Blueprint for a Golden Fund

⚖️ Blueprint for a golden fund

TL; DR — Impact finance today means giving money away, or prioritising market-rate returns. Golden Fund charts a golden mean between the two: patient capital, targeting 6.5% IRR, for ventures that might transform health and education infrastructure in emerging markets.

The problem we’re solving: capital on offer today isn’t working, for impact-first founders or funders.

Kiko is the Founder of Angaza Elimu, a startup in Kenya transforming how schools in Kenya teach children to read, write and do basic maths. Over breakfast a couple of months ago, he outlined the barbell he faces when it comes to raising capital.

On one side of the barbell, he’s trying to access grants from donors or philanthropies, donating their money for social good with no expectation of financial return. Kiko’s had success with this, raising from Gates Foundation and UNICEF. Or on the other, he could seek capital from funders seeking market-rate returns, such as VCs or banks.

For Kiko, like many others building the best versions of our future, those are their two options. And both sides are flawed.

Grant funding is flawed partly because it’s diminishing, falling by double-digit percentages in 2024 and 2025, according to OECD. Its future is uncertain, as high-income countries cut global development budgets.

This withdrawal has exposed a much deeper truth about grants: its reliance on the generosity and perceived moral duty of the giver, be that an individual, family or electorate. A 0% rate of financial return is inherently unsustainable; and that lack of sustainability has been exposed by its recent erosion.

To be honest, even when global aid was at its peak¹, it was still fundamentally unsuited to funding novel tech ideas like Angaza Elimu. The vast majority² of grant funding is project-based; it comes with conditions and the need for line-by-line budgets. Donors want to know, in advance, how their money is spent. That’s fine if you’re doing something with predictable outcomes (building a road, school, hospital, etc) but for a new venture starting out that certainty doesn’t exist. Kiko knows he’ll allocate capital to iterating his product and setting up his organisation for growth. Beyond that, he can’t know the exact details. I’ve seen way too much cognitive load and time burnt writing and reporting on these forecasts/budgets over the past decade.

Kiko, and those like him, need a financing engine that is flexible enough to meet their needs, and resilient enough to serve them long into the future.

On the other side of the barbell sits debt/equity investment, seeking market-rate return. One immediate positive: it doesn’t rely on the whims of a giver.

But for ventures seeking to improve people’s lives, to accept such capital often means prioritising endless growth and excessive profit, over and above the incentive to contribute to flourishing lives and communities. I’ve seen this incentive can manifest in any number of forms; for example:

Focusing on distribution, reach and retention before proving the product has a positive impact on someone’s life
Targeting and pricing your product for wealthier users, without considering the impact and revenue potential of middle and lower-income users
Exploitative practices towards your staff, suppliers, and the planet.
Erosion of ethical data privacy practices
Delivering an exit too soon, or to a misaligned buyer.

And grants incentivise the opposite. While market-rate capital seeks high-growth and profits to realise returns, grant recipients don’t need to reach profitability at all. This might sound great, but we believe it’s long term detrimental. Profitability is what makes impact resilient and sustainable; without it ventures can easily become dependent on unreliable grants³.

Neither end of the barbell — 0% or market-rate financial return — works well for Kiko. Or for the many others trying to scale new ideas that will radically improve millions of lives.

It also doesn’t work well for people, or institutions, allocating capital with a conscience. If you have money, and you’re looking to make the world a better place, you face the same barbell as Kiko. You can donate it via grants or allocate it to funds promising market-rate return. Those in the latter camp might also promise some degree of ‘responsible’ investing practice, but it’ll ultimately be the financial return they prioritise. Those are today’s two capital allocation defaults.

*Meme courtesy of* *Mulago Foundation / Kevin Starr*

For a good chunk of investors, that’s not good enough. How many exactly is impossible to say for sure, but some indicative data points:

In its annual survey of members, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)’s ‘State of the Market: 2024‘ report stated 26% of members seek below market-rate returns⁴. That’s a sizable minority.
A landmark 2019 study goes even further. By modelling the willingness to pay of investors using a logit model, Barber et al estimate that investors are willing to sacrifice 2.5-3.7% internal rate of return (IRR) for impact funds, as opposed to traditional VC funds. By modelling investors’ decision making (rather than asking them what they think), the authors paint a much more reliable picture of investors’ actual, real world willingness to pay for impact.

