The Brief

The Brief: Five ways to share the wealth

ImpactAlpha · April 21, 2025
Credit: Mission Driven Finance

Greetings Agents of Impact!

In today’s Brief:

  • Five pages in the playbook for shared prosperity
  • Low-cost mental health tech
  • Sustainable rice farming 
  • Cybersecurity for vulnerable populations

Five promising pages in the playbook for shared prosperity. Our road trip through North Carolina this month traveled both back in history and forward on the road to renewal. In Asheville, resilience was the theme of Neighborhood Economics, the roving annual gathering of community finance practitioners that became even more salient after Hurricane Helene hammered the town. At Re:Construction NC, our daylong gathering of Agents of Impact at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, we started to assemble a “playbook for shared prosperity,” a roster of what’s working in making less wealthy people more wealthy. The goal: Share the wealth. Our event at the Kenan-Flagler Business School was co-hosted by Good Trbl, a North Carolina “coalition of investors, builders, and truth-tellers.” It’s the latest effort of Napoleon Wallace, who is building out a broad network of wealth-building strategies while living with late-stage ALS. “We’re challenging our state’s wealthiest to double down on investments that address the health, wealth, workforce and housing needs of their fellow North Carolinians,” said Wallace, the subject of “Equity and ownership,” ImpactAlpha’s award-winning documentary. “While Wall Street plays its game, we’re building a different one. A local one. A just one. We don’t need permission – we only need our convictions, our capital, and a little courage.”

  • Buying the block. Parity Homes’ Bree Jones is working to revive abandoned blocks of West Baltimore. Thriving Black neighborhoods were destroyed through urban renewal, redlining, blockbusting and a lack of capital for investment. Parity is looking to renovate the houses and sell them – cheap, – to people who share Jones’ goal of generating community wealth and creating thriving neighborhoods once more. “This model only works if you are purchasing at scale and if you’re purchasing in concentration,” Jones says. Parity sells the renovated homes to the neighborhood’s legacy residents for $280,000 – or, $100,000 less than the typical appraised value – giving the new homeowners an immediate equity boost. The playbook’s tie-back to the historical Reconstruction is intentional. At Re:Construction DC, Jones spoke of vibrant Black economies that persisted long after formal Reconstruction was over, in Tulsa, Okla.; Rosewood, Fla.; Wilmington, NC and many other places. “These neighborhoods were thriving, and Black folks were just fine,” she said. “My theory of change is that when we can restore Black folks’ connection to land… then we can potentially change the world together through collective action, through political action, through collective engagement.”
  • Promising plays. ROC USA is helping owners of manufactured homes form co-ops to buy the mobile-home parks where they live. As more such parks are rolled into chains by private equity investors, ROC USA has spun off Integrity Community Solutions to raise an equity fund to be able to move fast to purchase portfolios, own them on an interim basis, and then sell them to homeowners. “You need the capital in advance in order to belly up to the bar and negotiate on bulk or portfolio purchases,” says Paul Bradley, who is leading the spinoff. Partners in Equity is helping business owners purchase the commercial property where they operate by providing down-payment assistance on a shared-equity basis. The appreciating asset can then be leveraged for growth capital, building generational wealth. “Partners in equity is essentially that rich uncle fund for those entrepreneurs,” the firm’s Wilson Lester said at the Chapel Hill event. Zarû is enabling ownership and operation of turn-key high margin businesses. The company has the ambitious goal of building a billion dollars in Black wealth in the form of 1,000 businesses worth at least $1 million each. Mission Driven Finance has created Care Access Real Estate to lease houses and centers to child care operators with an opportunity to purchase.
  • Keep reading, “Re:Construction: Five promising pages in the playbook for shared prosperity,” by David Bank on ImpactAlpha. Contribute to the playbook.
  • Join the call. On Agents of Impact Call No. 70, we’ll showcase specific examples and start to construct an innovative agenda for moving forward – together. Wednesday, April 30, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP. 

Dealflow: Investing in Health

J&J Impact Ventures backs Mobio Interactive to expand low-cost mental healthcare. When it comes to mental healthcare, those that need it most are often least able to access it. Mobio Interactive, a Singapore-based public benefit corp., aims to address that gap by using low-cost tools to expand care. Its app enables psychiatrists and other mental health providers to screen and monitor patients remotely via smartphone cameras. Patients record 30-second selfie videos, and Mobio’s AI software analyzes changes in blood volume in the skin for signs of depression, anxiety and psychological stress. Mobio’s technology draws on more than a decade of clinical studies and more than 3.5 million datapoints from 425,000 selfie scans. “The future of mental health is data-driven,” said Mobio’s Barbara Saab. “The solution isn’t just more therapists – it’s smarter, more objective tools that scale.” J&J Impact Ventures, the impact investing fund of Johnson & Johnson Foundation, invested an undisclosed amount of capital to support the company’s geographic expansion. (Disclosure: J&J Impact Ventures sponsors ImpactAlpha’s Investing in Health coverage).

