Vested Impact has bagged £1.1million in seed funding, backed by female deal teams at both Impact Shakers and HearstLab, to expand its platform for rapid, data-driven ESG and impact assessments.
This investment supports female CEO and founder Kimberley Abbott in her mission to make a significant positive mark on the global financial and sustainability market, helping businesses and asset managers meet sustainability goals and regulatory requirements.
The funding round was led by Impact Shakers Ventures, a pan-European impact fund investing at the intersection of impact and diversity. HearstLab, an investment arm of Hearst Corporation focused exclusively on supporting and scaling women-led technology startups, also joined the round.
Aiming to channel $1trillion into impactful finance, Vested Impact offers a tool designed to enhance decision-making for asset allocators and companies. It delivers fast, comprehensive, data-driven ESG, impact and risk assessments. Vested Impact’s proprietary algorithm and extensive data set — over 300 million points — enable quick and straightforward impact scoring, providing clarity and insight in seconds.
Impactful decision-making
By leveraging data from over 200 million academic papers, and 100 million impact data points from
leading organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, the platform provides companies and
asset managers with a comprehensive, science-based view of their impact against global standards like the
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) thereby helping them report and manage their risks and impacts on people and the planet.
Kimberley Abbott, founder and CEO of Vested Impact
The company currently automatically assesses the impact of over 25,000 capital market assets and over two million private companies and small to medium-sized enterprises – providing market leading capability for private markets and inclusive data for SMEs.
“This investment marks a critical milestone in our journey to empower millions of businesses globally to understand and evidence their risks and impacts,” says Kimberley Abbott, founder and CEO of Vested Impact. “As regulations around sustainability become the global norm, we have already seen a large range of organisations adopting Vested Impact, from the United Nations to financial institutions, global insurers and professional services.
“This investment will allow us to accelerate our growth even more. We are particularly proud to be backed by two value-aligned investors who put inclusive entrepreneurship at the centre of everything they do.”
Investing impact
Alina Klarner from Impact Shakers, also commented: “We invested in Kimberley in 2022 with our Microfund, when everyone else was looking at ESG tools. This gave the team time to build out a phenomenal, market-leading impact risk product and once the regulations came into force, Kimberley was ready to seize the opportunity. We have seen this business go from zero to significant revenue within the space of a year and can’t wait to see how Vested Impact will continue to grow on the back of this investment, especially with such a well-aligned co-investor as HearstLab.”
For Azahara Espejo Garcia, international director of HearstLab, while the number of companies in this space has grown rapidly in recent years, traditional ESG assessments tend to focus primarily on internal risks.
“Vested Impact takes a more expansive approach, offering a comprehensive view of a company’s external material risks and its impact on both people and the planet, all grounded in independent, science-based data. We’re thrilled to support Kimberley and her team as they enter this exciting next phase of growth,” she said.
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