At a glance: Few would disagree that a downturn in the US economy in the next two years is becoming an increasingly likely scenario. While adverse economic conditions in the US typically affect the performance of both public markets and real assets in emerging markets (EMs), evidence suggests that the vast majority of EMs show high […]
Capria’s learning from 3 years of investing in African fund managers
Marking the 3rd anniversary since Capria’s inauguration at SOCAP 2015, I wanted to comment on a few of our learnings about investing in and with fund managers in Africa. I’d also like to encourage both new and established managers to consider joining Capria’s growing global network, as our 7th investment cycle has just opened. As you can see […]
Saved by a ‘SAFE’: Three Lessons from a Broken Impact Investing Deal (Next Billion)
We don’t like SAFEs, but this one saved us. Many in the tech investment sector are familiar with the acronym SAFE. It refers to the “Simple Agreement for Future Equity,” and was first coined by the seed-stage accelerator, YCombinator (YC). SAFE instruments have become popular with early-stage founders in Silicon Valley, and for good reason. They […]
Policies to Promote Impact Investing in Chile
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with President Sebastián Piñera of Chile who was interested in hearing a global perspective on impact investing and discussing ideas that Chile could consider to promote both foreign and domestic impact investing. President Piñera was recently elected to his second term, so he is no stranger to the […]
Key Characteristics of Top Fund Managers in Developing Markets
Insights from Capria’s research of 85 principals and partners. Since launching in late 2015, Capria has received applications from nearly 300 experienced and aspiring local impact fund managers around the globe. To better understand the fundamental components of the best impact fund managers in the world, we performed a deep analysis of 85 […]
Scaling the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem – Development Dialogue 2017
I recently attended the 10th annual Development Dialogue, hosted by Deshpande Foundation, in Hubli, India. As always, there were invigorating discussions among an interesting mix of ecosystem developers, entrepreneurs from both for-profit and NGO sectors, funders, and investors. I participated in a panel discussion that focused on the challenges of […]
Finding Smart and Big Money in a Small Country – Chile
At some level, last week felt like “ground hog day” from 4 years ago. For those not familiar with the Americanism “ground hog day” - it means a repetition that happens every year, and it’s also the name of a very funny movie. In 2012, my partners Srikrishna and Dave and I were doing something that nobody else had done – we were raising money for […]
Global Trends in Impact: India
Following our series of posts on global trends in impact investing, let's take a deeper dive into the reasons behind the global trends we highlighted and how they vary from country to country. We'll examine the same three categories of Impact Investment Activity, Investment Ecosystem Readiness and Entrepreneurial Activity to provide more context […]
Thinking about tax-efficient structures post Panama Papers
As the debate over offshore vehicles rages in mainstream media, fund managers have been painfully aware of the complexities of structuring investments across multiple jurisdictions for some time now. In our previous post, we briefly touched upon some of the diligence you’ll need to be prepared to encounter as you engage international investors […]
Global Trends in Impact Investing: Investment Ecosystem Readiness
This is the second of a three-part series on global themes in impact investing. We conducted a study on the current stage of the impact investment ecosystems in a subset of countries in Latin America, South/Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. For more information on our methodology and the countries profiled in this study, check out parts one […]
Global Trends in Impact Investing: Investment Activity
Since launching in September 2015, Capria has received an incredible amount of interest from fund management teams across the globe. In our first nine months, more than 500 impact fund managers with varying backgrounds and experience have requested to apply to our accelerator program from over 60 countries. Capria's mission is to invest in, support […]
New Research Shows Expansion of Sidecar Funds for Accelerators
Our sister company, Unitus Ventures (formerly Unitus Seed Fund), recently released research results from a "Global Best Practices" survey of incubators and accelerators. They found that the concept of creating sidecar investment funds to invest in the best companies in each cohort is catching on faster than expected, with 90% of the accelerators reporting that they have […]
