Toniic members are active investors and invest in a variety of impact ventures both within Toniic’s network and within their own networks. The deals below represent some of the deals in which Toniic members have invested collaboratively.
Recent Investments:
Adobe Capital focuses on providing mezzanine financing for socially and environmentally impactful enterprises – primarily in the form of
convertible, participating, royalty or other similar loans – in order to help finance working
capital needs, company expansions or strategic acquisitions for Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs) in Latin America. SGBs represent the dominant form of business organization worldwide, accounting for two thirds of private sector employment and acting as the primary source of job creation. Accordingly, they create a multiplier effect on the economy by accelerating employment, raising incomes, spurring consumption, increasing locally sourced inputs and widening the tax base. This situation is even more evident in the case of high-growth SGBs, which are ideally positioned to drive economic development and innovation in emerging markets, representing a critical source of wealth creation.
BEE will consolidate technology, construction and integration partners with suppliers of renewable gas, electricity and heat under legal entities called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV). These SPVs will be focused on development projects, the result of which will be an integrated delivery system supplying gas, electricity and heat to B2C and B2B customers throughout Belgium all managed through a centralized clean energy supplier, BEE.
The Carego LiveWell healthcare network is dedicated to enabling Africans to deliver sustainable healthcare in their own communities. Primary and urgent care can be accessed through our affordable clinic facilities, which are linked to a comprehensive healthcare supply chain, thus providing affordable and sustainable care anywhere in Africa. Carego has developed a self-contained medical suite with power and communications equipment as the equipment necessary to perform medical examinations anywhere in the world, at less cost than outfitting existing infrastructure.
Clinicas del Azucar has developed innovative evidence-based algorithms for diagnosis and disease management, and maintains a chain of low-cost diabetes clinics that deliver diabetes care in developing countries and for the 14 million patients with diabetes in Mexico. Services are provided through a “package” approach, where patients can get access to an annual care program that ensures an ongoing relationship with the clinic.
Copia Global Inc (“Copia”) is a consumer catalog order and delivery system for nonperishable and durable goods serving Base of the Pyramid consumers in the developing world. By making accessible a wide range of consumer goods from thread to sewing machines, from nails to hammers, from matches to solar lights, Copia’s mission is to improve the quality of life of BoP people, transforming them into empowered global consumers. Much as the Sears catalog revolutionized life in the pioneer days of the United States and Amazon revolutionized life in the internet age, the Company will apply many of the same marketing and distribution concepts to this huge untapped market. Copia launched a 12 month pilot in Nairobi, Kenya in August 2012. Already sales (both number of orders and revenues) have exceeded expectations, providing proof of concept for this revolutionary idea. Meaning “abundance” in Latin, Copia was founded by Jonathan Lewis and Tracey Turner and is led by CEO Crispin Murira.
Digital Divide Data (DDD) is a social business that creates jobs for talented youth in emerging market countries by delivering high-quality content business process outsourcing (BPO) services to clients. DDD’s social enterprise empowers staff with the skills and experience they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Founded in 2001, DDD develops a strong workforce in countries with untapped talent. The organization identifies and recruits motivated, disadvantaged youth who would not otherwise have access to good jobs or higher education. DDD alumni go on to high-skilled positions in which they earn more than four times the average regional wage. This enables them to break the cycle of poverty that traps their families. With a sustainable approach to growth, DDD employs more than 1000 people across offices in Cambodia, Laos, Kenya.
Based on affordable fees for service, Healthpoint Services, founded in 2009, is building scalable, sustainable healthcare delivery infrastructure for rural India. EHealthPoints (EHPs), the company’s focal offering, are units that provide families in rural villages with clean drinking water, medicines, and advanced tele-medical services that effectively “bring” a doctor and advanced diagnostic tools to rural communities. Healthpoint’s access to licensed doctors, in the rural village, cost one-tenth the average cost of going into town. Healthpoint can provide 70 different diagnostic tests at the clinic, and maintains a licensed pharmacy at each location.
