Tilia Ventures is an impact fund from the Czech Republic investing in social enterprises whose business models go hand in hand with significant and measurable social or enviromental impact. The fund offers financial support for social enterprises in the form of different financial structures, ranging from flexible loans, mezzanine financing to direct investments.

Andrew Gray is part of the investor team at Tlia Impact Ventures. He is a mentor, angel investor and startup operator and has experience as a strategy consultant in New Zealand. Andrew has worked across the CEE region and UK, and has first-hand experience doing business in emerging markets. Andrew has an MBA from Cambridge University.

As well as Tilia Impact Ventures, Andrew is also interested in projects that can generate significant changes, besides profit.

“I think the concept of impact investing is maybe only 6 or 7 years old, and entered the vernacular of the capital world probably only 3 years ago, so it's still evolving. So, essentially, we’re talking about companies that are founded with the intention of generating a societal or environmental impact, alongside financial return”, says Andrew about impact investing and gives a short definition about what it means to have an impact startup.

When refering to impact, Andrew says that there is a clear line between companies that just donate their profit, in part or as a whole, and what the UN define as impact entreprises.

“You can roughly divide the types of impact that businesses do at a generic level. Some of them are reducing damage that's being done. Some of them are doing the opposite, which is benefiting certain stakeholders, and some are contributing with platform technological solutions which other people can build on top of to do one of A or B”, according to Andrew.

Also, there are a few ways in which investors look at impact. Before deciding to invest in a startup, impact investors look at what type of profound change is the company trying to address. In a nutshell, how many people can you impact with your solutions.

“When we're looking at a company in the process of screening it, we first make sure that they're actually aligned to solve some kind of societal or environmental problem and we score them”, says Andrew.

“We want to see that companies have thought about the change that they're trying to make. Because it shows that this is really their primary reason to be. And we also like to know that they can talk about how they measure the change that they are making, and that they have some meaningful thresholds, or target a kind of change they think they can make”, adds Tlia Ventures’ representative, stating the fact that as a fund, they are trying to help founders that want to make a change really maximize what they can do.

When evaluating investments in impact startups, Tilia Ventures has a baseline that follows and sees how the companies performe against this baseline: what is the change that’s happening as a result of this company existing, and what would it be like if they didn’t exist.

The fund has four areas of interest for the companies that need financing. Social inclusion, certificate education are on their radar, environment and sustainablility is also an important area, as well as access to health and well-beeing.

The fund invests in pre-seed startups and the ticket size is around 200,000 euros. “We're investing in companies that can to have some sort of product, some sort of traction, a few early customers that really love it, and a clear business model”, adds Andrew.