LendForGood
Melbourne Australia
2018
About LendForGood
LendForGood is a global impact loan syndication platform mobilising millions in impact finance to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We provide entrepreneur support organisations, incubators, accelerators, early stage investor networks and other syndicate leads with a loan syndication and campaign engine and marketplace. LendForGood enables these syndicate leads to connect the impact debt needs of their portfolio enterprises with its growing community of individuals and organisations who want to lend their support to courageous impact entrepreneurs, as well as engage their own community and that of their borrowers. To date, through its proof of concept phase, LendForGood has mobilised >AU$2.5M through 36 impact loans to 23 enterprises across Africa, Asia and Australia. We have 16 signed up syndicate leads and a lending community of almost 150 individuals and organisations. Our ambition is to mobilise US$1B of impact lending per annum for 1000s of impact enterprises currently trapped by the missing middle in impact finance. LendForGood will serve 100s of syndicate leads worldwide and grow its lending community to 25,000+. LendForGood was founded in Australia in 2018 by entrepreneur support organisation and impact crowdfunding pioneer, StartSomeGood, and impact finance innovation agency and entrepreneur support organisation, Red Hat Impact. In creating LendForGood, we recognised that the existence of the missing middle in impact finance - a multi-trillion dollar annual problem - is in large part due to the current setup of the financial and investment system, which also underpins most impact investing. In response, our approach is to: - make investing in impact possible for those who care about impact (not only those who care about investing). The largest untapped impact investment fund is all of us. Individuals and organisations who want to make the world better. Most of us are excluded from current approaches, including the opportunity for wealth creation through investment. It seems bizarre to us that the solutions to our community and global challenges rely on enabling those with wealth to make more money. - harnessing and elevating the amazing and powerful work that impact focused entrepreneur support organisations, accelerators, incubators and early stage investors/investor networks (our syndicate leads) do in support of courageous impact enterprises. This is due diligence in action and is typically lost in investment processes and considerations - enabling syndicate leads to become "fund managers" without the hundreds of thousands of dollars of upfront costs and lengthy lead time, by building out their portfolio of enterprises on our platform (this can support many emerging fund managers to get started and introduce much needed diversity into the impact fund management world) - figure out how to utilise DeFi and web3 tools that can not only facilitate scale and global payment and contracting processes, but support different ownership and governance possibilities across our community We believe this is a powerful tool in support of Main Street over Wall Street.
