ImpactAlpha Latin America

ImpactAlpha Latin America: Raising capital with a ‘simple agreement for future impact’

Jessica Pothering · August 27, 2025
Lima, Peru

Saludos, Agents of Impact! 

In this month’s newsletter:

  • Meet SAFI, the newest tool in impact-linked finance
  • EWA Capital’s gender-smart fundraising milestone
  • Building Peru’s impact investing market
  • Carbon offsetting insetting to meeting net-zero targets

Forget SAFEs. Impact investors are incentivizing growth and impact with SAFIs. An experimental idea by the impact finance experts at Roots of Impact is ready for prime time. The German advisory firm is out with a twist on the simple agreement for future equity, or SAFE, that aims to help founders and their investors align on impact ambitions. The “simple agreement for future impact,” or SAFI, enables entrepreneurs to raise early funding tied to their impact objectives without immediately setting impact targets. The flexible funding mechanism is the latest addition to a suite of products Roots of Impact is championing to build the field of impact-linked financing. The Roots team can vouch for the model because they first tried it for their own fundraise. “Our investors asked us, ‘How should we structure this round? It should help you achieve the impact you want, and you are the experts’,” recalls Roots of Impact founder Bjoern Struewer. The first SAFI was finalized last year when Roots of Impact closed its investment round with Delta Fund, the European Social Innovation and Impact Fund, BMH and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. 

  • Early roots. Struewer started Roots in 2015 with a mission of making entrepreneur-friendly financing more prominent and rewarding to founders with social impact goals. The company’s earliest and most widely known product, social impact incentives, or SIINCs, was designed to offer bonus payments to companies as they achieved specified impact milestones. The mechanism has been used dozens of times, including to incentivize diabetes care for low-income patients in Mexico, small farmer financing in Colombia, rural dentistry in Ecuador and more. Roots has also designed impact-linked loans and incentives for entrepreneurs to set up impact management and measurement systems. The company’s broader vision is to see impact incentives baked into every type of financing structure. “You can link finance to impact in all instruments,” says Struewer. “This is not a product, it’s an approach.”
  • IOU for impact. The SAFI is a new spin on revenue-based financing – a flexible debt instrument that allows companies to repay their investors based on how much they earn rather than in fixed installments. The SAFI assumes that new companies need flexibility in figuring out how to achieve the impact they aim to achieve. When an investor and entrepreneur sign a SAFI contract, they establish financing terms that reward the entrepreneur with a repayment discount for reaching their impact goals. But those goals don’t have to be set immediately. It’s modeled on the SAFE, which allows a very early-stage company to raise equity without an immediate valuation. “The SAFE is a templatized version of an IOU on a napkin. SAFI’s innovation is that you agree to agree on the impact later on,” explains Aunnie Patton-Power of the Innovative Finance Initiative, which supported Roots of Impact in workshopping SAFI’s design.
  • Market infrastructure. The SAFI wasn’t a crystallized concept when Roots of Impact started fundraising. Investors drawn to the company’s mission saw an opportunity to do more than fund its work; they could be a proof point. “Because our round was all about building the market infrastructure for impact-linked finance, we consequently agreed that as an outcome, we are creating our competition,” explains Struewer. “That is metric number one: volume and traction of impact-linked finance deals implemented by all practitioners.” Roots of Impact has also piloted the SAFI with Purefresh, a Kenyan water distribution company that secured financing from impact investor Aqua for All to expand its network of affordable water kiosks. Struewer says the SAFI was designed simply so it could be adapted to any type of business in any context. “We were known as the SIINC company,” he says. “Three years from now I assume we’ll be known as the SAFI company.”
  • Keep reading, “Forget SAFEs. Impact investors are incentivizing growth and impact with SAFIs,” by Jessica Pothering and Erik Stein.
  • Meet up. Roots of Impact is hosting a workshop on its impact-linked finance journey and work in Latin America and a launch session for the SAFI at Latimpacto’s Impact Minds in Medellín, Sept. 1-2. If you’re at the conference, also be sure to say hi to ImpactAlpha’s Erik Stein.

Dealflow: Gender Smart

EWA Capital raises a $24 million gender-smart venture fund for Latin America. Early-stage venture capital in Latin America remains a tough sell for women-led funds. Bogotá-based EWA Capital has made the case: its second fund, EWA II, closed at $24.4 million, above its $20 million target, with backing from nearly 50 investors. EWA backs startups in fintech, enterprise software, health, education and clean energy. The firm looks for companies with female founders, executives, board members, with majority-women customers, or with strong gender goals. “When we started in 2019 there were less than 10 female fund managers in Latin America. Instead of seeing that as a weakness, I said: this is our differentiation – let’s do things differently,” EWA’s Patricia Saenz told ImpactAlpha (see “In Latin America, investors see economic opportunities through a gender lens”).

  • 360-degree approach. EWA’s gender-lens approach extends beyond its portfolio: it aims to cultivate a new generation of female investors across Latin America. More than 40% of investors in EWA II are women, many of them wealthy individuals or women-led family offices investing in a private fund for the first time. EWA set a $50,000 minimum commitment to lower barriers for investors and tapped into growing investor interest in gender equity. EWA II also drew backing from COFIDE and Bancóldex, the International Finance Corp., Visa Foundation, the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, and Mexico’s government-backed Fondo de Fondos. Sonen Capital and Switzerland’s Mountain Partners also participated.
  • More. 

