Same purpose, new shareholders 🌎
Tags: Impact Investing, Ethical Banking, Sustainability, Green Finance, Startup

For a startup, fundraising is one of the hardest jobs. Even more so when you’re a purpose-driven company (by the way, in case you haven’t heard we are now a certified B-corporation).

There is the business plan, the timing, the valuation, all the terms and clauses to discuss, the amounts, the pitch deck, the term sheet, the hundreds of different possible investors and investor wannabes, the dozens of meetings, the cap table, and, more importantly, the vision and purpose.

Along the way, the options are narrowed down in a sort of “fit vs not-fit” succession of introductions and meetings (this works both ways). And, if you’re lucky enough there’s a match.

The challenge is twice as hard for impact-driven companies because there is smaller availability of investors who are willing to place impact ahead of profit or, at least, side-by-side 😉.

Why Mustard Seed Maze and Critical are right for us.

First of all, we’ve known each other for long and have had several interactions (and even projects together) before the investment happened.

Secondly, because we have a common vision of a more democratic, sustainable, and humane economy and society. Maze even has it in its statutes and Critical lives by being a “citizen company”.

And of course, the potential and synergies to make change happen: the impact and startup experience, network and investment capacity of MSM joined by the entrepreneurial spirit, technological knowledge, and international presence of Critical Software. It hardly gets any better than this.

Maze Mustard Seed: a marriage bound to happen 🔐

Shortly after we started GoParity, we were accelerated by an “Impact Generator” program in Lisbon. It was Maze before it even existed. That program was run by some of the very talented and committed people that are today behind Maze-X (what the accelerator is called now) and Maze Mustard Seed (the impact investing fund), like António, Cristina, Rita, and Luís (and many others). From that moment on it seemed to be a “marriage” meant to happen.

We’ve had our ups and downs but we never doubted the human quality of the people on the other side of the table. They say all the trouble should happen and be dealt with early in a relationship. They might be right: when everything seems perfect from the beginning you might be missing out on something.

We never lost contact, we even supported future editions of Maze-X, and we ended up, as you now know, confirming what was bound to happen.

Critical Software: the company that always steps up 🙋

I only knew Critical as one of the most successful IT companies in Portugal, when, in October 2019, João Carreira messaged me on Linkedin because he was “interested in the things I did”.

We grabbed a coffee in downtown Lisbon and suddenly were talking about a possible investment in GoParity and Critical contracting green electricity from Coopérnico (the renewable energies cooperative I started with 15 other people in 2013).

A few months later, Coronavirus struck. At GoParity, we co-founded the Tech4Covid19 movement in Portugal with 25 other startups (It ended up becoming a giant with +6000 volunteers) and we launched the first fundraiser to purchase individual protection equipment for the hospital staff. Critical Software was the first company to step up beautifully: they challenged their circa 1000 employees to invest and committed to tripling the funds gathered by them. In total 30k€ were donated.

Less than two years after that coffee in Rua de São Nicolau, both things happened: Critical Software now powers its offices with green electricity provided by Coopérnico and joined GoParity as a shareholder.

In our purpose, nothing changes. But we’ll be faster, more powerful, and wiser.

As of now, our mission is inscribed in our Articles of Association:

The impact mission of the company shall be to provide access to funding and investment opportunities in sustainable development projects, whilst democratizing access to impact investment by individuals and companies.

Article 4, paragraph 2

We have set very ambitious objectives together and they are fully in line with the promise we’ve made early this year: we’ll make impact finance an even bigger part of your daily life, triple our investments and impact until 2023, and, very importantly, leave no one behind (individuals or organizations).

I hope you are as happy with this news as we are and I can only promise that I’ll keep coming back to you to report on our achievements and struggles, whilst I am very positive that the best really is yet to come.