Social Tech Trust

We’ve played a vital role in developing the social tech ecosystem and have built an extensive track record of successfully supporting ventures to deliver financial and social returns. Since 2008, we have directly supported over 300 ventures, providing more than £30m of funding, with over 30 million people benefiting from our ventures’ products and services.

We understand that many high-quality ventures are currently being overlooked for several reasons, including:

• Structural inequalities in the investment market.
• A narrow focus on investing in potential ‘unicorns’.
• Investors seeing impact as a drag on returns.

As a result of these factors, many innovative ventures struggle to access the capital they need to scale.

We invest in impact driven tech companies at seed stage and Series A and aim to realise the financial and impact returns of overlooked companies. To do this, we invest using a flexible VC approach, which is a hybrid between revenue-based investment and established equity-focused VC models. Our approach has several important characteristics that respond to market need.

• We offer founder friendly terms that enable overlooked founders to pursue their growth plans.
• We target more consistent returns across our portfolio by investing in profitable companies.
• We identify transformative opportunities where impact is at the core, driving sustainable returns.

This is reflected in our investment criteria which specifically targets companies that:

• Focus on growing revenues and profitability.
• Have a social mission (linked to areas including Net Zero, Health and Wellbeing).
• Advance equality, inclusion and empowerment through their use of next generation digital technologies.

We add value to our portfolio companies in 3 main ways:

• Strengthening revenues through our networks and connections to public, private and public sector partners/customers.
• Building capacity in key areas including tech, impact management and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) by providing access to a curated network of specialist service providers and advisors.
• Driving collaborative advantage by providing access to our peer-to-peer community.

With over a decade of experience, we know tech has the potential to play a crucial role in addressing some of the greatest social challenges we face today.