I’ve been operating startup investment funds since 2012, and for the twenty years before that, I sat on the founder’s side of the table raising capital from venture capital funds. I thus feel an expertise on the subject of startup investing, and have trouble understanding what others don’t understand about the topic. Case in point, portfolios. Specifically, the fact is that...
Diloo delivers just about anything to anyone in Lima, Peru with a smartphone. In that growing city of 10+ million, with a fast-growing middle-class, and traffic like you can’t imagine, deliveries are a popular service. Over the past year, Diloo’s usage has grown 707%, and to keep up with that growth, the company has just closed a $400,000 investment round. Co-founder/CEO Jose ignacio...
Joel Solomon spoke at Impact Hub Seattle about the urgency of impact.
Soaring through 2017 2017 was an incredible year for Fledge. What once was a small outlier accelerator based only in Seattle is now a global network of accelerators and seed funds operating across three continents, on its way toward being a leader in the industry. That wasn’t in the plan written back in 2012, but as we teach the fledglings, all plans are wrong. What we don’t tell them...
Back in March, ImpactAlpha shared the news that Ziweto Enterprise purchased its distributor, Alfa Medics. The rest of the story is quite telling about African startup economics. The story began back in 2016, with the Ziweto founders reaching out to Fledge, seeking introductions to investors for up to $200,000 to buy Alfa Medics. Upon searching the world, we found less than a handful of fund who...
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...
Fledge is over five years old, and for that half decade and more the industry has been debating how to measure the impact of a company and a portfolio. Using the Pinchot Impact Index, Fledge is able to not only do that, but also to show how that measure changes from session to session. More specifically, we measure three levels of impact for our portfolio of fledglings: the potential of the idea...
Fledge is now more than just an accelerator, it is a family of seed investment funds. This new structure came about after talking to hundreds of impact investors, nearly all of which have specific areas of interest, either by geography and/or sector. With a large collect of funds, those investors can allocate their capital to the topics that best match those interests. To start with, all of...
Fledge is an impact accelerator, working with mission-driven for-profit startups from around the world, helping them achieve their impacts by teaching them how to succeed in their businesses. But what do we mean by impact? “What is impact?” is a question asked each year at SOCAP, at every Big Path Capital event, every Toniic gathering and Investors Circle national meeting. This...
One of the biggest challenges of impact investing is in measuring the impact of the investments. One would think that this would be an easy, solved problem, but it is far from simple. The impact ecosystem is still working through multiple methods of measurements, few of which provide a single value which can be summed, compared, and tracked over time. The Pinchot Impact Index is one proposed...