Barber et al’s work feels intuitive to me. In everyday life, I’d wager you (like me) try to stick to a middle path between self-interest and looking out for others. More specifically, you’ll spend a little more on an ethical choice, but not too much. A happy medium, between doing good and doing well. This tallies with the investor behaviour modelled by Barber et al: they’ll give up some IRR, in pursuit of this happy medium.

What’s more, I’m sure this willingness to sacrifice financial return for impact will only go up. It’s increasingly obvious that ‘market-rate’ returns are extractive, compound inequality, and overstretch our planetary boundaries⁵. Which leads to a more unstable and worse world for everyone.

The market for genuinely impact-conscious capital is large, and likely to grow. Deploying that capital today means putting up with either zero IRR, or funds where impact is a secondary consideration (at best).

Our solution: A Golden Fund

We propose a Fund that charts a golden mean between zero and market-rate IRR. In other words, a Golden Fund.

~2,500 years ago, Aristotle recognised virtue as the golden mean between extremes. For instance, courage exists between cowardice and recklessness. Practical action exists between indecisiveness and impulsiveness.

Golden Fund also embodies a golden mean between two poles: maximal financial return, and no financial return. Or, to be more blunt, between greed and charity.

We also aspire to the metal we’re named for. Gold is one of humanity’s oldest sources of steady value. Its track record extends back ~5,000 years. It stands for resilience and a long-term outlook. So do we. Like gold, Golden Fund seeks financial (and social) return over the long run. The Fund will aim for a reasonable IRR of 6.5%. Any amount over this threshold will be re-invested, reducing the Fund’s reliance on investors. (You can find more numbers later in this piece.)

The golden mean is a thread running through our thesis. We mentioned one already: the golden mean between zero and market-rate financial return. Here’s three more:

Our venture portfolio will chart a middle path between excessive and zero profitability. We’ll invest in and support ventures building tech products/services that might scale their user base, revenue and profitability gradually and deeply, working through their country’s institutions and systems rather than disrupting them. Resilient, profitable ventures create the pathway to reasonable return for investors.
We’ll operate in emerging economies. Not high-income, mature economies (e.g. North America, Western Europe), and not countries where institutions have been shocked and overwhelmed by conflict or crisis (e.g. Palestine, Mali, Sudan, Venezuela) — but a golden mean between the two.
We’ll invest in products and services that harness technology, but do so mindful of the work needed for tech to actually make people’s lives better (and not worse) in the long run. Our ventures will embody a golden mean between tech utopianism and cynicism.

The rest of this blueprint dives into Golden Fund’s target venture and business model in more depth.

But before we do that, a word on what we mean by social return, or impact.

Impact is the enhanced ability for people and communities to shape and live a life that means something to them, now and in the future. I’ve written elsewhere about giving people and communities the means to craft their own life and its trajectory, without assuming what that might be, is the only honest way to do good.

So, social return = greater agency for more people and communities.

We believe two types of venture have the potential to drastically turn the dial on social return and human flourishing.

Firstly, any venture that increases a person or community’s income, giving them greater means to pursue their life on their terms. Two ventures I’ve worked with that embody this are Karya (providing AI work opportunities for rural Indians on their smartphone), and Ampersand (giving Rwanda’s moto taxi drivers 30% more gross profit).

Or secondly, any venture that gives people and communities the foundations for living with agency. Our take is that ventures in health and education build these foundations, more than any other. With a healthy mind and a healthy body, you can get out there and shape your life, and its trajectory.

That’s why, as you’ll see below, new ideas in health and education form the core of Golden Fund’s focus. Globally, these are hundred-billion $dollar markets. Just as importantly, their potential for social return (agency) is immense.

Our target venture: building ideas users’ love, that scale deeply through institutions

For the last 8 years, I’ve worked hand-in-hand with 50+ venture teams all over the world. That experience has given me the broad brush playbook on how ventures grow their profitability and impact⁶. It looks something like this:

Build a product or service your end user loves, and prove it by generating some revenue from them. In education/health, this could look like payments (even in part) from: teachers, caregivers, private schools, patients, clinics, pharmacies, and so on. Whatever customer is ethical and practical. Use this small-scale B2C/B2B revenue (plus any seed-stage or grant funding) and insight to iterate your product or service, towards something users love, and that generates impact (agency) for them.
Over time (typically 5-7 years in), you’ll shift your payer from end users to large institutions. I call this hitting an institutional inflection point. In education/health, this might also be employers, insurance providers, larger school or hospital networks, universities, and so on. But — as I’ll argue later — it’s most likely to be the public sector. The sales cycle for this B2G or large-scale B2B revenue is long, but worth it.

