Investing with Impact Without Sacrificing Performance

Impact investing has grown up.

Originally associated with environmental and sustainability causes, the concept is now expanding to include diversity issues, social impact, healthcare and food access and more. Today, it’s about investing in companies that generate meaningful, beneficial impacts on society and positive financial returns.

At iSelect, we believe that these two goals – impact and performance — are not mutually exclusive. While our investments in the private markets are making a difference, supporting emerging companies solving critical global issues in healthcare, agriculture, and more, we’re doing so without overlooking performance. This is all possible because iSelect is a research-driven organization dedicated to deep diligence and careful execution. Every investment we make is fully vetted by one of the best investment teams in venture, leveraging the experience of 175+ subject matter expert advisors and based on more than 120 hours of diligence research on the more than 1,200 companies we consider every year.

Yes, iSelect is focused on creating a future without hunger and promoting good health and well-being worldwide, but not without a focus on positive financial returns along the way.

Consider a sample of our 50+ portfolio companies and the impacts each of them are making on their markets and the world.

	Benson Hill is working to develop sustainable, nutrient-dense crops to help feed the world. The company’s crop design platform is tapping the natural genetic diversity of today’s food crops, resulting in healthier, more sustainable, higher-yielding food choices. Benson Hill’s plant breeding, transgenics, and genome editing programs can develop better seeds for planting in half the time and cost of conventional methods.
	Geltor is creating animal-free alternative proteins. Today, most collagen proteins used in beauty and cosmetic products come from animal sources. But Geltor is working to change that, designing sustainable, animal-free proteins using its proprietary, cheaper, and more scalable fermentation processes than traditional techniques.
	Bonumose is developing healthy, natural sugars. Sweeteners don’t have to be bad for you. Bonumose commercializes low-glycemic index, low-calorie, healthy natural sugars through its proprietary, cost-effective enzymatic process. This could someday supplant traditional sugar consumption, which is linked to diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
	Vestaron is replacing chemical pesticides with biologicals. Unlike many synthetic chemicals used for insecticidal crop protection, Vestaron’s peptides are safe for humans and mammals, birds, fish, pollinators, and the environment. At the same time, these natural alternatives have proven as effective against crop-specific pests as traditional synthetic chemicals are.
	Cofactor Genomics is accelerating drug discovery to improve personalized medicine. By focusing on RNA, Cofactor’s patented precision medicine technology profiles a patient’s cancer tumors to identify which immune cells are present and how they interact in the body. This multidimensional approach is proving to be faster and more accurate than the industry’s single biomarker standard, delivering on the promise of personalized medicine.
	SciBac is on the front lines in the fight against antibiotic resistance. The world’s bacteria are winning the fight against many common antibiotics, putting all of us at risk. SciBac’s technology is developing live biotherapeutics to treat and prevent antibiotic-resistant disease while fortifying the human microbiome against future outbreaks.
	Molecular Assemblies is creating a new way to write DNA. The company’s enzymatic DNA synthesis platform technology is being used to develop new products in synthetic biology, personalized therapeutics, precision diagnostics, data storage, nanotechnology, and more. Molecular Assemblies is impacting two markets: Addressing the need for DNA in life sciences, and the emerging and potentially massive market for data storage.
	Holobiome is tapping the gut for new treatments for nervous system disorders. According to the company’s research, there are bacteria in our guts that are capable of modulating host neurotransmitters and can be used to treat everything from insomnia, to depression and more. It’s all based on the emerging field of medical research focused on the gut-brain axis and the potential market is huge.

Every one of these companies, and much of the iSelect portfolio, would qualify as an impact investment. But that doesn’t mean we’re ignoring financial returns.

As mentioned, every investment that iSelect makes is subjected to 120+ hours of due diligence research, fully analyzed by our expert network of selection committee members and subject to ongoing oversight after investment.

We do this not because we want to limit our reach but to ensure we’re supporting companies best positioned to make a real difference.

That’s what investing with impact means to iSelect.

Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.