REACHING FARTHER: UNITUS NEW VENTURES

The same entrepreneurial spirit that fueled tech startups Classmates.com and Jobster.com—and drove product development and investment strategies at companies like Microsoft, Price Waterhouse, and Apple—has found a new home: Unitus New Ventures.

Unitus New Ventures was formed to spark innovation in products and services that go beyond microfinance in creating opportunity for the world’s poor. Led by a global team of veterans from business development, technology, and microfinance fields, Unitus New Ventures is now scouting early-stage enterprises throughout India and Sub-Saharan Africa that offer scalable, replicable, income-generating opportunities for populations at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

“We launched Unitus New Ventures because we recognize the need to empower the poor to continually move up the economic ladder,” said Derek Streat, Vice President, Unitus New Ventures. “Microcredit, while often quite successful, is just one solution to increasing the poor’s income-generation potential.”

By leveraging Unitus’s existing business relationships, field expertise, and experience at rapidly scaling social enterprises, the Unitus New Ventures team is developing strategies to:

• Work with corporate partners to launch products that help the poor gain financial stability: Promoting health and life insurance products as well as savings instruments for the working poor helps mitigate risk and improve stability.
• Aggregate production and distribution networks: Supporting entrepreneurial models that aggregate producers of goods—such as agricultural products and handicrafts—allows the working poor to benefit from bulk orders and better pricing. The team is also exploring microfranchise models that enable improved distribution and pricing in hard-to-reach areas.
• Support businesses that create vocational training and skills development: Scaling the most promising employment training and placement programs will promote higher wages and income security.
• Incubate entrepreneurs with innovative business plans: The New Ventures team is introducing the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence program to support early-stage entrepreneurs in developing new business plans focused on poverty alleviation.
• Provide catalytic “mesofinance” investment capital: While microfinance loans are appropriate for sole proprietorships, Unitus New Ventures is seeking to promote lending models that offer larger loan amounts and support small enterprises that generate local employment.
  

“We’ll know we’ve been successful when we’ve uncovered the next microfinance—a new, scalable model for economic empowerment—that leads to even greater and deeper levels of income generation for millions of the world’s working poor,” said Streat.