For instance, Kiko might start by selling his personalised teacher support platform to one school, or even one teacher. Learning and iterating from there, he’ll eventually become a line item in the Ministry of Education’s 5-year budget and Kenya’s go-to platform for thousands of teachers.

The best teams do steps 1 and 2 at the same time. While selling to end users / iterating their product / validating their impact, they also understand what it takes to secure these larger, institutional customers.

Especially governments.

From experience, the government is the ultimate institutional customer for any venture operating in health/education and emerging markets. Like Kiko, most of Golden Fund’s portfolio will be targeting government-run budgets and systems. There’s several reasons for this:

It’s where ventures can access budgets on the scale of $billions
It enables access to hundreds of thousands, or millions, of users
Revenue from government budgets is consistent and durable. Once you’re in, you’re embedded.
Public sector systems are often where health and education is delivered to those who need it most in emerging markets. I.e. social return is highest, while the wealthiest go private.

Let’s dive into that first point. Kenya, where Angaza Elimu is based, spent 15.6% of it’s government budget on education in 2023-24. That’s $5-5.5bn (excluding donors), over 60% of Kenya’s total spend on education⁷. Even if Angaza Elimu claimed 0.3% of this spend for their product, that’s durable, annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $15M+. Government spend gives Angaza Elimu the addressable market that makes long-term revenue and profitability possible.

It’s a similar story in health. Kenya has a government health budget of ~$2.5bn (excluding donors); roughly half of the country’s overall spend on healthcare⁸.

Both education and health budgets are growing as a percentage of Kenya’s government spend, even as Kenya’s GDP grows by ~5% YoY. That’s a sizable, growing addressable market for any venture that builds a product or service users love, and that can make it to the institutional inflection point.

Let’s broaden out to a cluster of emerging markets. Specifically, we’ll consider countries that (like Kenya): 1) have above-average GDP growth over the last 10 years; and 2) are not high-income, and not overwhelmed by conflict or crisis (our golden mean). It’s a rough and ready criteria that gives us 46 countries in total⁹. These countries:

Spend ~3.7% of their GDP on public education, on average (~$375bn in total)¹⁰.
Spend ~2.8% of their GDP on public health, again on average (~$214bn in total).

It’s true that a lot of those vast health and education budgets are spent on the fundamentals: salaries, buildings, equipment, etc. But that leaves a lot of room for procurement of new products and services — especially where they can upgrade the existing “hardware”. For example, Angaza Elimu can transform the effectiveness of teachers, and government spend on teacher salaries. Worth pointing out, too, that as the emerging markets continue to grow, so too will those budgets and the scope to spend on new ideas.

The data paints the government as the lynchpin of health and education systems across emerging markets. In health, government spend is ~40% of all health spend in those 46 countries. In education, it’s ~65%.

This year, Taleemabad – a learning and school management app – hit the institutional inflection point with government. In 2023, they had 20K users. All were low-fee paying private schools, allowing the team to get feedback and hone their product. This year, following their first contract with government, they have 690K users, and $1.9M in government revenue. Given Pakistan’s education budget is $7.2bn+, there’s a lot of room for Taleemabad to grow. (Not counting continued revenue from Pakistan’s large network of private schools.)

Scaling Gradually, and Deeply

After hitting the institutional inflection point, our target ventures face two major decisions

Do we grow into new countries (expansion), or double down in one country (rooting)?
Do we scale our own organisation (org growth), or stay small and beautiful (decentralisation)?

There’s no right or wrong approach here, and all answers present a path to scale.

Expansion means building a product users love and hitting the institutional inflection point in multiple countries (albeit probably on a quicker time scale), while rooting means doubling down on institutional budgets in one or two countries.

Organisational growth is self-explanatory. As you expand or root, you get more employees and revenue. I.e. scale in the traditional sense.

Decentralisation means transferring management, governance and delivery of your product and service to other organisations. I’ve worked with ventures that decentralised management of pay-as-you-go bicycles to farming co-operatives, onboarding and troubleshooting users of an edtech app to local government education officers, educational content creation to teachers’ associations, and fitting prosthetics to primary health workers.

In all cases, the original ventures ceased to do everything by themselves. Mostly, they kept ownership of IP, decentralised ops and delivery, and retained activities like research, monitoring, advocacy, product development, and certification. Not only could the ventures themselves retain leaner organisations, but the partners/customers could often adapt the product or service to a particular context.

