Impact companies worth $2.3 trillion globally

Impact companies worldwide are now worth over $2.3 trillion. This reveals the report “Impact Startups 2022”, that was presented by Dealroom, together with ImpactCity, at ImpactFest last week. The report shows impact startups raised US$35bn in 2022 so far, down from a record US$68bn in 2021, but already above the amount raised over the whole of 2020. This means that -if you take out the extreme year of 2021, impact investments are still going up.

Dealroom’s Impact Database also reveals that the number of “impact unicorns” (impact startups that have reached a valuation of US$1bn or above), founded since 1990 has now reached 200.

Investors overwhelmingly focus on impact startups tackling climate change, in particular those targeting the UN SDGs on “climate action” and “clean and affordable energy”. The fastest growing SDGs when it comes to venture investment are “life below water” and “decent work and economic growth”.

The US remains the largest market overall, with US$16.3bn raised by impact startups so far this year. European impact startups are catching up with the US on VC investment. This year, they raised US$14.2bn so far. Africa is the region where impact venture investing is developing the fastest – growing 8.4 times in the past five years.

Europe has the highest level of impact venture investing as a share of the total venture capital market (18%, compared with 8% for the US and 4% for Asia).

The report also gives insights on the number of impact jobs in The Netherlands. Impact startups provide 10% of the startup workforce in the Netherlands. The province of South-Holland has the highest concentration of jobs in impact startups compared to other provinces in the Netherlands. On a city-level The Hague, Arnhem and Maastricht are the most impact intense cities.

The report, Impact Startups 2022, bases its findings on the Dealroom Impact database, which gathers information on more than 10,000 “impact startups”, defined as companies that address one or more UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) at the core of their business and have the potential to scale. ImpactCity and Dealroom founded this impact database with other partners to measure the development of the worldwide impact ecosystem.

ImpactCity summarised the report in a handheld leaflet, which was distributed to visitors at ImpactFest.