Impact Entrepreneur | By Drew Tulchin and Katrina Dutt | Published March 12, 2025
Impact investing is a growing movement that seeks measurable social, environmental, and community benefits alongside financial returns. For many in this space, the thrill of supporting entrepreneurs tackling the world’s most pressing challenges is deeply rewarding. Yet the path is not without obstacles — ranging from early-stage risks and the complexity of due diligence to building solid teams and coping with external political “shocks” that can shift markets overnight. One strategy that has repeatedly proven effective is collaboration among investors, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs. The process of impact investing (regardless of how it’s defined or tied to the SDGs) ideally tracks the triple-bottom-line return that investors seek.
Impact investing goes by many names and descriptions, but we can adopt a broad, “big-tent” approach to defining it. By “Direct Impact Investing,” we refer to supporting early-stage ventures with strong potential for high impact, as opposed to investing in a fund or other indirect mechanism. Organizations like Investors Circle (IC) — with more than 30 years of history — have demonstrated how angels and other investors can work together to support promising impact companies, most often through equity investments. The ideal is that these investments also embrace positive impact, meaning they’re fair to all parties, supportive, and rooted in partnership rather than hierarchical or extractive models.
Read more here on Impact Entrepreneur.
