GEXSI BoP Fund

Working with the most promising social enterprise start-ups worldwide

This is how our social start-up fund works.

Our Base-of-the-Pyramid Fund

Over the past years, GEXSI successfully set-up and tested financing instruments that provide early-stage risk capital to social enterprises whose business model tackles poverty-related issues.

Our benchmark is the New York City-based Acumen Fund, which successfully raised more than USD 50m to support social enterprises that contribute to poverty alleviation in low-income regions around the globe.

The GEXSI BoP Fund is different in three respects, and reflects our own mission and the European context in which GEXSI is embedded:

  1. We make much smaller investments, focusing on early-stage business incubation, thereby complementing the existing funding vehicles, including the Acumen Fund;
  2. We are a Europe-based initiative, with strong links to the region's impact investment community;
  3. We source our funding not primarily from large foundations, but work through own online fundraising tools, CSR partnerships, and support through committed venture philanthropists.

The GEXSI BoP Fund provides early stage capital to social enterprise start-ups that are not yet advanced enough to receive funding from other impact investment funds. It targets social enterprise start-ups whose business models help to improve the livelihoods of people at the base of the income pyramid (BoP markets).

The BoP Fund is a catalyst that helps to move early stage social ventures from our GEXSI lab “from aid to market”; that is, from grant-dependency to a self-sustaining business.