“Capital alone doesn’t create success stories”

Heather Hartnett — CEO, Human Ventures

It is well known that the greatest success stories in venture capital almost always involve funds that provide high-touch support well-attuned to the needs of its entrepreneurs.

Although many investors deliver this kind of “venture platform” support for their portfolios, it’s often for commercial funds investing in companies at Series A stage and beyond. We have adapted this tried and tested venture platform model for the impact ecosystem, to early-stage companies with high-impact potential, operating in emerging markets.

Going beyond capital to provide a venture platform is particularly crucial for entrepreneurs launching experimental business models in nascent markets to tackle some of the toughest challenges of our time. Challenges like climate change, financial exclusion, and other global disruptions impacting refugees and migrants, informal workers, micro and small business owners, smallholder farmers, and other underserved populations.

We’ve always provided our portfolio companies with technical assistance, working to find the best ways to add value as they test their minimum viable product (MVP), apply sales tactics, develop fundraising strategies, and more. However, as we grew, we recognized we needed to deliver support in a way that scaled, leveraged our expertise, and was right-fit to the type of investments we make.

Welcome to our Venture Platform.

The MCV Venture Platform provides a suite of services beyond capital to ensure our portfolio companies achieve impact at scale. This includes:

• Post-Investment Support
  We provide a suite of services to our portfolio companies to build strong foundations for growth.
• Partnerships
  We leverage a network of operational experts, advisors, co-investors, and founders to deliver this world-class support.
• Pre-Investment Support
  We address a current scarcity of support for emerging market ventures at pre-seed stage, particularly local and female founders.
• Insights
  We conduct action-oriented research and capture our learnings to share for the benefit of ourselves and the ecosystem.
• Impact Measurement & Management
  We provide deep impact expertise for companies engaging with our Venture Platform, to optimize for scalable impact.

We’ve consolidated years of experience in emerging markets to build and tailor this Venture Platform for founders of early-stage, high-impact enterprises, as they establish strong company fundamentals. And we know there is appetite for these services — in 2021 alone, we conducted more than 50 pre- and post-investment support engagements and produced a six-part insights series read by more than 4,000 industry stakeholders.

“We obviously think about impact measurement, but we’ve never had the framework to speak about it as clearly. The work that MCV has done allows our entire team, across the countries we work in, to have a common reference on the link between our daily operations and the value we are trying to create. We couldn’t be happier!”

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