Building bridges between Business Angels and investment funds to finance social enterprises in seed phase

ongoing

Through this project, we aim to strengthen the funding of social and impact enterprises in seed phase in Europe by enabling innovative co-investment schemes between Business Angels and early stage investment funds. Funds alone struggle in the impact pre-seed and seed stages and would benefit from associating with Business Angels, each of them bringing free sectoral expertise and know-how and unpaid support to the projects they invest in, in addition to lowering the transaction costs by relying on their pro bono work in every step of the investment process. Impact Business Angels is the first French Business Angels’ network exclusively dedicated to supporting impact entrepreneurship in France. Its members support pre-seed and seed projects fostering social innovations and generating a strong impact whether social, societal, environmental and/or territorial. GROUPE SOS Participations, the equity investment subsidiary of GROUPE SOS, invests in companies pursuing social, societal, environmental or territorial missions. The association of GROUPE SOS Participations and Impact Business Angels offers an innovative financing model that facilitates the sharing of deal flow and co-investment opportunities and their analysis and allows the mutualization of sectoral expertise from Business Angels and support functions from GROUPE SOS for closing the investments. It will fund around 30 projects for a total investment amount of EUR 4,5M. We hope to demonstrate the efficiency of this new funding scheme based on a partnership model rather than the creation of a new investment vehicle, which is therefore more easily replicable in other countries.