The Brief

The Brief: Expanding mental health care to places without connectivity – or English

ImpactAlpha · September 8, 2025

Greetings Agents of Impact!

In today’s Brief:

Wysa’s physical + digital approach to mental healthcare
Accion Ventures closes second inclusive fintech fund
Aavishkaar invests in Africa’s supply chains
Financing circular construction

Featured: Healthy Youth

In India, Wysa goes ‘phygital’ to bring mental healthcare to places without connectivity – or English. In India, as elsewhere, some of the people most in need of mental health services are least able to get them. With offices in Boston, London and Bangalore, Wysa reaches at least seven million people in more than 95 countries with a free, user-friendly chatbot that guides users to positive mental care approaches. Two years ago, the company took a step back from its mobile app and online model to develop a pen-and-paper version for remote, hard to reach places. “Think of an adolescent girl sitting in a part of rural India who [only] speaks her language,” says Wysa’s Rhea Yadav. “She is not going to be online.” Wysa pursued its physical-plus-digital, or “phygital,” model as part of the 100x Impact Accelerator at the London School of Economics. “Good mental health is a skill that can be built within people,” Yadav tells ImpactAlpha. “The ability to cultivate self-care and build that skill of resilience is something that needs to be democratized in the world.”

Disordered world. While global health initiatives have largely focused on infectious and, more recently, chronic disease, mental health has become the No. 1 global health challenge, affecting well over one billion people and costing the world economy trillions of dollars in lost productivity and direct costs. The Covid pandemic dialed up already-common conditions such as depression and anxiety by more than 25%, according to the World Health Organization’s “World mental health report“. Among the other stressors: economic precarity, social polarization, public health and humanitarian emergencies, forced displacement and climate catastrophes. Wysa’s founders Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vemat launched the mental health app after grappling with depression themselves and among immediate family.
New channels. With help from 100x, Wysa moved to expand its language base to include Hindi and Marathi, some of India’s widely spoken languages, and developed physical workbooks with scannable codes for young users to follow as they would in customized therapy sessions. These books have been rolled out in Marathi to over 250 girls’ high schools in India’s Maharashtra state with the help of the government and local nonprofits. Wysa wants to reach three times as many schools by December. “The distribution channel to serve that user is entirely new,” Yadav says. “It meant working with government systems. It meant working with grassroots nonprofit organizations and more.”
Keep reading, “In India, Wysa goes ‘phygital’ to bring mental health care to places without connectivity – or English,” by Lucy Ngige in ImpactAlpha. Hopelab supports ImpactAlpha’s coverage of Healthy Youth.

Dealflow: Inclusive Fintech

Accion Ventures secures $61 million for inclusive fintech ventures. The venture investment arm of the nonprofit Accion invested in financial tech companies before “fintech” was a thing. “When we started a decade ago, it wasn’t even a word,” recalled Amee Parbhoo, part of the VC group’s founding team. After more than 75 investments and 13 exits, Accion Ventures has dropped “Lab” from its name. Its second fund secured $61 million to find and seed promising startups driving access to financial services in emerging markets. “We are sticking to our core mission. We’re still early-stage, still the first seed check,” said Parbhoo. “It doesn’t feel like we’re a lab anymore.”

Next-level fintech. When Accion started investing in fintech in 2015, many solutions were focused on credit or savings. Fintech has since expanded financial access via mobile money, online banks, payment systems and digital banking. The percentage of adults worldwide that now have access to formal financial services has increased to 75%; two in three adults use some form of digital payments. Accion is now focusing on “contextualized” financial products: “how people are using financial products to better their lives, to become more resilient, to grow their businesses,” said Parbhoo (see, “Why embedded finance is emerging as the future of global financial inclusion”).

Financial services. Among the portfolio companies in Accion Ventures’ second fund is PaidHR in Nigeria, which provides payroll and HR services to small businesses and startups. Foyer in the US is helping first-time homebuyers save for a down payment with a high-yield savings product. FinFra in Indonesia provides embedded finance to help small businesses secure credit. Accion Ventures’ most recent investment is in TransBnk, a banking and payments infrastructure company in India.
Repeat investors. Accion Ventures’ second fund was anchored by Dutch development bank FMO and Accion. Proparco, Ford Foundation, MetLife Asset Management, ImpactAssets and Mastercard also participated. “Most of our existing investors from fund one reupped and put in more for this fund,” said Parbhoo. “That kind of support and commitment when it’s a very difficult fundraising environment is huge, and was very helpful for us in the fundraising process.”
Share this post.

