Impact Investing at the Base of the Pyramid: Unitus Seed Fund

Mary J. Cronin ()
Additional contact information
Mary J. Cronin: Boston College

A chapter in Managing for Social Impact, 2017, pp 217-235 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The Unitus Seed Fund is an early-stage venture fund focused on investing in companies with innovative, scalable business plans to serve the population at the base of the economic pyramid (BOP). Operating out of Seattle in the USA, and Bangalore in India, the Unitus Fund partners and Fund investors believe that local entrepreneurial activity will provide a strong and sustainable foundation for economic development and improved quality of life at the base of the pyramid in India and other countries. This chapter describes the Unitus Seed Fund investment strategy, profiles the social mission and impact of some of the Fund’s portfolio companies in India, and analyzes the challenges of achieving the Fund’s dual goals of providing venture investors with superior, long-term capital appreciation by investing in companies that will provide critical services and economic opportunities to millions of BOP individuals in India. In spring 2016, Unitus Seed Fund launched a second, even larger BOP investment fund that will total $50 million in capital to be used as seed funding for about 30 new social enterprise startups, plus follow on investment in the original portfolio companies. The new fund is raising its capital from many of the original US investors such as Bill Gates and the Dell Foundation, along with more investors from India. As the Unitus Seed Fund looks toward its next 5 years of impact investing in India, the managing partners will apply the lessons and insights gleaned from the current portfolio companies to their future investments.

Keywords: Social impact investing; Base of the pyramid investing; BOP; Social impact in India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-46021-5_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319460215

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46021-5_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Management for Professionals from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().