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Stacking Strategic Levers – How VCs Can Maximise Impact to Drive Value

  • Impact VC
  • Oct 30
  • 7 min read

Impact and value creation are no longer separate conversations. For early-stage companies, impact businesses can have unique advantages across attracting talent, building products customers love, unlocking capital, and leveraging regulatory tailwinds. In this Deep Dive, we explored how mission-led founders and VCs can use impact as a driver of performance: not as a trade-off. 

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We brought the ImpactVC community together with Iulia Tudor (Ascension) and Estia Ryan (Eka Ventures) to unpack four strategic levers where impact drives business value: Talent, Customer, Capital, and Regulation. Real case studies and actionable takeaways were shared for both founders and investors.





1. Talent  

Founders know their ability to execute is defined by who they hire, not just what they build. Increasingly, we’re seeing top operators and talent choosing companies with purpose embedded in the business model—not just the brand. 

What we’re seeing: 

Case studies 


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  • Stream: Fastest-growing company in Ascension portfolio; hires senior leaders who own the impact function who actively measure, manage, and amplify their positive outcomes, helping to foster a culture and purpose that consistently attracts top-tier talent.


  • Axle Energy: Secured Tier-1 VC backing by pairing a strong mission with a clear commercial model. The brand and impact narrative contributed directly to credibility in attracting talent. 


  • Flok Health: Displayed how commercial traction reinforces employer brand. Their commercial traction led to press, helping to build credibility, which in turn improved talent attraction—showing how impact → results → talent can create a reinforcing loop. 

"By far the biggest benefit of being an impact company is talent. As an early stage company hiring the right people is one of the hardest things you have to do, but those you bring into the team will have the greatest impact on what you are trying to achieve. We have attracted world class people who could be in lots of places, but they choose you – with no track record, no revenue, because they believe in the impact we will have.” - Finn Stevenson Co-Founder & CEO of Flok Health

2. Customers 

Megatrends are supporting impact-driven buyers across B2B, B2C, and B2G. Many impact startups win because they solve real problems for underserved groups. When products are more affordable, higher-quality, or entirely new, impact can be a driver of market expansion.  

Stream shows this in the B2B space. Using open banking data and employment insights, it personalises financial support for each worker, creating a new model of financial support that’s equitable, transparent, and tailored to variable incomes. This clear link between financial wellbeing and business performance has made Stream a strategic tool for employers to boost engagement and retention, while its data-led insights build brand authority and customer growth.

Estia from Eka mentioned three categories they see in relation to customers: 


  1. Products and services exist but aren’t affordable or accessible→ opens markets for startups like Urban Jungle: 50% cheaper insurance through better risk scoring and data science - allowing for accessible options for those who have been turned away by other insurance providers; and Stream who have found that focusing on an impact problem has led to considerably higher rates of customer acquisition. 

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    Urban Jungle allowing for more affordable and accessible access to insurance

  2. Sub-standard products and services – there are things on the market but not good enough → opens opportunities for startups providing data driven products like Jude (bladder health) and Ditto (menstrual health) who have seen very strong retention rates.

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  1. Products or services that don’t exist yet → Oxford Cancer Analytics: enabling early detection for cancer stages where no product exists today


3. Capital  

The pool of investors prioritising impact is growing. A growing number of impact-focused funds, financial incentives, and non-dilutive capital are becoming available, reducing costs of capital and expanding financing options for impact founders. 

What works: 

  • Across Europe, leading generalist investors — from Accel, LocalGlobe, Balderton, Northzone, Atomico, Kindred, Connect, Index, HV Capital, and others — are leaning into impact, backing high‑growth companies like Stream, Fuse Energy, Axle Energy, 1KOMMA5, and Ophelos, and health-tech unicorns such as Kry 

  • Stream moved from pre-seed to Series A in <4 months, and raised their Series C in the ‘largest fintech for good’ fundraise – with investors like Ascension, alongside more generalist VCs such as Balderton, Northzone, and more involved 

  • Improved impact performance drives value for all stakeholders supports in de-risking the product, its outcomes, and helps to attract investors  

  • Beyond VC, impact ventures also unlock concessional or non-dilutive capital such as European Investment Bank loans, Innovate UK grants, public subsidies, and support from organisations like The Green Finance Institute - enabling innovation, extending runway and reducing risk


