This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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In this solo episode of Investing in Impact, Grant Trahant spotlights Access Ventures, an impact investor using catalytic capital, blended finance, and a one-pocket mindset to support economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental sustainability.

Access Ventures approaches investing by asking what prevents people from participating fully in the economy and where flexible capital can unlock opportunities that conventional markets overlook. Rather than forcing every challenge into the same investment structure, the organization uses different forms of capital based on what the problem requires.

The episode explores how catalytic capital can absorb early risk, fund experimentation, and help make opportunities investable for additional participants. It also examines blended finance, which combines tools such as grants, flexible investments, guarantees, and market-rate capital to address complex challenges.

Grant also discusses Access Ventures’ one-pocket mindset, which encourages investors to evaluate their entire portfolio through both a financial and an impact lens instead of separating wealth creation from philanthropy.

Examples Featured in the Episode

GoodMaps is an indoor navigation company backed by Access Ventures. Its technology uses LiDAR scanning and camera-based positioning to provide spoken, visual, and haptic turn-by-turn directions inside complex buildings. The platform is designed to make airports, transit hubs, museums, and other public spaces easier to navigate, particularly for people with disabilities.

The Growth Loan Fund was designed by Access Ventures to serve small-business owners who could not qualify for capital through traditional underwriting. The fund offered non-collateralized loans of up to $35,000, demonstrating how a flexible financial product can address a specific gap in a local economy.

Together, these examples show the range of the Access Ventures model: investing in scalable technology while also creating new financing structures for people and businesses underserved by conventional markets.

In This Episode

• What catalytic capital is and when it can be most useful
• How blended finance combines different forms of capital
• Why every social challenge should not be forced into the same financial instrument
• What Access Ventures means by a one-pocket mindset
• How GoodMaps uses technology to improve accessibility
• How the Growth Loan Fund expanded access to small-business capital
• Why impact measurement must move beyond dollars deployed
• How investors can support access, agency, and community resilience
• The questions impact investors should ask about risk, returns, and community influence

Key Takeaway

Capital is most powerful when it is used with intention, creativity, and patience. Financial resources can remove barriers and create opportunity, but lasting transformation happens when people gain greater access, greater agency, and a meaningful role in shaping their own economic future.

Learn More

• Access Ventures
• Access Ventures Portfolio
• Investing in Impact

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to Investing in Impact and share it with someone interested in using capital as a force for positive change.

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Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.

This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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This episode of Investing in Impact is a little different from the conversations I usually have on the show.

Social Leverage is not an impact investing firm in the traditional sense. It is a seed stage venture capital firm investing primarily in fintech, financial infrastructure, wealth technology, and vertical AI.

But impact does not always fit neatly inside an impact investing label.

Capital allocation shapes which companies get built, which founders get opportunities, where wealth is created, and what happens after successful entrepreneurs and employees gain experience, relationships, and financial resources.

That idea became one of the most interesting parts of my conversation with Matt Ober, Managing Partner at Social Leverage.

Matt described a flywheel the firm sees repeatedly across its network: a founder builds a company, eventually has an exit, and later returns to their hometown or another community where they want to build a life. They begin mentoring and supporting other entrepreneurs.

Those entrepreneurs build companies of their own, and some eventually become new investment opportunities.

Successful companies can create much more than financial returns for investors.

They can create wealth for employees, produce experienced founders and operators, build networks, and recycle knowledge and capital back into communities and future companies.

That broader definition of impact is what makes this conversation particularly interesting.

Matt brings a unique perspective to the discussion. Before joining Social Leverage, he worked at Bloomberg, led data strategy at quantitative hedge fund WorldQuant, helped launch WorldQuant Ventures, and later served as Chief Data Scientist at Third Point.

Today, he invests at the earliest stages of companies building across fintech and AI.

In our conversation, we explore how Social Leverage evaluates founders, why venture investing is still fundamentally about people despite the rise of data and AI, and how technologies like AI are changing the economics of building companies.

We also discuss several Social Leverage portfolio companies, including Fiscal AI, Slash Experts, and SyntheticFi, the evolution of wealth management technology, agentic trading, the role of financial advisors in an AI driven world, and why the next generation of professionals will need to become deeply proficient with AI.

At its core, this conversation is about how capital, technology, entrepreneurship, and networks compound over time, and how the effects of a successful company can extend far beyond the original investment.

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Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.

This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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In this bonus episode Investing in Impact, we showcase a crossover episode from our Disruptors for Good podcast. On this episode, we speak with Lindsay Hadley, founder and CEO of Harbor Fund, about building a new financing model for films designed to influence culture and create social impact.

Harbor Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that uses philanthropic donations to invest in socially meaningful films. Rather than funding a single project through a traditional grant, Harbor Fund takes an equity position in selected productions. When a film generates a financial return, that capital flows back into the fund and can be invested in future projects.

The result is an evergreen model that combines philanthropy, impact investing, and independent film financing.

Lindsay shares how her 20-year career in nonprofit fundraising led her into filmmaking, why scripted narratives can sometimes create more cultural influence than documentaries, and what Harbor Fund looks for when evaluating hundreds of film submissions.

She also discusses the difficult state of the entertainment industry, the importance of established talent and strong intellectual property, and why commercial viability is a critical part of Harbor Fund’s impact thesis.

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Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.