that lays out the “impact is better” proposition in what you regard to be an unassailable way?

Pritzker Simmons: George Serafeim, Professor of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, studies the materiality of ESG on public markets, and he has a ton of studies that link ESG factors in companies to financial outperformance. So he is a great resource. The USSIF (United States Sustainable Investment Fund) website has a lot of resources around this. So does the Social Investment Forum. On the private equity side, however, there is not nearly as much information. That’s a place where I’d like to see more.

Michael Moran: You’ve had a unique experience in that you’ve had to transform a portfolio that was structured in one way and through a very methodical system over the past decade, you’ve turned that $500 million toward impact and ESG investments. How are the returns versus what you would have expected had you not taken this path?

Pritzker Simmons: You know, we set our asset allocation, and then we set our benchmark depending on the asset class. That’s what we’re trying to beat: the classic, traditional portfolio managers return rate. If you look at the last two quarters, that’s been a challenging environment for active managers in public equity. 

Generally speaking, all of our active managers are doing ESG active ownership, and they are consciously picking companies based on how they approach sustainability. And they have all outperformed across the board—not just the active management space, but their benchmarks as well. So we’re finding that some of these new strategies, particularly in a more volatile market, are helpful, paying off and resilient.

Of course, some things do pose a challenge. For instance, we have quite a bit of exposure to renewable energy in our portfolio, and a few years ago when oil prices dipped so did renewable energy prices. That caused us to take a bit of a hit, and we realized we had a little bit too much sector exposure. So this path can also open you up to a bit of overexposure in certain areas. 

The bottom line is this: Traditional investing is hard, impact investing is also hard—but I’m very happy with the financial performance of our portfolios. And we set pretty high standards both on the impact side and what we expect out of it financially, and so, yeah, I’m glad that we’ve taken this path.

Michael Moran: Can you give me some specific examples of investments that you’re particularly proud of, especially in the private equity space, since that’s where ESG data falls down so badly.

Pritzker Simmons: We took up a portion of our private equity portfolio and carved out our own internal, evergreen, direct investment fund. This is focused on fintech, logistics and renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa specifically. We look for early-stage companies in those sectors across the continent. We have a pretty heavy concentration of companies in East Africa but also some exposure to West Africa and southern Africa.

One company in our portfolio that we really like is a logistics platform for fresh fruit and vegetables and consumer goods in Kenya. They started by looking at the banana supply chain. And get this: A banana that is grown 50 miles outside of Nairobi might change hands up to 13 times before it actually gets sold. As you can imagine, the price goes up dramatically and the quality of the produce is pretty low by the time it gets to the customer. So the company has a logistics platform that just shortens that supply chain. It’s also more predictive about who needs what kind of goods, so they can help farmers plan.

Michael Moran: So that’s an efficiency play. You also mentioned renewables in sub-Saharan Africa. Can you tell me about an investment in that space?

Pritzker Simmons: In the energy space, we invested in a company called M-Kopa. It’s fairly well known in East Africa, where it’s the largest pay-as-you-go solar provider. It has connected more than 600,000 homes to affordable power. In a solar home, the system is a block with a solar panel, lights and a battery—one thing people use it for is to charge their phones. But M-Kopa figured out how they can finance this using mobile money, and so they’re able to go further afield and sell to customers in a more affordable way and provide light to people who didn’t have electricity. That’s a rather large market. We’re excited about that company, and it has been expanding.

Michael Moran: Outside being overweight renewables during the last commodity crash, were there things that looked good at first and turned out to be something to steer clear of?

Pritzker Simmons: We see a lot of products both on the public side and also on the private side that are kind of greenwashing. It’s a “trying to slap lipstick on a pig” sort of thing with some of these products. We try to steer clear of that. 

On the private side, if we see entrepreneurs that are more excited about speaking on panels and winning awards than they are about actually going back to their country and running their business, that’s one thing we get really nervous about too. There is a lot of hype in this space—the  challenges and accelerators and incubators and high profile this and that—and so sometimes it can be a distraction from the hard part, which is actually just running your company. 

That’s one thing we have to be wary of. If a company leader has a lot of change-maker awards, and he or she is only 25 years old and their company is six months old, we get really nervous.

Michael Moran: You count as a pioneer in this space, so I would imagine you’ve become quite good at detecting when something is greenwashed. But ESG data suppliers don’t always paint a clear picture of a company’s core values and what might be in their supply chain. How do you handle all these signals?  

Pritzker Simmons: You’re right to point out the data problem—particularly on the public side. There are very valiant efforts being made by analytics firms to try to get better ESG data out there. But when you have a point of view about what companies in certain sectors should be doing, you have to rely on your (fund) managers, particularly in the public market, to be able to parse data—good and bad—and develop a strong point of view and conviction around what companies are doing.

It often seems that in the impact investing space people want it to be easier. It’s like they want somebody to come out unequivocally and say, ‘this company is an impact play.’ It’s not that simple. ESG data is a starting point.

Michael Moran: Would you describe yourself as an active investor? Do you do get deeply involved in the companies you get involved with?

Pritzker Simmons: In the companies that we own directly in our venture portfolio, we are very engaged and try to be helpful investors by taking board space. We’re often the most flexible capital in that particular company, and so sometimes we will express that by doing debt financing and helping with bridge loans. We try to be as helpful as we can.

On the public side, when we work with a manager, some of them are pretty active. We do like managers who are actively trying to improve what companies are doing—not just buying a great company but taking good ones and improving them.

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