Key Sentence:
- Back in 2009, Eva Yazhari co-founded the Beyond Capital Fund.
- A nonprofit fund that supports companies serving clients in emerging markets at the bottom of the pyramid.
However, this nonprofit status limits the fund’s ability to expand. With this in mind, he founded a lucrative spinoff called Beyond Capital Ventures last year, which also focuses on India and Africa. He will make his first investment.
Like the first fund, the new one invested in companies where, according to Yazahari, “the effect fits a scalable business model.” The focus is on health, financial inclusion, and agriculture.
Evergreen
Jazari worked on Wall Street for about five years. But after the financial crisis. He decided to do something more meaningful, which became part of his passion for social justice.
He already had deep family ties to Africa; his grandfather moved his family and opened a health clinic in Tanzania in the 1960s. In 2009 he co-founded the Beyond Capital Fund, focusing on India and East Arica, specifically Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. He created it in what he calls a “nonprofit” nonprofit fund that invests early on in startups with financial and social impact; when the investment profits are repatriated, they are reinvested in the new business.
Seeds and Series A
This is because, according to Yazhari, the nonprofit model limits growth. This means that startup funds cannot grow beyond the size of a “single-digit millions” with a pilot portfolio of around US$1 million. “Philanthropy has its limits; donors often have a particular sector or geographic focus, others are reluctant to provide grants under $1 million,” he said. With that in mind, he worked for 19 months to raise a second fund that totaled $30 million.
In contrast to the first fund, this fund will target a more comprehensive, low-income, and underserved market, highlighting areas such as lack of access to health care for women or the creation of opportunities for smallholders to export their products from agriculture to market.
Price. “We see these areas as huge in terms of the opportunities they offer investors,” said Jabari. Investments are being made in the same countries as before, except Tanzania; as Yazhari points out, government regulations make investing in stocks more expensive and complicated.