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How to Raise Money as a Business

Strategy Driven

Whether you need to raise money to fund a new startup or to expand an existing business, financing can be a complex process. With so many options available, it can be difficult to know where to begin or which financing option is best for your business. You should also prepare some insights about your market and competition.

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Can Impact Investing Avoid the Failures of Microfinance?

Harvard Business Review

Impact investors over the past decade largely focused on proving that impact investments could achieve a “market rate” or above return profile. Making something wildly profitable will of course attract the attention of financial markets, and thus increase the chances it will scale effectively. Lessons from Microfinance.

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The Microfinance Contagion Scenario

Harvard Business Review

So far, the Andhra Pradesh (AP) microfinance crisis has largely been viewed as a local issue, with relatively little impact beyond AP or India's borders. Other microfinance crises, in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Bosnia, have not spread beyond the borders of a particular country. That could likely have consequences.

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Making Microfinance More Effective

Harvard Business Review

While meeting this challenge is a clear priority for policy makers and donors, it is also a major profit opportunity for commercial players who can solve market failures and create real value. Micro-insurance is not at scale anywhere except when heavily subsidized by government, a market we hope technology may change in the future.

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Under Fire, Microfinance Faces Falling Out of Favor

Harvard Business Review

Microfinance has come under fire in the past 18 months, triggered in part by SKS Microfinance's IPO. Critics complain that the institutions supporting microfinance have become too greedy, and many are using this as an argument to deeply regulate or, even more, cut support to microfinance operations. I hope not.

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How One Startup Developed a Sales Model That Works in Emerging Markets

Harvard Business Review

We serve two markets that are very different but united by the common need for reliable, safe access to energy: outdoor recreationalists and low-income households in emerging markets. We found an ideal storefront near a busy market in central Bhubaneswar. Experiment #5: Microfinance Institutions.

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Global Entrepreneurs Need New Funding Models

Harvard Business Review

In low-income countries, according to World Bank data in a recent paper by the consultancy Dalberg, 43% of businesses with between 20 and 99 employees say that access to finance is a major constraint. The White House has called this gap between the demand and supply of finance for small and medium enterprises a "market failure.[and]