After two years of building an institutional impact investing marketplace, Impact Agora has been named Best Digital Impact Investing Marketplace (UK) at this year’s Ethical Finance Awards.
There is no denying the acceleration of impact investing in the past decade. An ever-increasing number of consumers and investors alike are beginning to favour sustainable businesses that positively influence the environment or society. This trend, alongside the growing awareness of our footprint on the planet, has seen financial institutions taking on a more dominant role in this sub-sector.
Impact Agora recognised that the impact investing market was growing rapidly but in an increasingly fragmented way. Impact was not only on the traditional financier's agenda; financial institutions also had a clear need to meet the growing investor demand, as they looked to impact investing in a bid to make a positive change or diversify their investment portfolios. From this, Impact Agora, an impact investing marketplace for financial institutions, was born. Anna Curtis, Impact Agora’s community manager, said:
“It’s exciting to see this recognition for Impact Agora. One of our key visions has always been to build a bridge between those looking to invest and those representing this broad range of companies that need funding to scale their solutions. Impact investing is all about innovation and understanding that small solutions can make a big difference. It’s fantastic to see more and more stakeholders become involved and recognise what impact investments can achieve not only on a social and environmental level, but also on a financial level.
“There’s still much that we, as well as the wider industry, need to do to make impact investments easier to access and ultimately accelerate cash flow into these exciting companies. Nonetheless, this recognition is an exciting step forward and highlights that impact marketplaces have an important role to play.”
So who does Impact Agora serve?
To date, Impact Agora has vetted 100 financial institutions that are now part of the platform. These members tend to be wealth managers, financial accelerators and incubators that turn to Impact Agora to:
source high-quality deal flow for their investing clients;
support co-investment opportunities;
find investors while raising capital for their clients.
This can also include family offices that want to allocate to the VC space within impact investing, as well as fund managers and angel networks that lead investment rounds and look for co-investors.
Some exciting impact opportunities on Impact Agora
From VC impact funds to direct deals, Impact Agora’s members share a broad range of impact opportunities aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This can range from clean-tech products that reduce water wastage to agriculture solutions that will increase yield.
Discover our members’ investment opportunities by logging onto the Impact Agora platform. Please note that we vet all of our members before joining and only serve as an institutional marketplace.
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