  • Global mental health. Mobio partners with hospitals, telehealth networks and insurers worldwide, including the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario’s Center for Addiction and Mental health, Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital. The company is looking to expand access to its app in places with a shortage of mental health services and professionals. It launched this year in the Indian state of Karnataka and is using an educational grant to train community health workers there on digital mental health tools. “We recognize the power of data-driven insights combined with enabling digital literacy to unlock the full potential of Mobio’s technology,” said Johnson & Johnson’s Sarah Mullane.
  • Check it out.

Eratani nabs $6.2 million to provide digital services and financing to Indonesia’s small rice farmers. The Jakarta-based company acts as a tech-enabled marketplace for small rice farmers, offering the farmers credit, insurance, agronomic support and connections to farm input providers. It also helps them sell their harvests to rice millers. Eratani says it works with about 34,000 farmers and has helped them boost their yields by up to 30% and incomes by 25%. It raised $6.2 million in a Series A round. The company is looking to help farmers adopt sustainable growing practices and precision farming tools and equipment. 

  • Market efficiency. Investors are embracing marketplace startups like Eratani that are helping boost efficiency, unlock value and reduce waste in emerging market food supply chains (see, “Investors find value in making emerging market food systems more efficient”). Clay Capital, a Singapore-based venture capital firm for food and agriculture tech, led Eratani’s Series A round. SBI Ven Capital, Genting Ventures, IIX joined the round, alongside existing investors TNB Aura and AgFunder.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • Indian financial services firm Varthana secured a loan of 750 million rupees ($8.7 million) from small business lender Oxyzo to on-lend to low-cost private schools. (Inc42)
  • Swiss startup novoMOF raised 4.4 million francs ($5.4 million) from GTT Strategic Ventures, Shift4Good and Regenerative Limited to develop highly porous materials to capture carbon from industrial processes. (ESG Today)
  • California-based Mainspring Energy, which designs and manufactures power generation solutions, raised $258 million in a Series F round from General Catalyst, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, DCVC, Temasek and other previous investors. (Mainspring)
  • Austin-based Hexium raised $9.5 million in seed funding and $2.5 million in credit to supply isotopes to nuclear fusion and fission producers. MaC Venture Capital and Refactor led the round; Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overture VC, and R7 Partners also invested. (TechCrunch)

Impact Voices: Impact Tech

Cybersecurity for vulnerable populations: an overlooked opportunity for impact. Cybersecurity has not historically been a focus for the impact investing community. That’s perhaps because the cybersecurity industry tends to focus on large organizations – corporations and government bodies – that make headlines when there are major breaches. But most cybercrime affects individuals, small businesses and community groups with fewer resources. That raises important questions for impact investors, write SJF Ventures’ Elizabeth Roberts and Dan Geballe in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “Can cybersecurity startups be a vehicle for social progress? Should impact investors begin investing in security companies? If so, in what circumstances does a cybersecurity company merit impact funding, and when does it not?”

  • Cyber inequity. “The disparities we see in our physical lives are echoed in our digital ones,” write Roberts and Geballe. “Cyber inequality is driven by resource limitations, skills gaps, regulatory blind spots, and lack of prioritization.” Women are more likely to report feeling unsafe online than men. Immigrants, people of color, the elderly, veterans and people recovering from natural disasters are disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals. Organizations that provide core public services are also more vulnerable. In Maryland, cybercriminals stole Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits from thousands of adults and families in 2022 and 2023. In Arizona, a ransomware attack shut down the Tucson Unified School District for two weeks in 2023.
  • Gauging impact. Cybersecurity startups have an opportunity to address these issues and support vulnerable populations and institutions. Solutions that promote online safety, security hygiene and digital literacy, as well as vertical-specific companies that target industries like healthcare and education, could make worthy impact investments. “Investors should maintain a high bar for the intentionality of investments,” write Roberts and Geballe, but they shouldn’t shy away from opportunities that could support their impact missions. “As the gap in digital literacy and resilience widens, we should see impact investors roll up their sleeves and begin to step in.”
  • Keep reading, “Cybersecurity for vulnerable populations: an overlooked opportunity for impact,” by SJF Ventures’ Elizabeth Roberts and Dan Geballe on ImpactAlpha.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Don’t miss these upcoming ImpactAlpha partner events:

NESsT appoints Chad Sachs as CEO, replacing Kristen Dueck, who is stepping down. Sachs will be the social enterprise investor’s third CEO since co-founder Nicole Etchart stepped down in November 2023… Allivate Impact Capital welcomes Duke University’s Suman Murthy as an MBA impact investing associate… Lendable promotes Noemie Rosala Rivera to director of capital solutions… TPG Rise Climate taps Juan Diego Vargas from EQT Infrastructure as partner. 

The Canada Forum for Impact Investment and Development has an opening for a director… Blue Forest is on the hunt for a conversation finance director in Sacramento, Calif… The Canadian Tax Observatory seeks a founding CEO in Toronto… Oikocredit is recruiting an investment officer in El Salvador… Innpact is looking for an impact officer in Luxembourg… One Acre Fund is hiring a senior associate of environmental and social impact in Uganda. 

MetLife Foundation is accepting applications for its 2025 Community Impact Grant Program, which will award up to $200,000 to nonprofits working to improve food security, mental wellbeing, environmental sustainability and vibrant communities globally… The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is hosting a virtual summit on barriers and breakthroughs in Black mental health, Thursday, April 24.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– April 21, 2025