Editor’s Note, May 2: This article was updated to reflect the number of portfolio managers working at the Shell Foundation.
Last year, Envirofit — a social enterprise that develops low-cost clean cookstoves — hit a startup jackpot when it announced it had secured $4 million in financing to scale up its operations. Around the same time, another company with a mission to provide solar energy to the poor — d.light — announced it had raised more than $22 million in investment.
Both these social enterprises might have died years earlier were it not for the continued backing of a special kind of funder willing to invest in regions and sectors where traditional donors and even impact investors are often still too risk averse to tread.