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When Competitors Collaborate: How Eight Impact-First Investors Came Together to Confront the Valley of Death
The “Valley of Death” — the gap between early-stage capital and the scale-ready financing that social enterprises need to grow — is a perennial challenge in development finance. But according to Brigit Helms at Miller Center for Global Impact, investors rarely slow down enough to unpack why it persists, and what role they can play in closing it. She discusses the initial findings of a unique collaborative study conducted by eight leading impact investors — organizations that are both peers and competitors — who each contributed individual fund data to identify the cost of maintaining their impact-first models. As Helms argues, this expense is not an inefficiency to optimize away, but rather the true cost of closing the Valley of Death.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Viewpoint: Philanthropy Is Underestimating AI. Here’s How to Catch Up
If you are operating a philanthropy and you think your only engagement with AI needs to be in your internal practices or in “AI for XYZ” (eg., better farming), I ask you to consider doing more.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Global
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India’s Snabbit Closes $56 Million Round as Investor Interest in On-Demand Home Services Heats Up
Snabbit’s fundraise comes as investor interest in India’s on-demand home services sector heats up.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- employment, gig economy, startups
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BTG Pactual TIG Raises Over $1.2 Billion for Reforestation and Restoration Strategy
The firm’s Latin American billion reforestation and restoration strategy, which includes nature protection organization Conservation International as Impact Advisor, focuses on the conservation, restoration, and planting of deforested and degraded properties.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- Latin America
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Efishery Founder Sentenced to 9 Years in Prison
An Indonesian court has sentenced eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah to nine years in prison over a fraud scandal that exposed inflated financial reporting and shook Southeast Asia’s startup investment market.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Investing
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- agtech, regulations, startups, venture capital
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Spill Games Raises $3.1 Million to Build a Systems-Led Global Mobile Gaming Company From India
Spill Games, a Bengaluru mobile gaming startup, raised USD 3.1 million Seed funding led by Centre Court Capital and PeerCapital to scale its systems driven casual games portfolio.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Press Release: Ant International, IFC, GCash Pioneer First-Of-Its-Kind Sustainability Impact Scorecard to Expand MSME Access to Sustainable Financing
The Scorecard provides Filipino MSMEs with trusted, clear, and accessible pathways to measure sustainability performance, strengthen credibility, and unlock opportunities aligned with global environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- South Asia
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Africa’s Firms are Not Growing—New Data Reveal a Jobs Challenge
Across 48 Sub-Saharan African economies, a firm that has operated for nearly three decades employs barely twice the workers it had at birth. The gap relative to high-income economies is large, structural, and costly.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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