These models for scaling (expansion, rooting, grow their org, decentralise) all embody the golden mean, between hyper-scaling and standing still. They’re all different routes to scaling gradually and deeply – becoming embedded in national-level institutions and growing peoples’ agency, while making money.

Let’s dive into that last point (making money). I mentioned Kiko above: capturing 0.3% of Kenya’s government spend on education equates to ~$15M ARR.

Golden Fund’s venture portfolio would seek a target annual revenue of ~$5-50M. Loosely, this might mean:

Expansion into 3-5 countries, capturing ~0.05-0.3% of their education or health budget.
Rootedness in 1-2 countries, capturing ~0.3-0.5% of their budget.

Obviously, a big variable here is country size. 0.05% of India’s education budget is $70M by itself. To reach $10M ARR in Rwanda, you would need an (unrealistic) 2% of their annual education budget. What revenue is feasible varies based on where the venture is, and the portfolio of countries they target. If Kiko was to capture 0.3% of government education spend in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda (all emerging markets in East Africa), his annual revenue would hit ~$30M, not including any other revenue from businesses or households¹¹.

Besides geography, it also matters whether the venture pursues organisational growth, or decentralisation.

If the organisation chooses to deliver everything itself, it needs to generate higher revenue to cover its greater costs. If it decentralises, revenue (but not impact) will be lower as the organisation doesn’t need large numbers of employees, distribution costs, etc. We expect organisations that pursue this approach to be on the lower end of our revenue target.

While a decentralised org isn’t optimising for revenue, it has other advantages: greater ability to expand (less operating infrastructure required), higher profit margin, and (generally) less complexity.

Our Business Model: Combining Equity Agreements with Revenue Based Financing

We will combine revenue-based financing (RBF) and equity investments, targeting an internal rate of return (IRR) of 6.5% and TVPI (total value paid in) multiple of 1.6x. As highlighted above, we believe this represents the golden mean between greed and charity.

Equity is a well known financing mechanism, so I won’t spend too much time on it. Golden Fund will invest $ for an ownership stake, which might grow in value over time.

RBF deals are less common, so worth spending more time on. In a nutshell, Golden Fund will provide $, with an agreement that the venture will pay the $ plus interest back over time, once a revenue milestone is reached.

RBFs are not commonplace yet, but momentum is growing. In a survey of 200 US-based investors by Village Capital, RBFs were identified as the most promising alternative strategy to traditional equity/debt. Investors such as Uncap¹², Lighter Capital¹³ and Adobe Capital¹⁴ have pioneered this approach over the last 5-10 years.

Given Golden Fund’s thesis, there’s two big advantages to including RBFs in the mix.

One is that ‘exits’ matter less to realising financial return.

The emerging economies in which we operate tend to have fewer exits (via IPO, acquisition or secondary sale), due to fewer buyers with less capital, higher perceived risk, and (sometimes) weaker legal and business environments.

And when exits do happen, they happen on misaligned timescales. A typical Fund may want liquidity 5-8 years after deploying capital, to satisfy their own investors. But ventures may take longer to be acquisition or IPO ready. Or, it might just take that long for the right deal to come along. As we’ll show below, we assume a decade between investment and exit for our equity investments.

Either way, RBFs do not need these external exit moments to generate cash. They create internally negotiated liquidity moments.

The second advantage is that, by combining RBFs with equity investment, we can tailor financing to the scaling pathway of our investee. If equity investing was the only tool in our toolbox, we’d be forced to target only higher-growth, higher-revenue ventures. With RBFs, we can invest in lower-growth, profitable ventures that root in fewer countries and/or decentralise their operating model (and without worrying about their pathway to exit).

Let’s take two hypothetical investments.

Investment one is in a venture building a school management platform in Indonesia. Having built a product that school administrators love, they’re working towards that all important institutional inflection point, while targeting expansion across South East Asia. To make sure schools are onboarded and looked after effectively, the team has decided to pursue org growth, keeping a large sales, account management and engineering team.

Investment two is in a team building low cost, locally manufactured eyeglasses in Senegal. Users love the value and comfort of the eyeglasses, and the team are moving to decentralise distribution, fitting and maintenance to district health officials. They will double down on product development (keeping the eyeglasses high quality) and advocacy for the importance of good vision on economic development and human agency. They’ll focus on staying rooted in Senegal and embedding within the health system there, with expansion to other West African countries a medium/long-term goal.

