The theme for our 220+ company portfolio in 2021 was resilience in recovery. As with 2020, our portfolio showed remarkable resilience to the daunting challenges of the pandemic. Many companies continued to grow ahead of plan, with “pandemic positive” business models; others took hits and had to struggle a bit to recover. And that recovery was of course illusory at times, with Covid waves continuing their impact, taking a continuous toll on team productivity, but thankfully not lives. In total, our portfolio grew nicely and delivered nearly USD 2B in revenue.
Our thriving local investment partner relationships enabled us to double our cumulative investment commitments in 2021 to USD 41M, providing catalytic and growth capital to inspiring startups when they need it most. The total of lower and middle-income lives impacted also almost doubled to 31,000,000, well on the way to achieving our fund’s 13-year goal of positively impacting the lives of 100,000,000 individuals across the Global South.
We have always been of the view that social and environmental impact will be maximized by investing in the right sectors and picking entrepreneurs who know how to scale companies quickly and profitably. The markets we operate in showed amazing performance in 2021, with 93 unicorns minted throughout LatAm, MENA, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), India and Southeast Asia. We’re looking forward to some of our portfolio joining that club soon. The trends driving these unicorn valuations include: