Impact Framework

The rules we apply to every investment, before we commit and every year after. What qualifies as impact, how we assess it stage by stage, what we measure, and what we do not claim.

What qualifies

Impact has to be inseparable from the business

We back founders whose core business model cannot be separated from a positive social or environmental outcome. Not companies where impact is a layer of marketing on top of an otherwise neutral product. If the company grew tenfold and the outcome did not grow with it, it is not what we are looking for.

Every investment must positively contribute to at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal while doing no significant harm to the others, in line with the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

That is the threshold. Beyond it, every prospective investment is measured against seven criteria before a term sheet is issued, from impact magnitude to exit potential. See the seven tests.

How we assess

A different bar at every stage

A seed company and a pre-IPO company cannot answer the same questions. Our assessment runs on five stage-specific forms, so what a company is asked reflects what is realistically achievable where it stands, rather than a single bar calibrated for a mature business. The Seed form carries 12 structured questions across four sections; the Series A+ form carries 28 across five.

01

Pre-Seed

Founding team and early product; little to no revenue yet.

02

Seed

First paying customers; core team in place; testing what scales.

03

Series A+

Proven demand; scaling the team, the product and the customer base.

04

Series B

Established revenue; expanding into new markets or geographies.

05

Growth / Pre-IPO

Mature operations; preparing for a public listing or a large-scale exit.

How we measure

No single score

We could compress each company into one composite impact number. We choose not to. A carbon-markets company and a sustainability data platform contribute to fundamentally different goals, in fundamentally different ways, and collapsing that into one figure would flatten exactly the texture worth reporting.

Instead we map each company against the specific Sustainable Development Goals its business model directly advances, down to the sub-target where the evidence supports it.

Carbon markets and climate financeUrecaSDG 13, Climate Action
Industrial water and resource efficiencyWatergenicsSDG 6, Clean Water
Regulatory compliance and carbon accountingCarbon GateSDG 13, Climate Action
Sustainability intelligence and transparencyilluminemSDG 12, Responsible Consumption
Financial inclusion and last-mile infrastructureFAMESDG 1, No Poverty
AI-enabled sustainable designPoliarkSDG 11, Sustainable Cities

What we collect

Numbers, and the story behind them

The primary metric

The one number that best captures what the company changed over the period, chosen by the company itself.

Who it reached

A description of the people or organisations on the receiving end, specific enough to picture them.

Before and after

What the situation looked like without the company, and what changed once it was there.

In their words

A quote from a customer or beneficiary, lightly edited for length, never rewritten.

Alongside this, we run a structured internal assessment tracking each company across team and social practice, environment, impact strategy, governance and supply chain. It guides where we put our own support. It is deliberately not published, and no ranking of our companies is implied by what appears here or in our report.

What we do not claim. Company-level data in our reporting, including revenue, team size, customer counts, impact metrics and quotes, is submitted directly by each company's founder or a designated executive. It has not been independently audited by Sustainable Impact or by a third party. Where a company cites an external standard, for instance Gold Standard-registered carbon credits or alignment with the GHG Protocol and ISO 14064-1, that standard's own verification process applies to that specific claim, and we have not separately re-verified the underlying data. Reporting periods vary by company. We would rather publish an unfinished answer with its limits stated than a polished one that cannot be checked.

Read the Impact Report