Investment one suits equity; they may well reach the top end of our $5-50M target annual revenue. Some simplified, illustrative maths on the deal:

$400K investment for 20% ownership (diluted to 15% at exit)
Company hits $30M in revenue and exits for $60M (2x revenue multiple)
Exit proceeds = $9M (18x return)

Investment two suits RBF; They might just reach $5M in revenue, but as long as they stay profitable and resilient, the RBF would work for them and for Golden Fund. Again, some simplified, illustrative maths:

$250K investment for 5% revenue share, until a 3x multiple is reached.
Company averages $2.5M in revenue during our investment period, with an average payback of $125K (5%) per year.
Exit proceeds = $750K (3x return) in 6 years

The big downside of RBFs – that they take money away from an org’s growth – is also less applicable in our thesis. As we’ve detailed, we’ll use RBFs when teams double down on one or two countries, and one or two functions. In the eyeglasses example, the $250K capital injection might boost product development and advocacy efforts, and is more than the team could generate organically through their P&L.

Those examples show how both deal structures can achieve great outcomes. Of course, not every equity or RBF deal will play out so well. So, let’s do the maths at a portfolio level.

A simplified financial model for Golden Fund (or, our maths in 3 tables)

We forecast a $48.5M fund.

Our funders will gradually disburse capital to Golden Fund over years ~1-9 to be invested, and the Fund will seek to achieve all returns within a 14 year time period.

Below is some illustrative math, on how the business model might play out. These tables obviously have a lot of assumptions – take them as illustrative rather than definitive.

Total fund size	$48.5M
Amount allocated to investments	$38M
Amount allocated to Golden Fund operations	$10.5M (2.5% of amount invested per year when deploying capital; 1% thereafter)
Initial Equity investments	30 (in years ~1-4 to enable 10 year holding period)
Follow on equity investments	8 (in years ~7-8)
RBF deals	48 (in years ~1-8)
Follow on RBF deals	24 (in years ~7-9)

Now, let’s assume that ~33% of equity investments generate some return (10 out of 30), and 50% of RBFs (36 out of 72).

Traditional VC is based on power law principles for equity investments: 80% (or more) of the return comes from 20% (or fewer) of the investments. Data backs this up. For example, Correlation Ventures’ study of 21K+ venture financings show that only ~35% generated an exit multiple of >1. Acumen, the world’s leading impact investor, has declared 25% of its equity investments as ‘home runs’ generating both social and financial return, and 38% generated >1x on invested capital.

In line with this data, we assume a third (10) of ventures generate >1x financial return:

Exit type	#	Return multiple
Home run	2 (~6%)	18x (as in our Indonesian school management platform example above)
Solid double	4 (~11%)	10x
On base	4 (~11%)	6x

Our golden mean target IRR (6.5%) means we’re not chasing unicorns (50-100x return multiple). We’re after steady growth and exits at reasonable multiples.

RBFs are a lower-risk, lower return option. We assume a 3x return, with a 50% success rate. Here’s how that compares with our equity investments

	RBF deals	Equity investments
Average Cheque Size	$250K	~$525K ($400K initial cheque, rising to $1M for follow-on investments)
Success rate	50%	~33%
Number of successful exits	36	10
Average success multiple	3x	10x
Average success return per investment	$750K	~$9.5M
Total proceeds	$27M (over years ~8-14)	~$56.8M (over years 11-14)

Our RBF deals start to generate returns as early as year 8. This is crucial — giving money back to investors sooner (at our target IRR of 6.5%) slows our compounding debt to investors, and means our equity investments don’t need as much of a dramatic return.

As you can see above, although our fund returns $79.6M on $48.5M paid in (TVPI of 1.6x), not all of this capital is used to pay back investors. The Fund generates a surplus of ~$4.8M, all of which is reinvested in the Fund.

Questions I’m still pondering:

Are exits, especially ‘home run’ and ‘solid double’ exits, viable at the scale we need?
Is business-to-government revenue viable in emerging markets?
Can we convert our investment between equity and debt, if the venture’s strategy and potential exit strategy shift?

Appendix 1: Lead Indicators for our Venture Portfolio

How do we identify which teams and ideas to invest in?

Over a decade in the trenches, I’ve worked with hundreds of organisations building products and services users love, hitting the institutional inflection point, and scaling impact. Here’s three lead indicators I’ve come to correlate most with success:

1️⃣ $income generation from end users (or those proximate to end users)

Even in emerging markets, there’s no better signal that users love your products than willingness to pay — either directly from a user or from an organisation that “gets” their need (e.g. a private school buying for their teachers).

