Impact investing, exploratory analysis of the link between funds and financed companies.

This research investigates relations between investments funds and funded companies in the impact investing sector. The aim is to offer a first sight of the bond between funds and funded companies, to capture the characteristics that lead more capital and the correspondence between funds and companies characteristics. The research is firstly based on a conspicuous literature review that explores several perspectives on the impact investing phenomenon and gave us guidelines to analyse social enterprises and funds. We conduct quantitative analysis for both, using a unique dataset made by matching by fund name ImpactBase database and Thomson One Banker database; The first database houses the profiles of over 425 investment funds and products and reflects activities, returns and metrics of the impact investing funds currently on ImpactBase. The second, instead, contains financial data on public companies, as well as mergers and acquisition information and market data. Stratifying with subsequent steps the dataset, we obtained a cluster of funds diversified by the number of investments, target return, target geography and headquarter location, that granted us to offer a global landscape. The cluster includes 10 funds that invested in 127 companies. We conducted a quantitative analysis of both funds and funded companies. Then, for the latter, we conducted also a qualitative analysis using public information. We classify each of the 127 companies basing on their characteristics: mission and vision, target population, level of integration between social and economic returns and the technology used are the features that helped us to capture all the nuances in the social spectrum of these social enterprises.