FrogTek’s TiendaTek is a simple accounting/inventory application that turns a smartphone or tablet with a barcode reader into a point-of-sale device. All data gathered is uploaded to Frogtek’s cloud for backup, analysis and sale to consumer companies through the web. The shopkeeper receives education to fully benefit from the newfound information. TiendaTek also enables shopkeepers to increase revenues by taking credit card payments and selling mobile minutes or other digital services.
Detailed data captured through Frogtek’s application may represent the best available intelligence to guide Latin American consumer companies’ growing push into emerging markets.
The Grassroots Business Fund (GBF) supports and invests in “High Impact Businesses” – businesses that create wealth and empower large numbers of the poor in around the world (e.g. Kenya, Tanzania, Peru, Bolivia, India and Indonesia). The High Impact Businesses that GBF supports are scalable and replicable with the potential to provide economic and social opportunities to thousands at the “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP), yet they typically fall through a gap in the market because they require longer term, quasi-equity financing not offered by local financing institutions or most investment funds. Many also require additional value-added services, including financial management assistance or operational expertise that cannot be readily acquired or financed from local sources.
Kinara Capital (previously Mesoloan) promotes financial inclusion by providing loans in the range of $2K to $20K to small enterprises in India, thus filling the gap between microfinance and commercial capital. Loans in this range help create sustainable businesses and propel economic growth in these communities.
Liberty & Justice (L&J) is a Fair Trade Certified clothing company that serves as a model entrepreneurial SME, creating formal jobs for Liberian women and making them co-owners in the business. L&J is committed to a future in an entire supply chain completely aligned in making choices that result in the eradication of poverty, the responsible stewardship of the environment, and the empowerment of workers. L&J is an “ethical agent” intermediary, bridging the gap between large multinational clothing retailers in the developed world with small Fair Trade
Certified factories in Western Africa. L&J solicits large orders for clothing, manages the supply chain and production, and makes an attractive profit. L&J also implements a series of social programs, from vocational training programs for women, to health clinics and schools being built in these neighborhoods from the stream of Fair Trade premiums earned.
Living Forest Communities is creating a market-based model for large-scale forest conservation in Canada that integrates residential living, commercial buildings and community facilities. LFC obtains development entitlements through support of local NGOs and planning authorities and adds value through careful community planning and efficient green infrastructure features.
Lumni helps finance the costs of college for Latin American and US students in exchange for a fixed percentage of their future earnings over a set period of time, not longer than 10 years. By adjusting payments with income level, this structure reduces the risk of unaffordable payments for students relative to traditional student loans. Lumni creates funds by raising money from a wide variety of sources, including multilateral development institutions, foundations and high net worth individuals. These social investment funds invest in the education of diversified pools of students. Each student repays his or her obligation as a fixed percentage of income for a set period of time after graduation. Lumni specializes in the actuarial analysis and valuation of future salary curves needed to effectively create portfolios of students that earn investors a strong financial return while benefiting underserved students.
The Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) provides low-cost capital and technical knowhow to help journalists around the world in challenging environments build sustainable businesses around professional, responsible, quality journalism — news companies that are strong enough to hold governments to account, expose corruption and provide a platform for debate.
Mosaic is an online marketplace where people in North America can invest in solar projects. On one side of the marketplace, Mosaic uses crowd funding to aggregate capital from retail and institutional investors. On the other side of the marketplace, Mosaic streamlines the origination, underwriting and contracting to provide financing for solar projects.
Summary:
Portapure manufactures and sells water purification products where clean drinking water is inaccessible. This includes remote communities and natural disaster sites. In these situations, Portapure’s products provide clean drinking water for survival. Portapure is the inventor, technology owner, manufacturing mold owner, trademark owner, and copyright holder for all product offerings. Leveraging its patented technology, Portapure has created a set of products that are: Proven to exceed stringent health and safety standards; Superior price compared to existing alternatives; Designed for portability and ease-of-use
Product:
To differentiate from the current competitors, Portapure leverages technology, affordability and the right product-market fit driven through focus group customer analysis. Portapure has designed portable water systems to make water from any river, lake, or stream safe to consume by removing all known viruses and bacteria.
Portapure’s current main product offering is:
PureLives – A home-use, 5-gallon water purification device
Promethean Power Systems designs and manufactures rural refrigeration systems for commercial cold storage applications in off-grid and partially electrified areas of developing countries, beginning with India. Our technology enables food suppliers to reliably store and preserve perishable food items—such as milk, fruits and vegetables—without the need for expensive diesel powered generators.
