Sustaining Impact Through Growth and Exit: Key Takeaways for Investors and Founders
- Impact VC
- Jul 1
- 6 min read
During London Climate Action Week 2025, alongside Astanor and Rothschild & Co, we brought together a curated group of senior leaders from across the capital stack including impact VCs (from early stage and growth funds), PE investors, LPs, CVCs, and strategic corporates — to explore:
How do we support impact-driven ventures as they scale and exit — without compromising impact or performance?
This piece captures key insights from the group’s discussion and outlines practical ways to embed, sustain, and evolve impact across the company lifecycle—from early-stage intentionality to post-exit resilience. It is intended to support impact-led founders and the investors who back them in maintaining a strong focus on impact as companies grow and exit.
1. Early Stage: Build with Impact Intention
Laying the groundwork for lasting impact starts well before acquisition or IPO. Early-stage decisions around strategy, metrics, and culture are crucial to embedding impact in a way that can scale with the business.
Set the Foundation Early
Founding teams need to begin with intentionality. Clarifying the impact ambition and planning to integrate it into the business model from the outset is a key first step in sustaining impact at a later stage. This avoids retrofitting impact later and ensures alignment with growth. Oyster’s Social Impact Thesis is an excellent example of intentionality, clearly articulated through their impact strategy and Theory of Change.
Measuring Impact
Social Impact At pre-seed/seed stage, the focus is on impact intentions and ambitions, and over time this shifts to actual outcomes achieved. Best practice would be to articulate a measurement plan at the point of investment even if certain KPIs can't be measured straightaway. This ensures alignment over the direction of travel. For social impact metrics, we have outlined a framework that acts as a starting point for conversation in our VC Founder Playbook.
Environmental Impact There has been a lot of work done to better measure and standardise environmental impact measurement. Slide 5 from this Project Frame report does a good job of mapping the different initiatives. Conducting an LCA is the most robust environmental methodology to measure a company’s product footprint but more importantly, training your company early, from Series A, to do it themselves paves the way to ensure that the company’s environmental strategy is fully embedded in its commercial one. The same logic applies for the company’s carbon footprint. These tools help set environmental and social practices within the company’s process which we would expect to evolve over time – from a starting point that is proportional to the size and stage of each impact company.
Impact as a Driver of Business Value Creation Impact should not be an optional add-on, nor should it be thought of as separate from commercial value. For impact to be sustained as a company grows, it’s essential to link it to business performance—to ensure relevance through regulatory, political, or external changes. Impact can also act as a positive driver of that business value – through engaging customers, talent, investors, and potential acquirers. You can find more on assessing the links between impact and business value here.
2. Growth Stage: Embed, Don’t Overlay
Embedding Impact into Your Company Culture
Founders can start to embed impact into the company’s DNA by hiring and retaining impact-driven talent. Building a culture that prioritises impact helps ensure its continuity in the long term – including after an exit such as acquisition when founders, often the main stewards of impact, may move on. Emilie Stephenson of Innocent notes that culture has been key to maintaining the brand’s social mission following its acquisition by Coca-Cola.
Avoiding Founder Dependence: Embedding Impact through Governance and Accountability As companies grow and founders exit, it’s crucial to embed governance and accountability mechanisms to sustain impact. Some approaches include:
Policies and standard operating procedures to ensure consistent impact focus
Integrating requirements in the shareholder agreement is the best way to ensure long term alignment, here are samples of Impact and ESG clauses that can be found in SHAs.
Governance structures like impact committees to oversee impact priorities.
Incentives designed to link compensation to impact KPIs.
Tools and guidance that help companies integrate impact into everyday decision-making and processes. For example LCA assessments and ongoing tools for use as they scale.
Impact startups and VCs use various tools to embed impact in governance and preserve it through transitions. Examples include B-Corp certification, dedicated oversight bodies such as Togetherall’s ‘Guardian Council, and transparent impact reporting by companies like Second Nature, Wagestream and Olio.
As an investor, Astanor support their portfolio companies in creating Impact Committees, made up of impact and non-impact investors that report biannually to the board, helping maintain impact commitments even after exiting. These mechanisms help organisations avoid founder dependence and ensure long-term impact.
3. Navigating Impactful Exits
To-date, most impact exits have occurred via acquisition, which can be complex from an impact perspective. As highlighted in Better Society Capital’s blog on impactful exits, several dimensions are critical:
Investor Visibility: Early-stage investors often lose board seats before exit. Maintaining ongoing relationships with founders is key to staying informed about exit trade-offs and ensuring impact remains a priority.
Buyer Alignment: The acquirer’s mission, vision, and values—and their purpose for the acquisition—will determine the future of the company’s impact. Cultural alignment and clear communication are essential for successful integration.
Business Model Resilience: If impact is central to the company’s value proposition, even impact-agnostic buyers will have an incentive to sustain and enhance it.
Governance Mechanisms: Mechanisms such as B Corp certification, dedicated impact oversight bodies, and public impact reporting can help preserve impact through transitions.
Talent and Culture: Recruiting and retaining individuals committed to impact ensures there are champions for the mission post-acquisition. Building a culture that prioritises impact is equally vital.
Post-Exit Safeguards: Consider continuation clauses (e.g., founders donate shares to charity if KPIs aren’t met) and require ongoing impact reporting.
Align Incentives: Tie management compensation to impact outcomes, ensuring continuity through ownership changes.
4. Additional Tools for VCs In addition to encouraging founders to take the actions described above, VCs can take further action to support, encourage and require practices or provisions that help sustain impact into the long term:
Embed mission in legal documentation, such as shareholders agreements or company’s articles of association, that enshrine social mission or embed the elements of governance described above. There are limits to such documentation, however, as subsequent investors wield significant power in changing or removing such provisions and may not be aligned with the impact mission of earlier investors.
Engage with initiatives such as the Impact Valuation Hub launched by Astanor to help companies articulate the monetary value of the impact they are delivering – which can help communicate how meaningful that impact is to different stakeholders and funders over time.
5. The Role of LPs
How can LPs play a role in supporting VCs to think about sustaining impact on exit?
Foster Peer Learning: Create events and opportunities for VCs to share best practices across your portfolio of funds.
Share Portfolio Insights: Disseminate learnings from what you’ve seen work or pitfalls from across your portfolio.
Drive Alignment: LPs can require VCs to define and report on impact metrics and employ strategies to ensure impact accountability, reinforcing alignment throughout the investment chain.
Conclusion: Making Impact Resilient
To survive the scaling and exit journey, impact must move from intention to embedded practice—aligned with financial performance, leadership incentives, and organisational culture. The goal is not only to have impact intent, but to make the outcomes resilient, able to outlast individual leaders and withstand market shifts.
Impact is still an emerging area within the venture ecosystem, and many fund managers and founders alike continue to experiment with how best to create, sustain, and scale it. Considering impact at the point of exit is a critical—but still often overlooked—part of this journey. As more investors and founders face this challenge, we expect growing attention on how to ensure impact endures through acquisitions and beyond.
We hope this piece offers a useful starting point and encourages further conversation across the ecosystem on how to get this right. For more on impactful exits:
As a founder, you can find more on how to embed impact into your startup in our Founder Impact Playbook.
As an investor, you can find out more on how to support your portfolio companies through the VC Impact Playbook.
Or get in touch to share your own approach to sustaining impact through growth and exit.
Write-up by: Ellie Broad (Community & Impact Manager at ImpactVC)
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