“As a VC, you’re not interested in quick flips. You’re helping entrepreneurs building large sustainable companies where you take all stakeholders into account. The current macro situation is an opportunity to build out impact and to fund companies and build companies that are doing good. For example, I work with Again Bio - here, the bigger the business is, the more good they do. It’s green, it’s cheap, and it’s local supply chain. These are the examples of companies that will continue to get funded.” (EUVC) - Jan Miczaika, Partner, HV Capital highlighting why impact companies still win

4. Regulation 

Evolving regulation can create opportunities for impact-driven businesses to stay ahead of the curve and engage with new commercial opportunities, particularly in response to global megatrends. 

Examples 

  • ETS regulation caps emissions and lets companies trade carbon allowances, creating a growing market for high-quality carbon credits. As carbon prices rise, carbon removal becomes more valuable, giving companies like AirHive a built-in revenue tailwind tied directly to policy. 

  • Pushing on open doors: Axle Energy have been working with Ofgem to enable consumer participation in flexible energy market (P483 clause) 

 

Key Takeaways  

  1. The most successful founders aren’t relying on a single lever — they’re building a stack. By combining customer insight, purpose-led talent strategies, aligned capital, and proactive regulatory engagement, they’re compounding their advantage. In this way, embedding impact into a company is not just a nice to have — it’s a blueprint for business value creation, contributing to long-term success.  


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  1. Backing impact ventures can be a winning strategy for VCs. 

    Impact investing in venture capital is still emerging, with ‘impact’ defined differently across studies and varying approaches to measuring returns. Yet early evidence points to a clear trend — impact can be a powerful driver of value creation and market success.


"We consistently observe a positive correlation between financial performance and impact performance.” (EUVC, 2025) - Cyril Gouiffés, Head of Social Impact Investments at the European Investment Fund

 

Contribute to this ongoing work stream 

We’re building a bank of case studies and insights linking impact to business value creation. If you know a startup we should feature, have relevant evidence or examples to share, or would like to contribute your work or feedback — we’d love to hear from you.  


Please submit your thoughts below — we’ll review and get back to you shortly.



Relevant resources

  • Impact as a Driver of Business Value Creation (ImpactVC)  Drawing on insights from over 20 leading VCs and LPs, ImpactVC has created this resource to help VCs and founders identify and leverage impact dynamics to drive value creation.

  • Benevolent Disruption: The Fortune in Solving the World’s Biggest Problems  Co-authored with Professor Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and VenCap International PLC (a large VC allocator) and academics at MIT and Oxford University. Drawing on proprietary data on 500+ VC funds and 14,000 companies, over the last 40 years, the study unveils an enormous, and hitherto undiscovered, source of investment value: just 30% of venture-backed companies tackle big problems and these have historically delivered 51% higher returns compared to their peers. 

  • Revent: Real Value Framework  Created by Revent VC, their framework translates human and natural capital directly into financial terms. This allows us to not only understand the scale of a problem, but also quantify the financial upside potential of solving it. It's a first-principles method to systematically identify impact markets: sectors where societal costs intersect with massive economic opportunity.

  • Eka – Shared Value Thesis  An euvc podcast interview with Jon Coker, founding partner at Eka Ventures, to unpack how the team behind the £68M Fund I has backed 21 early-stage companies driving systemic change in consumer health and sustainable consumption, and dive deeper into their Shared Value Thesis.

  • Poverty Premium Research – Fair By Design  The Fair By Design Fund supports technology businesses that are tackling the poverty premium by reducing living costs and enhancing accessibility. This initiative focuses on correcting market inefficiencies in several key sectors, including financial services, credit accessibility, insurance, food and household goods, energy, and transport. These efforts are aimed at catalyzing significant systemic change, striving to create a fairer and more affordable existence for low-income households throughout the UK. This link highlights the academic research and insights on what the Poverty Premium is, and helps identify

  • Stream reports (Financial Wellbeing and Mind over Money)  Financial Wellbeing explores how individuals manage their finances, focusing on behaviors, confidence, and overall financial health. Mind Over Money examines the psychological and emotional factors influencing financial decisions and money management

 
 
 

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