The Catalytic Capital Consortium invested $128.5 million in 15 impact funds since its launch in 2019. Those funds were able to pull in an additional $3.1 billion in capital from investors — a multiple of $24 dollars mobilized for every one invested.
C3 is a joint initiative of a dozen foundations and family offices backing impact-first investments globally. The highest concentration of their portfolio goes to health, information and communications technology, and financial services. The MacArthur Foundation, which manages the C3 investment portfolio within its $500 million impact investing allocation, published a report today outlining how it measured performance across its investments.
Their current strategy relies heavily on “horizontal” catalytic capital — investments made at the same financial terms as other investors, but committed at an earlier stage. The timing is intended to catalyze further private investment.
“Catalytic capital is about much more than concessionary returns,” MacArthur states in the report. “More than half of the initial C3 investments did not hinge on the concept of accepting lower returns but were instead driven by a willingness to accept disproportionate risk.”
Impact measurement
C3 tracks each of its investments against three benchmarks: financial returns, impact, and whether the fund kept to its initial catalytic targets. “Setting portfolio-wide impact targets at the outset was more difficult, so targets were developed at the individual underlying investment level and then aggregated to assess the portfolio performance,” the report states.
Financial performance varied but most funds met or exceeded expectations. And many led to follow on investments into second funds.
C3’s largest investments include allocations to the billion dollar plus SDG Loan Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation’s Zero Gap Fund, One Acre Fund, and Acumen’s two Latin America-focused funds.
Humility and discipline
In a guest post on ImpactAlpha, MacArthur’s Charles Coustan explains that a core takeaway from the report is a call for humility and discipline in how impact investors measure success.
Rather than chasing portfolio-wide aggregates or claiming precise attribution, the foundation opts for judging impact — and financial performance — against investment-specific expectations. “Given the potential for conflation or a false level of certainty, we believe our investments contribute to the impact created by our investees. But we do not try to attribute a specific amount of impact to our investments,” writes Coustan.
By centering investees, setting clear impact targets, tracking capital mobilization and evaluating returns relative to intent, Coustan says that MacArthur positions impact measurement not as an exercise in headline numbers, but as a practical tool for accountability and continuous improvement. Keep reading.
