The urgency and magnitude of the world’s leading challenges, from climate change to poverty and wealth inequality, far exceed the public funding available to tackle these. However, we believe that innovation and entrepreneurship can play an important role in meeting these challenges and bridging the funding gap.

Disruptive innovations have the potential to bring fresh approaches to intractable problems that can be both transformational and rapidly rolled out, such as the internet, mobile telephony, or mRNA vaccines, to name but a few in recent years. Furthermore, such innovations can open doors to entrepreneurial and commercial opportunities, which the likes of agile startups can build upon to reach large user bases at radically affordable prices. After initial seeding, these startups also have the potential to attract investment and support from private capital and intermediaries, which can supplement far more limited public resources, and sustainably fuel their growth and scale their impact.

As an impact investor, we strive for impact through nurturing and fostering these purpose-driven founders and startups, who are building disruptive commercial solutions to the world’s leading problems - starting with our own region in Southeast Asia. We particularly focus on markets and sectors where funding and support is initially lacking, such as with early stage startups in the still maturing ecosystems of many emerging markets, or among under-represented groups, such as women founders or founders from diverse backgrounds. 

However, the scale of the problems that our region faces goes beyond the capacity of any one organisation and can only be solved with joint effort across all sectors. So, we work with partners from every sector to create shared value and to pool resources, which can propel the startups we support and catalyse private investors to follow suit. And part of this work is to promote new approaches to impact investing that can engage a wider audience and so further galvanise collaborative action.