Other investment news crossing our desks:

  • Agrifood investing. Brazil’s Mahta raised 20 million reais from Impact Earth’s Amazon Biodiversity Fund to develop new food products from ingredients sourced from local communities in the Amazon.
  • Conservation finance. Microfinance lender WCCN backed Amazonia Impact Ventures to finance Indigenous and forest-based entrepreneurs… UK-based Sustainable Investment Management raised $60 million to finance zero-deforestation soy farming in Brazil… Brazil-based Radix Florestal raised 10 million reais from Germany-based Ecosia to replant degraded forestland in the Amazon and deploy drones to monitor its projects.
  • Development finance. IDB Invest committed $80 million to expand small business credit in Brazil’s Amazon and Honduras. The private finance group of the Inter-American Development Bank has also invested this month in environmental sustainability in Brazil’s pulp and paper industry, electricity infrastructure upgrades in Belize, and affordable housing construction in Mexico.
  • Financial inclusion. BancoSol issued a $22 million gender bond to expand loans for women-led businesses in Bolivia… T. Rowe Price backed PayJoy’s $250 million asset fund to expand smartphone and credit access in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia… IDB Lab invested $1.5 million in Mexican fintech startup Aviva to expand its AI-powered financial service kiosks in underbanked communities.

Signals: Market Building

Peruvian impact investors are mobilizing capital for inclusive growth in the Amazon. Peru is claiming its spot on the impact investing map. Long considered Latin America’s “fourth market” behind Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, Peru is building momentum as fund managers, institutions and entrepreneurs shift capital for climate resilience and inclusive growth. “We’re not just looking for returns on the economic side. We’re also trying to cause impact,” Luis Lira of Aliados de Impacto, Peru’s national advisory board on impact investing, told ImpactAlpha in a video interview at last week’s Impact Investing Summit in Lima. “People that are investing in these types of [impact] businesses are what moves the needle here.”

  • Peru’s dealflow. Last week, Amazonia Impact Ventures secured backing from Wisconsin-based Working Capital for Community Needs to provide flexible loans to Indigenous and forest-based entrepreneurs. In May, ecotourism operator Inkaterra raised $17 million to grow Peru’s hospitality sector. And in February, BBVA Perú and IDB Invest issued a $100 million social bond to expand credit for women-led small businesses.
  • Visibility of wins. Investors are using innovative financing to target the capital gap for social entrepreneurs. Oikocredit, which finances micro and small businesses in Peru and Colombia, ties its impact directly to growth. “If the business succeeds and scales, the impact scales with it,” said Oikocredit’s Harold Calderon. ALIVE Ventures, which backs high-impact startups across the Andes, stresses the need to showcase results to bring in more investors. Says ALIVE’s María Pía Morante, “We need more visibility of wins.” 

Don’t miss these Impact Voices from Agents of Impact in Latin America:

  • Brazil’s North showcases a bioeconomy in action as COP30 nears. Innovative social enterprises are proving that the Amazon’s economic future lies beyond the extractive models that have fueled deforestation and left local communities behind. In a guest post, Mariano Cenamo of impact accelerator AMAZ shares how the organization is seeding the bioeconomy with Indigenous-led food and fashion businesses and regenerative agroforestry. Read more.
  • Smart, inclusive, circular: A new model for waste management in Brazil. In the city of Salvador, the RODA project is piloting a new approach to recycling that blends digital scheduling, electric vehicles and waste-picker cooperatives to cut waste, create jobs and advance social equity. Saville Alves of the circular economy startup SOLOS argues that this inclusive approach can be scaled across Latin America, turning waste into a resource. Check it out.
  • New in the corporate decarbonization playbook in Latin America: Carbon insetting. The road to net-zero is not paved with offsets; it must be built through reinvention, argue Latimpacto’s Paula Ramírez and Janeth Londoño. Unlike offsetting, which compensates for emissions via unrelated external projects, insetting focuses on emission reductions within a company’s value chain. To meet net-zero targets, Bayer, Natura and other corporations in Latin America are integrating regenerative agriculture, circular product design and sustainable sourcing. Dig in.

Follow the Talent

On the move

Borja Garcia Fernandez stepped down as head of structuring and Latin America at Citi Social Finance to join the International Finance Corp. as inclusive capital lead… CrossBoundary Advisory promoted Jonathan Duarte partner and head of Latin America and Caribbean advisory.

Sergio Gusmão Suchodolski, previously with Banco de Desenvolvimento de Minas Gerais, was appointed CEO of Fama Re:capital… Federico Brusa was promoted to lead specialist of climate change at the Inter-American Development Bank… Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter of IMPAQTO Capital was selected as a 2025 Yale World Fellow.

Step up

The Inter-American Development Bank seeks a senior specialist of climate change and sustainability at its headquarters in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic… Prudential Financial is on the hunt for a senior sustainability analyst in Rio de Janeiro… Impact Hub is looking for a process and operations analyst based at its hub in Florianópolis, Brazil. 

BBVA is looking for a sustainability finance and taxonomy associate in Mexico City… Also in Mexico City, Mondelez International is recruiting an ESG data and digital manager… New Story, a Mexico-based nonprofit addressing housing affordability and financial inclusion, has an opening for an impact associate.

The National Geographic Society is taking applications for grants to fund projects to protect, restore and research marine ecosystems. High interest areas include Baja, Mexico; Central America; the Caribbean; and Colombia… WRAP and the Plastics Network are accepting applications until Monday, Sept. 22, for an accelerator program focused on plastics circularity in Latin America.

Meet Up

Don’t miss these upcoming impact investing events:

Aug. 27, 2025