About Mercy Corps Ventures

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Mercy Corps Ventures

5 min readSep 8, 2021

Supporting visionary entrepreneurs to deliver impact at scale.

About Us

Entrepreneurs around the world are deploying disruptive business models and transformative technologies to solve the biggest challenges of our time. Simultaneously, we believe that the next generation of highly-scalable and commercially successful startups will evolve in emerging markets to confront these challenges. However, they are often undercapitalized and don’t have access to the resources they need for their ventures to survive.

We’re an impact-first, early-stage investor, using catalytic capital and targeted support to fuel startups' growth and help them realize their vision.

Mercy Corps Ventures invests in and catalyzes venture-led solutions to increase the resilience of underserved individuals and communities.

Founded in 2015 as the impact investing arm of global development agency, Mercy Corps, we’ve supported 50 early-stage ventures to scale and raise over $465 million in follow-on capital. 44% of our portfolio has at least 1 female co-founder and centers around climate adaptation and resilience-building solutions in adaptive agriculture and food systems, inclusive fintech, and climate-smart technologies, so that those living in frontier markets can withstand disruption and plan for the future.

Through capital and support, piloting new approaches, action-oriented insights, and rigorously managing impact, we catalyze the ecosystem toward smarter, more impactful investments.

Our portfolio centers around solutions across adaptive agriculture and food systems, inclusive fintech, and climate-smart technologies, so that people living in frontier markets can withstand disruption, plan for the future, and thrive. Through targeted support, strategic collaborations, and insight sharing, we further catalyze the ecosystem towards smarter, more impactful investments.

We’re relentlessly focused on accelerating a future where people and communities are resilient in the face of climate change and have agency over their own financial future.

Vega, a portfolio company, is disrupting the coffee value chain by paying small farmers a guaranteed premium price for their beans and hiring them to participate in roasting, packaging, and administration. **Left:** Noushin Ketabi, co-founder of Vega Coffee (Credit Daily Harvest), **Right:** Vega Coffee farmer

Our Approach

We make impact-first investments

We deploy capital strategically, prioritizing opportunities where we can form a team of co-investors or set the stage for follow-on financing. Meet our portfolio & explore our Resilient Future Thesis.

We provide support for companies to scale

Our Venture Platform is our offering beyond investment. It provides a suite of support services for startups within our portfolio in areas including financial management, market analysis, customer insights, impact measurement strategy, fundraising, board governance, and more. Explore our Venture Platform.

We responsibly pilot cutting-edge technologies

We work with partners to launch responsible real-world use cases to test, de-risk, and build the evidence base for promising cutting-edge technologies. This sits alongside our work as investors, informing our investment thesis and building resilience for underserved individuals and communities. Explore our Venture Lab.

We ensure robust Impact Measurement & Management

Robust impact measurement and management (IMM) is core to who we are and integrated throughout our entire investment process. High-quality IMM is vital for startups because it increases efficiency, business resilience, and investment attractiveness by helping companies better articulate and validate their customer value propositions. Explore our IMM approach.

We strengthen the sector through insights

We generate insights and learnings for the benefit of the ecosystem. Through the work of our portfolio companies and piloting real-world use cases, we build the evidence base for nascent and unproven solutions to amplify their impact, establish investor and donor confidence in emerging markets, and drive funding into solutions enabling climate resilience. Explore our insights.

**Left:** OKO, a portfolio company, designs and delivers climate-index insurance products for smallholders in French-speaking Africa, ensuring that farmers have greater income stability. **Right:** Pula, a portfolio company, is radically restructuring the landscape of agricultural insurance to help insure the previously unbanked, uninsured and untapped market of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers.

Our Thesis

Globally, we’re undergoing dramatic advancements in tech and increasingly severe disruption.

At this inflection point, we see the opportunity to scale companies creating a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient world.

We focus on three areas as part of our Resilient Future Thesis:

Adaptive Agriculture & Food Systems

The speed and efficiency of food system innovation must rapidly increase to meet global demand. We invest in the tech and models reinventing agriculture to spur the next green revolution.

Inclusive Fintech

The current financial system is not designed to serve the needs of 1.4 billion people who are currently unbanked. We invest in inclusive frontier fintech startups that enable people to be more productive and resilient.

Climate-Smart Technologies

Existing systems and tech infrastructure across natural resources, land use, and supply chains are fragile and extractive. We invest in startups reshaping supply chains and developing nature-based solutions.

**Right:** Our first pilot tested whether digital stablecoins and mobile wallets could ease frictions and reduce costs in cross-border payments for low-income youth in Kenya. **Left:** ImaliPay, a portfolio company, is the first Pan-African embedded finance solution for Africa’s gig-economy, seeking to provide a safety net to informal workers through “pay as you go” productive use financing, savings and credit building tools.

Our team

We have experience in fintech, crypto, agtech, climate adaptation, last-mile distribution, clean energy, impact evaluation, innovative finance, telecoms, marketing, and emerging market investing. We’re former entrepreneurs, civil servants, investment bankers, management consultants, lawyers, and venture capitalists.

HETAL PATEL | Director, Investments, based in Kenya
LILLIAN ALEXANDER | Senior Impact Advisor, based in the US
KEN KOU | Fintech & Innovation Lead, based in Sweden
TIMO ASIIMWE | Innovation Project Manager, based in Uganda
DOREEN KUBU | Junior Investment Analyst, based in Kenya
TOFFENE KAMA | Investment Principal, based in Senegal
DAN BLOCK | Partner, based in the US
FAREEDA ABDULKAREEM | Insights Manager, based in the US
MARIA PAULA GOMEZ | Innovation Manager, based in Mexico
ROFEM EGBE | Investment Associate, based in Nigeria
NATALIE VERGARA | Head of Platform, based in Colombia
BETHANY KANTEN | Senior Director of Strategy & Operations, based in the US
TIM RANN | Managing Partner, based in Panamá
ASTRID INSIGNARES | Marketing Coordinator, based in Colombia
AYAH ABUALGANAM | Program Officer, based in Jordan
GEORGE MOSOMI | Platform Associate, based in Kenya
SCOTT ONDER | Chief Investment Officer, based in the US
SANDRA UWANTEGE HART | Crypto Humanitarian Aid Practice, based in Bangladesh
RICHARD MILLER | Finance Manager, based in the US