Sharing BGV's 2019 Impact + Learning Report

What weird times we live in right now.

Certainly, when we started working on BGV's 2019 Impact + Learning Report, we didn't anticipate that the current COVID-19 pandemic would have such an impact on people's everyday lives. Despite the upheaval this pandemic has caused, we've been incredibly impressed not only with our portfolio companies responding to the crisis, but the wider tech sector, civil society, government, and others collaborate more and step up to the challenge to protect lives.

But this is not another post about the coronavirus. We realise that these are extraordinary times, and as tech for good VC, we acknowledge that now more than ever we need to ensure that investments in tech need to inherently drive positive change for people + planet.

As B Corp-certified investors we want to contribute to a better funding ecosystem that is more transparent and accountable, and create equal opportunities for all founders, regardless of their backgrounds. That is why we're excited to share the results of our 2019 Impact + Learning report, reflecting on our efforts in the past year and hope it makes for an interesting read during this time.

Aside from insights and data about BGV's performance and that of our portfolio companies, we share what we've been working on over the year and how it fits within the bigger tech for good and impact investment ecosystem. We're also proud to share the results from BGV's first Diversity & Inclusion Survey and are pleased to report that we are doing well on gender diversity, with 68.8% of BGV’s employees identifying as female (which according to Diversity VC's research report 'Diversity in UK Venture Capital 2019' is more than double the London VC industry average) and 31.3% of BGV's employees have an ethnic minority background, when ethnic minorities are under-represented in venture capital.

You can find the report and download it on our website at bit.ly/BGV2019Impact.

TL;DR Highlights from the report

• To date we have run 14 programmes supporting over 127 early-stage tech for good ventures, of which 73 are still active 
• Our most recent programme received an NPS of 80 - defined as 'world class'
• Our overall NPS is 68, citing ‘BGV Support’ as most common reason
• We received a record number of application for our programmes and completed more investments in a single year than ever before (19 at programme stage + nine follow-on investments at pre-seed and seed stages)
• Our ventures have gone on to raise ￡16.3m in further funding in 2019, bringing it to a total of over ￡80m
• While the total amount fundraised decreased, combined revenues have increased by 54% (￡29m) and the number of users has almost doubled to 12 million, achieving significant financial growth and scale of impact.
• The portfolio ventures employ 362 employees, of which 46.5% identify as female, exceeding the UK tech sector average of 19% and 0.3% identify as non-binary.
• In 2019, 22p out of every ￡1 went to all female-founder teams, 23p went to mixed-gender founder teams and 54p to all-male founder teams.
• Our active ventures accelerate progress towards 15 out of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals
• 49% of our portfolio actively assess potential unintended consequences arising from their products, of which 75% have developed ways in which they are mitigating them.

Many of these achievements are a collective reflection of our amazing portfolio companies, whose contributions to tech for good continue to inspire us. And our gratitude goes out to all of our mentors, partners, LPs, investors, and friends in the community, who help us in supporting them. Last but not least, a huge shout out to the entire BGV Team and our Board member Amanda Feldman, who all contributed in making this report and the talented folk at Traffic Digital for making my live easier by designing it so beautifully.