Funding future generations
Is pre-K investment about to boom? Investment into pre-K – edtech for under 5s – is taking off, with venture capital funding almost tripling in the last decade. Nesta Impact...
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All Aboard!
Directors’ Responsibilities: Not Just a Free Lunch Nathan Elstub A long time ago I wrote a blog on board information as a guide to our team and for people we...
Improving funding and support for minoritised entrepreneurs
How our investment teams are helping to level the venture capital playing field We are proud to announce that Nesta Impact Investments has been certified as a Level 2 Diversity...
Productivity: supporting young people into work
Nesta backs GetMyFirstJob.co.uk to create pathways to employment It’s common knowledge that the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in our society. This impact is particularly evident in the challenge young people now face when identifying job opportunities...
Skin in the Game
We recently made a £500,000 follow-on investment in Skin Analytics, who are world leaders in using AI to help clinicians diagnose skin cancer, and so I sat down a few...
eExperimenting with MEL Science – Nesta Impact Investments supports a new educational platform
Nesta Impact Investments recently completed a £1 million investment into MEL Science, a London-based science educational platform. Manish Miglani from the Investments team, explains the added value of this acquisition...
This is the Year that Was – Nesta Impact Investment Team
Our investment strategy is designed to back companies aligned with Nesta’s broader strategic goals, one of our methods of scaling innovation and impact. A quick recap on Investment at...
Nesta supports Female Founders Office Hours to improve access to funding and support
Lisa Barclay, Investment Director I am going to be participating in my third Female Founders Office Hours in a couple of weeks and wanted to share the concept. Playfair Capital and Tech Nation have done a...
Nesta’s experiences of investing in technology ventures
In a previous blog I provided an overview of Nesta’s first investment phase. In this post I aim to cover the period 2007-2012 when Nesta was actively investing in UK...
Why Nesta is investing in ed-tech for higher education
Nesta Impact Investments recently led the £7million Series A investment round to support the growth of edtech company, BibliU. Nesta invested £1million alongside other investors, Guinness Asset Management, Oxford Sciences...
The Doctor Will Video Call You Now
Nesta Impact Investments recently led a £1.5 million investment into Q doctor, a platform that allows video consultations between patients and their healthcare providers. Below, Manish Miglani explains why now...
The story of my life
What does a good board pack look like? Over the next couple of months I will post a couple of blogs about corporate governance with some thoughts on roles, compositions...
Growing the Impact Investment Market: Some Reflections
The global movement for investment to be used as a tool for social and environmental benefit is growing, as is public demand for sustainable investment opportunities; a good time for...
A brief history of everything (relating to Nesta Investments)
Nesta has always taken a fundamental interest in how innovation can improve people’s choices and lives for the better. This interest manifests itself through our research and policy work, our...
Direct and indirect impact
What do we mean when we say we are looking for investments with impact? Here at Nesta we have been investing for impact for almost a decade. Over this time...
Breaking up is the hardest part – thoughts on leaver provisions for venture backed managers
One of the things that we always find challenging during deal legals is agreeing leaver terms with managers and founders. In essence these are the rules that determine what happens...
It’s been too long, we’re glad to be back. Welcome to the new Nesta Investments website
If you are a regular visitor to the Nesta Investments website (Hi Mum!) you’ll could be forgiven for thinking that not much has been happening in the Impact Investment world...
Should you be auditing your impact?
Today we are launching a report that takes a major step forward to increasing the transparency of our impact investment fund. It is a report about openness, about learning, about...
Regulation for a Sustainable Economy – putting finance at the service of our planet
There is a quiet revolution in the investment world and it is getting louder. Whilst there have been funds labelled as “green” or “ethical” around for years, increasing demand from...
Choosing the right Investor for your Venture
Ishaan Chilkoti from our Impact Investment team will be discussing “Choosing the right Investor for your Venture” at The Business Funding Show’s flagship event on the 22nd February. Find out...
Critical success factors for startup boards
At Nesta Impact Investments, we have the privilege of investing in exciting, early stage businesses that aim to improve the lives of the people around us. At the stage we...
GetMyFirstJob: Navigating a tricky apprenticeship market
Just before Christmas last year we made our fourth investment in GetMyFirstJob (“GMFJ”), an innovative platform helping young people find the right apprenticeships for them. In this blog we talk...
What is the evidence for Ed Tech?
We spent last week at the biggest education trade show in the world, BETT. In this final blog in our BETT series we ask what evidence we should be expecting of ed...
Shaping demand for data in impact investment
In this last blog of the series coming out of our Impact in Impact Investment Roundtable, we explore what is shaping demand for data in impact investment. What information do...
