Creating postive impact on the health and wealth of people in Southeast Asia

Why Impact as a VC?

Venture capital as the fuel that drives innovation should be applied judiciously to the benefit of society. We consider ourselves stewards of the resources entrusted to us by our investors to bring about positive impact, using capital to amplify the outcomes of the works by our investment companies. Hence, we include a layer of focus on the creation and measurement of impact outcomes of our impact portfolio companies.

How do we evaluate a startup’s impact?

At the point of our investment evaluation, we do not deem it necessary that the founders have already put in place ESG or Impact related policies. Especially so for seed stage startups when their primary consideration is establishing product-market fit (also the reasoning for targeted metrics selection).

We adapted the IMP framework for evaluation of the potential scale of impact of the startup's solution to arrive at 1 of 3 conclusions: Does No Harm, Benefits People, Actively Contributes to Solutions (negative impact startups are immediately filtered out for).

How do we track and measure our portfolio startups’ impact?

We leverage the IRIS+ system to arrive at impact outcome metrics in conjunction with our portfolio companies to keep track of. Selection of metrics is aimed at being as relevant to the core business objectives and outcomes as possible to avoid being onerous to the management team.

Additionally, we adapt and apply ESG guidelines and policies to the operations of ours and our portfolio companies. Using ESG policies as a guide to evaluate operations is proving to be a tool for sound risk identification and mitigation. We see stronger emphasis on the social and governance aspects of ESG being applicable to our portfolio companies as they operate in the tech space. Social where it pertains to employment practices and stakeholder engagement, and Governance which includes corporate governance, business conduct, risk management as well as supply chain management.

Our ESG guidelines are adopted from IFC’s Sustainability Policies and Standards.

For specific details on our policy statements regarding the IMP framework. ESG and Impact metrics, please contact us at Enquiries@trive.vc