EQT Foundation announces $1.5 M grant to the GIIN Impact Lab

The Impact Lab initiative will enable important field building and development of critical infrastructure for the impact industry. The Impact Lab’s will focus on driving a deeper understanding of impact performance and the relationship between impact, risk and financial return. The initiative strives to establish the next wave of critical impact infrastructure, to increase flow of capital towards underserved communities and environments and to reduce barriers to impact investing. Without reducing barriers to effective impact investing, capital allocation will continue to be inefficient, and impact will be poorly measured. Highly impactful investments may miss out on funding, causing significant potential flow on effects to otherwise underserved communities and environments. The Impact Lab will seek to change this through R&D and ultimately push the frontiers of the impact industry.

For an initiative like this to succeed, collaboration across the impact industry is required. EQT Foundation will contribute by leveraging the broader EQT platform to provide unique input on analytics and benchmark development. The funding will also contribute to scaling the required resources and acquiring the technology and analytic capabilities to scale the impact intelligence tools that the Impact Lab will produce through its innovative R&D agenda. Cumulative funding of USD 4.5 million – provided by founding strategic partners EQT Foundation, Temasek and Visa Foundation– will allow the Impact Lab to begin its work aimed at enabling investors to more efficiently allocate capital towards effective social and environmental solutions.

The EQT Deal Team, consisting of Anna Ström, Aiste Mazeikaite and Ajeet Hansra, will support the Impact Lab team to scale their impact, leveraging the expertise, competencies, and network within EQT.

"Determining impact performance is an important step for the financial industry to allocate capital to where it will matter the most. Developing impact intelligence tools and benchmarks with wide participation is critical for investors and asset managers to level up from impact outcome reporting to understanding if the impact outcome achieved was reasonable given the amount of capital being deployed. We see this as a key initiative to support and strengthen the impact investing community."
Cilia Holmes Indahl. CEO of the EQT Foundation

"The founding of the Impact Lab is an important development that will take impact investing to a new level of sophistication and push the boundaries of what is possible. At a time when impact investing is gaining traction around the world, the industry is looking to visionary leaders, like our partners EQT Foundation, Temasek and Visa Foundation, to take confident action and establish critical infrastructure that prioritizes impact with integrity and cultivates a ‘race to the top’ on the basis of impact performance."
Amit Bouri. Co-Founder and CEO of the GIIN

"The EQT Foundation is dedicated to supporting organizations and entrepreneurs that accelerate the shift to an impact economy and we see the GIIN’s Impact Lab as a significant contributor to that process, building the infrastructure to enable more efficient capital allocation towards social and environmental solutions. Most importantly, the Impact Lab is focused on developing tools to help investors understand the relationship between impact, investor engagement, and financial performance. We look forward to partnering with Amit and the GIIN team in launching the Impact Lab and conducting research to help optimize the impact achieved by each dollar invested."
Ajeet Hansra. Vice President in EQT’s Private Equity Advisory Team