Investing in Education: Four key things we'll be looking for at Bett
In preparation for the annual education tradeshow Bett 2018, we’re sharing a short series of education blogs. In this blog, we take a look at how an impact investor spots new...
Impact investment: looking beyond the big numbers
Have you ever looked at an impact report from a charity, funder, or impact investor and thought that it was just a bit too good to be true? 60,000 jobs...
Is there a holy grail of a single impact metric?
What do ‘improving older people’s fitness’, ‘making pre-surgical risk-assessment smarter’, ‘helping children learn mathematics’ and ‘matching young people to apprenticeships’ have in common? The answer: they are all outcomes that...
Increasing transparency in impact investment
Do you know how your pension is invested? What does your bank do with its balance sheet? All investment has an impact on society. Sometimes that impact is positive; creating...
A new impact approach for Nesta Impact Investments
How can we invest for profit and social impact? How can we understand the impact of a diverse portfolio? How can we help to embed social impact into commercial businesses?...
Out and about: Why we’re investing in Oomph!’s excursion service
Oomph! stands for ‘Our Organisation Makes People Happy’: Martin can vouch for that. He’s a care home resident who recently joined Oomph! on a visit to Brooklands Auto Museum, bringing back memories...
Protecting our purpose
Impact investing faces an existential threat and we are sleep-walking into it. Low accountability for impact is leaving us wide open to attack at the first sign of trouble. ...
Measuring the impact of investments: a question of scale
It is a truth universally acknowledged that people hate filling out forms. From tax returns to job applications, forms force us to represent ourselves in ways decided by anonymous bureaucrats...
Nesta Impact Investments leads £500k Series A round in Genera
Nesta Impact Investments (NII) has led a £500k Series A funding round in Genera, a fast-growing healthcare technology platform that facilitates seamless patient assessment and risk evaluation ahead of surgery,...
Too young to choose? – a parent's educational dilemma
My daughter recently got her GCSE results and has started her A level studies at 6th Form. However, she has a problem. In some ways it is a good problem...
Give it a bit of Oomph!
What do Olive’s improving stiff joints have to do with an exit valuation? How does Norman’s trip to Burnley FC relate to an internal rate of return? The answer:...
Announcing our latest ed-tech investment
We are delighted to announce our latest investment into Third Space Learning, which uses technology to connect academic talent from around the world to children at risk of failure in...
How to measure impact – learning from practice
Two and a half years ago we launched Nesta Impact Investments. We boldly stated that we would scale innovative solutions to social issues and at the same time measure impact...
3 top tips for 'thinking big'
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
6 tips for growing your business once you've raised investment
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
5 tips for surviving the due diligence process
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
6 tips for creating a financial model for your startup
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
Top Tips series: 5 tips for pitching to an investor
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
Top Tips series: 5 tips for developing an impact plan
This article is part of a series of blogs offering our tops tips on surviving the process of raising impact investment. Investment raising is difficult and time consuming, and the...
Top Tips series: 3 tips for thinking big
Social entrepreneurs are always thinking big right? Well, I’d agree that the scale of the problems we see them taking on are large. Those tackling financial exclusion, for example, are...
Top Tips series: 6 tips for growing your business
You’ve had months of presentations, meetings, knock backs, negotiations, then finally a ‘yes’, followed by a legal completion process which always feels harder than it should. But what happens after...
Top Tips series: 5 tips for surviving the due diligence process
You’ve done all the hard work of securing interest from the investor you’ve had your eyes on – you’ve given your pitch, met the fund’s executives, and discussed heads of...
Top Tips series: 6 tips for creating a financial model
Remember me: our paper on dementia care and impact investing
Dementia is one of the biggest – and fastest growing – challenges facing our society. As more people develop the disease, there is a growing need for new innovation in...
Guest blog: Fixing the apprenticeship market – supply or demand?
In January we announced our investment into GetMyFirstJob, an online platform that proactively matches training providers and employers with apprenticeship candidates. As we enter National Apprenticeship Week, GetMyFirstJob co-founder David...
Food sharing and street running
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics in February show that over half of adults in the UK report some feeling of loneliness whilst 10% feel lonely all, most...
In defence of empiricism – what social investing can learn from science
You may not have come across the term ‘empiricism’ before, and if you have, you may wonder what it has to do with impact investment. The empirical method was first...
Let’s put some Oomph! into care
The BBC reported over the weekend that one in five care homes in the UK are failing to meet national standards for care. The news comes at a time when the care...
Cost, efficiency or income? The main drivers of fuel poverty
This week is “Cold Homes Week”, the biggest public campaign to raise awareness of fuel poverty in the UK. So we thought it would be worth sharing some of our...
