VC Impact Focused Databases for Founders and Investors
Finding ways to connect Investors to Entrepreneurs, is a challenge for both parties. It can be even more difficult to find opportunities based on mission alignments. The posi2ive podcast is one project I’ve been working on for the past year, to help connect the VC Impact Community.
Many Angels / VCs rely on private networks to find deals aligned with their thesis. Many use VC Scouts to find early deals before the crowd becomes aware. Free websites like AngelList list new companies prior to F&F or Angel Rounds, but many Founders simply don’t list their startups for Angels to find, until they start their Seed Rounds or even later. On paid database services like Crunchbase, a similar issue arises — where some companies list too late to be found, in my experience.
There are ways to find prospects early, e.g., searching via ‘Stealth’ or ‘Angel Investor’ companies on LinkedIn. Some rely on Twitter, Lunchclub, Clubhouse rooms, and other platform to align with interested parties. I’ve been building lists for both PreSeed funds (around 70 on Twitter in US), and Positive Impact focused peers on Twitter for some time (at 5k cap) — it’s all not enough to connect good people with great opportunities.
In this article, I wanted to outline some active free databases worth noting and using as both Founder / Investor to connect in the early stages. There are lots of investor matching tools out there, which I may cover in a future article, such as Lolita Taub’s for Underestimated Founders, NewStack VC Rank, Conduit’s, or FounderSuite’s. Have been tracking and using these all for the past couple years, as an active Impact Angel based in SoCal — you can see my private portfolio here (currently over 25 investments), with a focus on both Social and Sustainable Tech.
One World — Sustainable Investor and Company Directory
Currently OneWorld has over 350 startups ranging across a sample of the below categories. It covers PreSeed through Late Stage. On the investor side, they currently have 250 Angels / VCs focused on Positive Impacts.
Good Here — an open database of social impact organisations.
Currently lists over 2000 startups across the below categories. They are an open source project, where creators can fork their project to build their own investor databases — through Github here.
On the Investor side, there are multiple categories which align on impact, with over 550 organizations and investors currently listed.
The VC Firms Backing Black Founders
For black Founders who feel underappreciated, there’s a great database of Investors who back black owned venture scale startups with higher freqeuncies, curated by PeopleOfColorInTech. This awesome database includes over 450 black Founders and other statistics like the below.
InvestorFlow — international Investors and Flows
Targeting:
Individuals seeking investments that match their areas of interest, target geographies, stage and ticket size.
Foundations and impact investing funds, seeking relevant dealflow and co-investors. Not quite half of investorflow.org members.
Investing groups, investment banks, the UN Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, and Engineers Without Borders comprise the rest, making investorflow.org a network of networks.
SpiringWise: Innnovations that Matter
This large database lists over 10k sustainability focused startups. From what I can find, they don’t list VCs focused on impact, atm. However, it may be a good place to discover comparables, and research the market.
AngelList — All Markets
Find startups and Angels who are listed, or have raised in similar competitive spaces to your startup. Examples of markets with an impact focus:
Sustainable Brands by Category — an open source project
This hand curated database of new Sustainable Brands by my friend Rishabh Varshnay is crowd sourced and pushed to Github. It includes over ~250 brands and currently lists categories like Clothing / Health / Home Goods / Personal Care and Cosmetics / Travel / Lifestyle / Kitchen / Grocery / Food.
Female Founder Database 2019
This database is free, and open. However, it looks like they provide the 2020 dataset after signing up to their community. It also lists details of fundings, the VCs who backed them, and other location data. It also includes the names of the female Founders.
HelloTomorrow — Deeptech investor database
Deeptech has such a tremendous impact on our everyday lives, so I decided to include this 1000 investor dataset. It’s very comprehensive, in terms of funding amounts, locations, and industry/verticals and ticket sizes.
Database link here.
This concludes our short tour of databases geared toward both Social and Sustainable Tech. Please leave comments below, and share any additional one’s I’ve missed, in the comments. Look forward to collaborate!
