The idea of having a whole family of seed funds rather than one big pool of capital continues to resonate with investors and serve the needs of entrepreneurs. Case in point, the new Sanitation fund, and it’s $20,000 revenue-based loan to JOELEX.
The impetus of this fund was rather simple. A small handful of investors saw JOELEX’s pitch on Demo Day (below), talked to Joel, and decided to invest. These investors understand the benefits of diversifying investments and the likelihood of Fledge finding other water and sanitation companies in the coming year or two and thus rather than creating a syndicate of Angels for one investment, they asked Fledge to set up a new fund for this purpose. The Sanitation fund was born.
With these funds, plus the last of the $20,000 investment from the accelerator, JOELEX will expand from one to three facilities. That isn’t yet the ten Joel is planning, but reinvested profits from just three facilities are projected to allow JOELEX to grow to over 20 facilities in the next four years. That’s the doubling Joel talks about on stage.
We’re hoping to at double the size of the investment well before then, to help grow this company to the thousands of facilities Kampala needs.