3 ways to fix the drop-out problem in education
The Local Government Association published research on achievement and retention in post-16 education yesterday. It’s not good news, and reinforces the importance of the innovative work of our portfolio companies...
Announcing our investment into GetMyFirstJob
We are excited to announce our investment into GetMyFirstJob, the eighth beneficiary of our impact fund. GMFJ is a platform that helps improve the experience of young people entering apprenticeships....
So…what exactly do we mean by sustainable communities?
In November 2014, Nesta Impact Investments celebrated its second anniversary, with almost half of our fund’s money invested into a portfolio of seven social investments that all fall within our...
new test blog
Here is the text for my new test blog on the Nesta Impact Investments website.
6 top tips to grow as a new entrepreneur
As Global Entrepreneurship Week 2014 kicks off, there’s going to be a flurry of events, articles and announcements from a whole range of established entrepreneurs, keen to give the next...
Education needs to adapt – this time it’s personal
As technology continues to influence the pace of change across nearly all sectors and avenues of life it brings with it the challenge of how to stay productive. How can...
How can charities overcome the challenges of going digital?
When national charity Carers UK wanted to reach more people, in a simple, practical and affordable way, it created ‘Jointly’. Jointly is an app designed especially for carers and it...
Announcing our 7th investment into edtech venture Cogbooks
DC Thomson Ventures and Nesta announce £1.75 million investment in education technology Nesta Impact Investments and DC Thomson Ventures, the venture capital arm of private media group DC Thomson, have made...
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Exploring the application of Ai-Media’s technology in Education.
Tomorrow evening Nesta Impact Investments launch our investment in Ai-Media UK to explore supporting young people with autism and learning difficulties. We’ve been working with Ai-Media for some time exploring the...
Social Impact Investment: are we nearly there yet?
Yesterday morning, the final report of the snappily titled “UK National Advisory Board to The Social Impact Investment Taskforce Established Under the UK’s Presidency of the G8” has been published....
Nesta Impact Investments announces its new investment in Ai-Media UK!
As Nesta Impact Investments announces its new investment in Ai-Media UK, Beth Abbott and Eileen Hopkins reflect on the way they are using technology to break down barriers to learning……… Imagine...
Measuring success in education
The new school year is here. Teachers are firing up the teaching synapses that have been dormant for 6 weeks, trying to remember logon details, facing new classes, new kids and...
The highs and lows of building a tech for good startup
As the Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) accelerator programme gets underway with a new team of ventures, Sinead MacManus, CEO and co-founder of Fluency, reflects on what they’ve learnt since being...
Getting started on impact
You’ve come up with a great idea, sorted out your business model, built a strong team, dealt with cash flow and all the other aspects of setting up your own...
You’ve raised that vital investment – what happens next?
As part of our blog series on raising social investment, Matt Mead examines what social entrepreneurs need to think about after they’ve got that all important investment deal. 6 Basic Foundations of...
FutureGov – Why we went for impact investment
FutureGov is a for-profit business, but we work with public sector and social organisations. So, Impact Investment meets our mission as a business, bridging the two worlds of profit and...
The needle in the haystack – what impact investors look for
Raising early stage investment is difficult. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Since we launched Nesta Impact Investments over a year ago, we have seen close to 500 applications for investment, but...
Investing for measurable impact
It certainly is an exciting and interesting year for impact investing. The government is working to make the UK a global hub for social investment, a new tax relief has...
Guest blog: Fuel poverty – time for a new approach?
Fuel poverty continues to grow as energy prices increase and it brings with it massive economic and social costs. Age UK estimate that fuel poverty costs the NHS more than...
Speed dating brings edtech ventures together with investors
Speed dating is not for the faint hearted but at our first ever edtech speed dating evening we helped to make over 430 introductions in under 3 hours! The event...
What is a self-sustaining community?
A question I often get asked when meeting people in relation our impact investment fund, is what do we mean by ‘self sustaining communities’? Is there even such a thing as a...
Why social entrepreneurs should be celebrating today
Every year budget day reminds me of my early career in one of the big accounting firms. Clients were invited, food and drink arranged, it was a major event. We...
Speed-dating – a new type of investor networking
There’s no denying that the education technology sector is growing rapidly, and we, at Nesta Impact Investments, are passionate about supporting its growth and the ecosystem developing around it. Over...
Why we invested in FutureGov
This month made the fifth investment from our impact fund – into FutureGov. FutureGov is transforming public services by using elegantly designed technology to improve local government services in areas of...
Let’s put some Oomph into care
When I started working with the Nesta Impact Investments team I was expecting to be challenged by the jargon that went with social investment and de-mystifying it. I was expecting...
