Emerging impact enterprises find it hard to access smaller amounts of affordable capital to support their development and growth as they work towards delivering more impact. Often, many of these enterprises have raised their start-up money from family, friends, and crowdfunding. Once they are up and running, they need more money to keep going and growing. Typically, they are forced to turn towards gaining more short-term philanthropic support, or to sell equity too early.

Simultaneously, there’s enormous unmet interest in impact investment by individuals and family offices.

Impact enterprises can provide solutions to many of the local and global challenges we are facing. However, most fail to achieve their potential due to lack of access to the right capital at the right time. This ‘Missing Middle’ in impact finance is a global problem.

We believe easier access to affordable, responsive debt investment can address the gap for early-stage capital for growing impact businesses in a systemic, scalable way.

There are two key problems holding back the impact enterprise movement:

-The lack of appropriate capital to help impact enterprises grow through the “Missing Middle” and; -The lack of opportunities for average people and small institutions to access quality impact investment opportunities.

We solve these problems together by linking growth-ready impact enterprises, vetted and endorsed by a trusted intermediary, with individuals and institutions looking to invest in such businesses.

As the first retail impact investment platform in Australasia we do not have direct competitors, but we may be seen as competing in the P2P lending space, against LendingClub & SocietyOne, and with SME lenders like Lumi & Prosper. Our nearest global equivalent is UK-based LendaHand, who do loans denominated in pounds to poverty-fighting enterprises in Africa.

We often get compared to micro-lending platform Kiva, but where they provide very small loans to individuals with no return to lenders we provide loans at the level required by growing impact businesses, and with returns to encourage investor participation.

As one of our lender’s has said: “I have been a lender on both Ratesetter (for interest) and Kiva (for impact) and I have often wondered why I can't do both on one platform right here in Australia. Now I can.”

Once launching the alpha version of the platform last year we have hosted 20 success campaigns raising over $1.5M AUD for growing impact enterprises.

We have signed up 12 intermediaries as customers, including well-known sector leaders SEFA, Social Impact Hub, Zebras Unite Capital, She Backs Her and Collab4Good. Over 60 lenders are on-boarded, including institutions Save the Children Impact Fund, English Family Foundation, Kirrakin Foundation and dozens of individuals getting to experience direct impact investing for the first time. We have three family offices who have a goal of deploying $1M of capital each through the platform this year. Now we need to bring in more deals so they can!

We also won the Market Builder of the Year Award at the Australian Impact Investment Awards in December – another sign of both the uniqueness and enthusiasm for our solution.