Community development financial institutions and other mission-driven lenders and impact investors have a new AI resource to help streamline their impact data. In conjunction with its acquisition of Radiant Data, Pacific Community Ventures is launching a digital hub to offer such AI data capabilities to help smaller CDFIs and mission-driven organizations with limited resources improve their impact underwriting, measurement and reporting.
“Right now, if you’re a nonprofit leader or the leader of a CDFI, you do not have easy access to data and machine learning and AI talent. It’s really, really difficult,” said Sachi Shenoy, Radiant’s founder who is joining PCV as chief data officer (for background, see, “How machine learning and AI can be harnessed for mission-based lending”).
Through Radiant Data Hub, she says CDFIs can use transaction data to build predictive lending models and use voice-based data like transcripts for better impact storytelling. Building trust in the data and financial stability of such lenders is the best way to attract investors “who still have assets sitting on the sidelines that could be actively deployed,” PCV’s Bulbul Gupta told ImpactAlpha.
Community-centered AI
“An innovative, human centric economic future augmented through equitable AI is possible, backed by data and fueled by belief made tangible through investment – if we want it,” Bulbul wrote in her earlier guest post on ImpactAlpha, “Charting AI’s course to an inclusive economic future.”
In the second part of the series, “Re-humanizing AI with community voices to deliver economic mobility in America,” Gupta and Shenoy say the Radiant Data acquisition will help PCV put ethical, community-centered AI tools in the hands of small business entrepreneurs and workers.
Since 2021, PCV has used Radiant’s AIKKA AI tool to collect voice-based feedback from workers, rather than conducting traditional surveys that don’t often capture the whole picture. Central to PCV’s new strategic plan, they write, is reimagining “how we use this technology to uplift our missions, not be at its mercy.”
Catalytic capital
The acquisition of Radiant is part of PCV’s five-year plan to utilize AI and other innovative technologies to improve its own impact underwriting. The CDFI, originally launched as Silicon Valley Community Ventures in 1998, has deployed over $65 million in patient, flexible capital to California small businesses to create and preserve 40,000 green and quality jobs.
By 2030, PCV is looking to deploy $100 million of “restorative capital” and create 100,000 quality, sustainable jobs. The nonprofit lender aims to better target underestimated small business owners, including women and entrepreneurs of color, while driving economic dignity and climate resilience through quality green jobs.
“The journey has always been how we can prove out what is possible as the most impact-first, equity-centric community investor,” said Gupta.
