Beyond Capital: Our Venture Platform
Pioneering solutions is risky and difficult. While capital is an important component of supporting nascent business models, it’s not enough. Early-stage startups operating in emerging markets need support tailored to their needs.
Our Venture Platform is our offering beyond investment.
Designed to address the needs and risks of the types of companies we invest in, our Venture Platform provides a suite of support services for startups, helping us build a resilient and high-impact portfolio.
Within the Venture Platform, we provide support to companies across four pillars. These four offerings are available as structured support packages, alongside some bespoke services, enabling us to scale these offerings and thus deliver our platform cost-efficiently.
All our support is designed to be value-add, aligned with Mercy Corps Ventures’ strategic goals, and take a user-centric approach to help companies offer right-fit products and services to their customers. We also include a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens as a key factor to sustainable impact, and support ventures to build climate resilience into their business models.
To date, we’ve conducted over 235 post-investment support engagements tailored to each venture’s specific need, provided support to 44 of the 47 companies in our portfolio, and gained an average NPS score of 9.1/10 for our structured engagements.
“In one word, I’d describe the support as tremendous. [The team] could really see the goal and made it super easy to translate our assumptions into actual figures.”
Financial Services Company Operating in Nigeria
Venture Platform: Our four pillars
Impact
Robust impact measurement and management (IMM) is core to who we are. We work constantly to build the right-fit impact measurement & management approaches for each venture, appropriate for their specific stage and business model.
High-quality IMM is vital for early-stage startups. It is the right thing to do: the better we can understand your real end user impact, the more we can ensure you are fully understanding and articulating a holistic impact narrative. And it is also the smart thing to do: gathering feedback from end users helps to understand if the product is really solving a problem for them, and what to change if not.
Our IMM offering consists of bespoke support to help startups build their internal data capacity, establish customer feedback loops, and articulate their impact story. Whether founders want to build a Theory of Change from scratch, or need support fine-tuning their climate resilience metrics, we can help.
Find out more about our IMM offering here.
Product
We know that a core step on the journey to growing an early-stage startup is about understanding customer needs, their experience with the product, and how to improve it. An early-stage startup also may need to respond to challenges or unexpected circumstances in the market, and pivot the model accordingly.
Through our Venture Platform, and a roster of expert consultants, we provide support to iterate on startups’ products and reach a product-market fit. We work on a variety of topics, including:
- Customer Insights: focusing on the user’s experience is the best way to find product-market fit. We can support with in-depth customer journey mapping, feedback loops, and surveys.
- Market Analysis: depending on need, this can go deep into assessing customer groups and product-market fit for target expansion markets. We can also co-produce scorecards or question databases to help startups assess new markets.
Find out more about our Product offering here.
Fundraising
All of our portfolio companies want to scale and grow. To make this happen, we know that they need to raise subsequent rounds, and do it fast and effectively.
At the same time, we know that founders’ experience with fundraising differs. But it’s part of the job, and it can be useful to get some outside help. We want to provide that help, and lighten the fundraising load.
Our fundraising support can be tailored to startups’ needs. Our three priority focus areas are fundraising strategy, pitch deck review, and finance (including financial modelling and finance systems). Thanks to our wide network, we can also make direct introductions to debt and equity investors, as well as grant-makers, depending on what startups need.
Find out more about our fundraising offering here.
Leadership
We know that being the founder of an early-stage startup is hard. There are challenging decisions to be made, competing priorities to be tackled, and exciting visions to be achieved. Even in the most friendly environments, running a company is difficult — and founders are operating in some very challenging environments, with underserved communities who rely on their work to get by.
This year we made the decision to focus more on how we can best support the founders of these nascent, innovative companies. Our new leadership offering includes sponsoring founder coaching with a roster of vetted consultants, and making introductions to other mentors or experts. We are also developing our DEI approach to support founders to build strong, diverse, inclusive teams and cultures.
Find out more about our leadership offering here.
How we provide support
To work effectively with early-stage startups, whose priorities and timescales are often fluctuating, we’ve developed several ways that we can deliver our support. The most hands-on support comes through structured consulting-style engagements, for which we define timelines and desired deliverables at the start — though we’re open to pivoting depending on what comes up during the work! We also provide more bespoke, ad hoc support, responding to companies as they reach out to us and either providing support ourselves, or making introductions and facilitating partnerships where we see a better opportunity for our companies.
Read more about how we initially built our Venture Platform, and the latest developments here.