When Koalaa entered Sierra Leone, amputees paid $5-10 per year directly towards their upper limb prosthetic. This was only ~10% of the total cost, but their willingness to contribute signalled how much they valued the product. We also found those close to the user, including grassroots charities and private clinics, were willing to contribute.

Their collective skin in the game was a lead indicator that users’ loved Koalaa’s product, and this might ultimately translate to it becoming procured within the public health system. Given prosthetics in markets like Sierra Leone are often poorly designed, given for free, and abandoned, we recognised the massive opportunity for Koalaa.

2️⃣ Institutional decision makers’ willingness to give up their time, money or reputation

Sales cycles for governments and larger organisations are long. But you can still infer signals that you’re on the right track to hitting that all important institutional inflection point. Some tangible signals we’ve seen:

Small scale funding for a pilot / demo / trial
Having a named focal point (ideally with decision making authority), who gives up time to co-design your route to institutional scale
Having multiple people put their reputation at stake to champion your idea, and make connections within the organisation.

3️⃣ A leadership team with grit

This one signals a team will keep showing up and keep going, in service of their mission. In the words of Sam Altman in 2014: ““The most underrated quality [for Founders] of all is being really determined… this is more important than being smart, more important than having a network, more important than a great idea.”

¹ In the first two decades of this century, total overseas development assistance grew from ~$90bn to ~$240bn per year

² This issue is less structural, more cultural: there’s no inherent reason that grants require so much upfront certainty. Many grant-based organisations are challenging this, including those I have had the pleasure to work with. 100x Impact Accelerator, who provide unconditional £150K grants to scaling ventures, is one example.

³ Sometimes referred to as grantpreneurs

⁴ Of this 26%, 15% seek closer to market rate, and 11% seek closer to capital preservation, according to the State of the Market report.

⁵ For more on the negative consequences of market-rate returns, check out Katie & Brian Boland and Kate Raworth .

⁶ I outline that Playbook in depth in this piece.

⁷ Kenya’s government education budget was 689bn KSH (or ~$5-5.5bn) for 2023-24, according to Africa Check. Household spend accounted for 37% of total education spend in 2017-18, according to UNICEF.

⁸ Kenya spent 2.2% of GDP of its GDP on public health expenditure in 2019-20, according to one paper – equating to roughly $2-2.5bn. In 2022, 46% of health expenditure was by government, according to a report by Think Well. This blueprint assumes those %ages hold constant into this year.

⁹ Specifically: Ethiopia; Kenya; Ghana; Tanzania; Côte d’Ivoire; Cameroon; Senegal; Uganda; Zambia; Rwanda; Benin; Sierra Leone; Togo; Mauritania; Guinea; Egypt; Morocco; Jordan; India; Bangladesh; Pakistan; Nepal; Indonesia; Thailand; Vietnam; Philippines; Malaysia; Cambodia; Lao PDR; Mongolia; Colombia; Peru; Dominican Republic; Guatemala; Bolivia; Paraguay; Honduras; Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; Armenia; Georgia; Albania; Tajikistan; Kyrgyz Republic; Turkmenistan; Türkiye.

¹⁰ All data is from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators

¹¹ At this point, Angaza Elimu would be a very compelling proposition for donors and philanthropic capital. Grants would be highly leveraged, enhancing the effectiveness of Kiko’s own revenue/investment capital, and contributing to something which (unlike most aid projects) has the financial means to endure over time.

¹² Uncap, who pioneered RBFs in Africa, invest to €20-100K in early-stage businesses. Since 2022, they have funded 87 businesses in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda, and aspire to fund many more through an at-scale, tech-led approach. More details on Uncap’s approach available here and here.

¹³ Since 2016, Lighter Capital has used RBF deals with 600+ startups, often over multiple rounds. More details available here and here.

¹⁴ With a focus on Latin America, Adobe Capital provides larger cheque sizes (e.g. $1M) to revenue-generating businesses. They target a 2.5x return, with flexibility on the time scale for return.

🤔 Got thoughts? Don’t keep them to yourself. Email me on asad@asadrahman.io. Let’s figure this out together.

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Banner depicts ‘The School of Athens’ by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino. Aristotle stands at the centre, holding his Ethics (which the ‘golden mean’ comes from). From Wikimedia Commons.