Technology is unlocking transformational new forms of political participation and social engagement. Purpose, as a “creator of 21st century movements” allows people around the world to combine their power as citizens, consumers and cultural agents. By providing the savvy to conceive of and orchestrate online and on-the-ground movements, Purpose has identified a way to effectively deploy enormous numbers of people to influence the political process, create consumer demand and encourage the behavioral shifts that can bring about “the kind of change that politics alone cannot.”
Rent To Own provides affordable financing to high capacity entrepreneurs in rural communities across Zambia. Rent To Own’s variety of rental arrangements helps business owners build assets and expand their own services. Beyond traditional asset financing, Rent To Own adapts its services and to the individual needs of each client, including guided asset selection process, direct distribution and one-on‐one training for maintenance and proper equipment usage. The company’s unique six-step loan process mitigates repayment risk and ensures that the equipment is being used optimally.
Rethink Autism’s solution is a web-based autism treatment platform that combines a proven treatment methodology (ABA) with a proven method of instruction (video modeling). Using technology to deliver clinical best practice treatment programs anywhere, Rethink Autism has created a unique online service providing parents and organizations with training for implementing treatment, tools for evaluating an individual child’s needs, a comprehensive video-based curriculum with 1,200+ teaching steps, data tracking systems for measuring progress and automating case management, and online professional support. No other product or company combines a dynamic video-based curriculum, data management tools and professional support, all on a single easy-to-use web-based platform.
An innovative systems-based approach to pioneer a model for low-cost off-grid infrastructure that provides safe and affordable sanitation to slum occupants across Kenya. Sanergy develops new appropriate technologies such as small-scale prefabricated ferro-cement toilets and bicycle powered exhaustion pumps for pit latrines. They combine these novel technologies with a realistic deployment strategy in their sustainable sanitation cycle that features three major parts: sanitation centers, waste collection and processing.
Scoot is a new mode of transportation in San Francisco, combining electric motor scooters with smartphone technology in a system that allows for 10 minute, $5 trips from one part of the city to another. As fast as a taxi at a fraction of the price and with no carbon footprint!! Scoot is the ideal form of mobility for our increasingly connected and crowded city lives.
Scoot opened its beta in October of 2012 and has grown to 12 locations and 35 vehicles in SF. We will expand to other cities in 2014.
SMV Wheels is in the financial services business. It gives its customers, rickshaw drivers in India, the opportunity to own their rickshaws directly by providing asset based loans. Upon credit approval, rickshaw drivers are loaned a newly constructed, lightweight rickshaw which is paid for over the course of one year in weekly amounts that total no more than 15% of an operator’s daily income. In addition, rickshaw drivers are given a formal license, insurance in the case of damage or theft, an identity card and a basic bank account. Through this suite of services, SMV Wheels delivers a chance of upward mobility for rickshaw drivers, and a sense of
dignity and control.
Sumazi’s matching algorithms utilize 50+ key variables that include your demographic, psychographic and social graph data, as well as semantic analysis to intelligently discover, recommend and proactively introduce you to the right people and opportunities at the right time, anywhere in the world. Additionally, Sumazi provides you with unique visualization and analytic tools that allow you to understand how your extended networks come to your aid.
Urban India produces a mound of garbage every week that weighs more than twice the Empire State Building. Only half of this is collected and dumped. Little is processed despite municipalities spend half their budget on the issue. Residents are fed up. Waste Capital Partners trains and employs waste pickers to conduct doorstep waste collection in small towns in India for a monthly subscription from the household itself. Waste Capital Partners then environmentally processes the waste forming a quality soil amendment they sell to local farmers and also aggregate and sell recyclables. In total, 85% of the waste is environmentally processed, 20,000 carbon tons are averted per 100,000 households, and the income of the waste picker is doubled. The business is already cashflow positive and recently secured interest from key state officials in two major states of India. Its board consists of the founders of SELCO, BASIX, and IDE-I and its management has 40+ years of operational experience in profitable social enterprise businesses with a focus on Public Private Partnerships.