There is a whole kind of funding most founders never approach, because nobody told them it was for companies like theirs.
In this lane, the story is not the pitch. The evidence is the pitch. (read where we wrote it)
Each one has its own page. Point at a name for a two-line explanation.
Founders get this wrong both ways. Some think doing good means they qualify. Others think a business run for profit never could. There is a real test, four gates, and most companies fail the same one.
Gate one
Does the business sit on a problem the world has agreed matters?
Health access. Financial inclusion. Climate and energy. Food and farming. Education and skilling. Water and sanitation.
A lender to people the banks ignore passes. A diagnostics chain in small towns passes. Their founders rarely realise it.
If you fail it
Fail theme and you are a commercial business. Raise commercial money, and stop wasting time.
Gate two
Is the impact built into how the business makes money, or is it a side effect?
If you doubled revenue tomorrow, would the impact double?
If the answer is yes, the impact is running through the revenue, and that is the version funders want.
If you fail it
Fail intentionality and donors may fund a programme you run, but not the company itself.
Gate three
Would commercial money have served these customers anyway?
This is the gate founders fail most, and the one that matters most.
It asks what the market would have done without this money. No founder can judge that fairly about their own company: nobody can see it, and everyone wants the answer that lets them in.
If you fail it
Fail additionality and take it as a compliment. Commercial money is open to you, and it is faster anyway.
Gate four
Can you track the outcome, over time, with data?
An impact claim with no data behind it is not a weak claim. It rules you out.
The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that most companies clear this gate more easily than they fear.
If you fail it
Fail measurability and it is not a no, it is a not-yet. It is usually six months of work, not a problem with how the business is built.
The work has two halves. The first is the money: impact funds, foundations, development banks, and the grants and schemes beside them. It also covers blended deals, where cheaper public or donor money brings commercial investors in. The second half is impact measurement: the reporting these funders require, and the part founders most often underestimate.
Every question asks what you do or what is true, and has an answer that can be checked. There is no room to flatter yourself.
For now our team runs it with you, so you get the result in a conversation, not as a file.
The impact assessment toolkit: a way to measure your impact that funders will accept, before you have a team to do the measuring. Ask for the toolkit
Government grants and schemes fund the same kind of company as impact capital. You can search our register of them by stage and sector.
Debt & Blended Finance is for a company that needs a loan or a credit line, not money from a fund.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
Founders get this wrong in both directions. Some assume doing good means they qualify; others assume a commercial business never could. There is an actual test, four gates, and most companies fail the same one.
16 Sept 2026, 9 min read
A diagnostics chain across tier-2 towns was told its margins were thin and its geography hard. In the language of a whole class of investors, it was an impact business, and there were funders whose entire job was to back exactly what it was building. Not a shortage of capital: a blind spot about which capital.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
The same deck gets five different reactions from five kinds of impact capital. That isn't incoherence: each funder is asking the one question their mandate forces. Here's the grammar they share, and the five dialects they speak.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
About four months after the round closes, an email arrives with a reporting template and forty fields nobody tracks. Impact measurement runs for as long as the money does, and built properly, it's one of the more useful assets a company can own.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
Five families fund impact businesses in India, each with its own calendar and behaviour. Knowing which one fits saves months of chasing the wrong door.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
Founders raise a round. Capital actually comes in layers, ordered by how much return it wants back. Each layer should buy the de-risking that makes the next one cheaper, and taking them out of order is expensive.
From Sanskriti Jhaveri, Lead - Growth & Partnerships, Impact Finance & Strategy
Ask a founder to name venture funds and you’ll get a dozen without pausing. Ask who funds affordable healthcare in tier-2 India, or lending to borrowers with no credit history, or a model that needs seven years to prove itself. The room goes quiet. Not because the answer is obscure. Because nobody ever told them there was one.
Everyone had been treating impact measurement as something you get past to close the round: a hurdle at the door, cleared once. It isn’t. It’s a discipline that runs for as long as the money is invested, and for most of these funders that means years.