Guest blog: innovation in education
One of the outcomes our fund is looking to target is increasing the educational attainment of children and young people, which means we’re constantly on the lookout for, and meeting...
Social investment roadmap – our views
It was good to see the government recently laying out its plans to support the growth of investment into UK social enterprises with the publication of its Social Investment Roadmap....
We reveal the first social entrepreneurs backed by Nesta Impact Investments
At Nesta Impact Investments we are very excited this week to be announcing the first four investments made from our social impact fund. Our fund is all about investing in...
What is on the horizon for 2014?
2013 drew to a close with more miserable evidence of the failure of the mainstream banking industry – even the self-declared ‘good guys’, an ethical bank, has lost trust and...
Dementia G8 Summit – what role can impact investors play?
Today London will host the first G8 summit on dementia – an event dedicated to developing co-ordinated international action to tackle dementia globally. Dementia currently affects more than 800,000 people...
New tax reliefs for social investment – our thoughts…
Here at Nesta Impact Investments we are pleased to hear about the new tax reliefs for social investment promised in the Autumn Statement. It’s been glaringly obvious for some years...
Fuel Poverty: are we just ‘rearranging the deckchairs’?
There has been a lot of news recently about the rising price of energy and how best to drive a better deal for the beleaguered consumer. Expectations are that the...
Rats and social investment? Let me explain…..
It’s not every day that you get inspired by a story about rats, but that’s exactly what happened to me at the Good Deals 2013 conference last week. The social...
Impact – it’s not academic
I learned this week that academics are suddenly worried about their impact, driven by the inclusion of impact as a criterion in the Research Excellence Framework. As explored in Tuesday’s...
Are older people becoming prisoners of isolation?
“It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” These were John McCain’s thoughts after five and a...
What a difference a year makes…..the world of impact investing
“What is social impact investment?” and “why should I get involved?” were common questions I would get from investors and entrepreneurs when we first launched Nesta Impact Investments nearly a...
Preparing to care – our work on ageing
We are living through a huge demographic shift in the UK, one that is set to cause fundamental changes in the way we do things. There are now more pensioners...
Not another brick in the wall…
It’s definitely September, feeling Autumnal and the new school year is under way. Across the country children and teachers are saying goodbye to summer and nervously beginning the term ahead....
5 tips for pitching to an investor
Raising early stage investment is difficult, there is no doubt about that. In Silicon Valley one in every 100 business plans read by a VC receives investment. For a start-up...
The commercial value of impact measurement: does it do what it says on the tin?
Nesta has long been interested in ascertaining the impact of its work, not only to gauge where we are being effective, but to understand how effective we are being at...
Could crowdfunding work for innovative social ventures?
The forecast of a £1 billion impact investment market by 2016 is indicative of the growing realisation that more fit-for-purpose funding is needed if social ventures are to be given...
The question every impact investor should aim to answer
The aim of Nesta Impact Investments is to scale high impact solutions addressing our target outcomes, and to make a financial return for our investors. This double bottom line approach...
Moonshot thinking
A couple of hundred people, including me, gathered this week in Hertfordshire for the Google big tent event 2013. An interesting range of people including Eric Schmidt, Michael Flowers, Ed...
Accelerating Tech for Good
Laura Bunt, Lead Public & Social Innovation Advisor, Nesta Last night at Nesta’s Tech for Good event we heard from a brilliant and inspiring group of entrepreneurs using technology to...
Tech for Good – scaling social innovations
In the second in our ‘Tech for Good’ blog series Annika Small, CEO of Nominet Trust, shares her experience of investing in early stage Tech for Good innovations and what...
Building the case for an Impact Tech ecosystem in the UK
At Nesta Impact Investments we launched our fund almost three months ago now. In that time we have seen some really interesting organisations come through our door. Over the next...
Why 2013 should be really interesting
Happy new year, and it promises to be an exciting new year, as late in 2012 we launched a new venture fund, but a fund with a real difference, a...
Hear about our aims for Nesta Impact Investments
Watch a video of our Director of Impact Investment Joe Ludlow talk about our aims for Nesta Impact Investments and what we look for in social ventures
Announcing Nesta Impact Investments
Today we’ve announced the first closing of Nesta Impact Investments, a £25m impact investment fund for social ventures. In the first closing, we’re delighted that Omidyar Network, Big Society Capital and Nesta...
Standards of Evidence for Impact Investing: a new approach to balance the need for evidence with innovation
This blog post introduces Nesta’s Standards of Evidence, a developed to test whether the products and services Nesta Impact Investments fund make a positive difference. This new approach aims to...