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Facebook co-founder’s B Capital leads $10M investment in Indian payment startup Mswipe
B Capital, the investment firm from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin backed by BCG, has stepped into India after it backed smart point-of-sale company Mswipe in its first deal in the country.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- fintech, venture capital
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Venture Capital is Broken – Here’s How to Fix It: A Q&A with Village Capital President Ross Baird
Venture capital investors are often backing the wrong ideas for the wrong reasons, hoping to strike it rich by dumping billions into frivolous apps that benefit only a wealthy sliver of the world’s population. Meanwhile, innovative solutions to pressing global challenges go underfunded. That's the thesis of Village Capital president Ross Baird, which he expresses in a new book. NextBillion editor Sonya Vann DeLoach discusses the book's message with Baird in this interview.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Viewpoint: Impact funds not scaling fast enough in India
There isn’t any doubt that impact investors such as Aavishkaar have made tremendous progress over the past decade since venture capital as an asset class returned in earnest to this market. Over the last seven years, 2010-2016, impact investors have put $5.2 billion to work across 485 deals, according to a McKinsey & Co. report in September. It wasn’t until 2010 that impact investments in India started to gather momentum and the last two years have been quite exceptional. Investments touched the billion-dollar mark for the first time in 2015 and scaled to nearly $1.1 billion last year.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
- Region
- South Asia
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Press release: More Capital Flows in Africa and Latin America as Two New Impact Fund Managers Join the Capria Network
Since launching in 2015, Capria has reviewed more than 425 fund proposals and selected 11 fund managers who form the Capria Network. Capria’s two new fund managers are enabling significant impact in Africa and Latin America.
- Source
- Press release
- Categories
- Investing
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The U.S. government is investing about $200 million in overseas venture capital funds
The program, unveiled Wednesday at a conference by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, will dedicate around $200 million over the next few years in 10 to 15 venture funds that focus primarily on making a social impact in overseas countries. The exact amount of money allocated could change, but is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- North America
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Somalia’s ‘touch and feel’ e-commerce hit
When Saed Mohamed, a young entrepreneur from Somalia, pitched his online shopping business Muraadso as part of an East African start-up competition in 2015, he was prepared for rejection.
And rejection is what he got.- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- venture capital
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Impact investors flock to sustainable agriculture
"There's total momentum right now around people rethinking about how their money is being put to work," said Kate Danaher, senior manager of social enterprise lending and integrated capital at RSF Social Finance. "Impact investing as a whole is growing very quickly, and my guess is that if you polled everyone interested, the most popular sector is sustainable food and ag."
In fact, according to the Global Impact Investing Network's most recent survey (PDF), 63 percent of impact investors said they were putting their dollars into food and agriculture, and impact investment in the sector has grown at an annual rate of 32.5 percent since 2013.- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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Press release: Bamboo Capital Partners exits its investment from Vitas Group, a leading microfinance institution in post conflict MENA and Eastern Europe regions
Vitas has grown significantly over the course of Bamboo’s investment. Since 2011, Vitas and its affiliates’ Gross Loan Portfolio increased from $82 million to $247 million and the number of clients has tripled. Currently, Vitas and its affiliates serve more than 112,000 clients while employing nearly 1600 local professional staff.
- Categories
- Investing