India-based Aavishkaar Capital invests in Africa’s supply chain. Aavishkaar Capital’s Supply Chain Support Fund offers working capital loans to African and Asian small businesses that provide jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, logistics and essential consumer services. Its mandate is to boost livelihoods and fair wages in its borrowers’ supply chains. Its latest loan, to Nigeria-based spice company Horizon Group Africa, increases the company’s capacity to purchase from more than 3,000 farmers of ginger, turmeric, clove, cinnamon, cardamom and black pepper. Horizon will also ramp up processing at its plants in Nigeria, Tanzania and Madagascar, rather than shipping raw materials for processing elsewhere. “The business impact is to bring more value addition to the continent. By virtue of doing that, there is more value captured locally, which can percolate downstream to the farmers,” Aavishkaar’s Darren Lobo told ImpactAlpha. Horizon is the Supply Chain Support Fund’s fourth investment in Africa and eighth in total.

Debt demand. Mumbai-based Aavishkaar Capital launched the fund in 2022 to meet a need for affordable small business debt. It provides loans of $3 million to $8 million. Many family-owned small businesses need capital to grow but do not want to dilute their ownership. “They probably will not accept the kind of terms private equity or venture capital firms give,” Aavishkaar’s Ashish Patel told ImpactAlpha. Credit “is a much better understood product in emerging markets.” Debt funds give emerging market investors greater clarity on exits as well, added Lobo. The Supply Chain Support Fund was anchored with $55 million from German development bank KfW. The Japan International Cooperation Agency invested $40 million this year (for background see, “Japanese investors dial up deal-making in Africa”).
Share this post.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

Houston-based renewable energy producer Catalyze secured a $200 million line of credit from Deutsche Bank to speed clean energy acquisitions and projects. (Catalyze)
UK-based Mopo raised £5 million ($6.8 million) from Norway’s development finance institution Norfund to offer its solar + battery home and business power systems in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad and other African markets. (Mopo)
Platcorp Holdings, a small business lender focused on East and Southern Africa, secured a $10 million loan from Swedfund and a guarantee from the EDFI Management Company. (EDFI)

Impact Voices: Circular Economy

Every demolition a harvest: Financing circular construction. The building industry has long followed a linear model: extract, build, demolish, landfill. The more than $1 trillion in structural steel, timber and building facades wasted globally each year represents a hidden pool of assets that could be unlocked, argues Prateek Srivastava, a structural engineer at Stantec. “A circular built environment changes this paradigm,” he writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “Instead of waste, every demolition becomes a harvest and every building becomes a future material bank.”

Circular opportunity. In New York, circular design guidelines are helping pilot deconstruction approaches that preserve material value and reduce landfill waste. Maryland-based Cambium Carbon is building reuse hubs in US cities to give a second life to urban wood while creating jobs. In Switzerland, Neustark injects captured CO2 into demolished concrete, mineralizing carbon and producing a carbon-negative aggregate. Investors, says Srivastava, can integrate embodied carbon into ESG due diligence, fund pilot projects, and build market infrastructure. “By directing capital into circular business models, investors can unlock trillions of dollars in hidden value, cut emissions at scale, and build more resilient, equitable cities.”
Read the full post.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Join ImpactAlpha at these upcoming partner events:

Sept. 18: VentureESG’s FRAME 2025, London.
Sept. 29 – Oct. 1: Neighborhood Economics, Chicago. ImpactAlpha subscribers can use the code IA495 for $200 off (expires Sept. 22nd).
Oct. 3: Swiss Impact Investment Association’s Impact Summit, Lausanne.
Oct. 7-9: GIIN Impact Forum, Berlin. ImpactAlpha subscribers are invited to use the code Berlin-IMPACTALPHA for 15% off (the code is good for first 50 signups).
Oct. 27-29: SOCAP25, San Francisco.

The NYC Commission on Gender Equity welcomes Priya Nair, previously deputy chief diversity officer of the New York state government, as executive director… Finnfund taps Otto Ahonen, previously with Deloitte, as an investment analyst… Neeraj Aggarwal, former director of Australian Impact Investments, is appointed director of Australia’s $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund Corp.

Terra Alpha Investments taps Jean Rogers, founder of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, as an advisory board member… Brookfield Asset Management seeks a sustainable management associate in New York… Also in New York, BDO is on the hunt for a sustainability data and reporting manager… Cooperative Energy Futures is looking for a national partnerships director in Minneapolis… In Nashville, UBS has an opening for an equity relationship manager for workplace wealth solutions… The William Davidson Institute is recruiting an impact investing director… JPMorgan Chase is searching for a corporate responsibility strategy associate.

The Conservation Fund seeks a California state director=… Allstate is hiring a climate investment intern in Chicago… ICA Fund is looking for an impact investing associate in Oakland, Calif… The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has an opening for a director of executive communications and media relations… Jay Lipman of Ethic, the sustainable investing platform that includes Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle as impact partners, seeks a “right hand” for climate and nature investing.