Vancouver-based Spring Activator today announced its first Impact Investor Challenge, an investor training program that will invest $100,000 in 10 new impact investors.
The Impact Challenge aims to remove the barrier between entrepreneurs and investors.
The Challenge is a 10-week long program starting at the beginning of April. It is designed to walk aspiring early-stage impact investors through the process of how to find and vet opportunities, assess teams, conduct due diligence, negotiations and closing, and understand exits and returns. Spring is launching the new challenge in partnership with Active Impact Investments, Vancity, and Ink LLP.
At the end of the program, investors will award $100,000 in investment (provided by Spring) between five companies that they have learned to screen throughout the program.
“Here at Spring, as we’ve supported both investors and entrepreneurs, one challenge we’ve found consistently is the amount of early-stage impact investment available at that critical time for great world-changing businesses,” said Keith Ippel, founder CEO of Spring. “We see an opportunity to empower people to be trained and supported to make their first early-stage impact investment well, and create a community in the process.”
Related: Startup Canada Podcast Ep.126: The Purpose Generation with Spring Activator’s Keith Ippel
Spring focuses on fostering startups with social impact, by supporting entrepreneurs, investors, incubators, accelerators, and funders in over 30 cities around the world. It has trained more than 700 entrepreneurs to date.
Spring’s Investment Readiness Training has helped early-stage companies raise over $18 million in funding in the last four years. Spring has worked with companies in food, agriculture, healthcare, sustainable energy, e-commerce, helping for-profit, and non-profits, as well as early to growth stage businesses.
In 2016, Spring announced a partnership with digital media and technology school RED Academy to create a skills and innovation hub. It has also partnered with Seattle-based Fledge accelerator to co-launch FledgeX, a virtual accelerator for impact-focused companies around the world.
Applications for the Impact Investor Challenge are open and can be found here.
Image courtesy Spring Activator.