As Rianta Capital Zurich’s Artha Initiative is a project that has evolved from a family office, a main concern is adherence to the impact priorities and vision of the family they serve.
DIMENSIONS
Rianta Capital advises the Singh Family Trust and their associated entities in investments in companies that are scalable, create livelihoods and increase per capita incomes.
Impact is at the core of their investment rationale. These interventions occur through a program called the Artha Initiative, and all investments today are systematically made in syndication with other funding partners who share their values and their approach to patient capital over extended time frames. Artha does spend time calculating the attribution of relative outputs to their intervention per se, but they are conscious of their catalytic role as an early growth stage supporter of high impact enterprises. They do aggregate impact data from among their portfolio companies for reporting purposes.
FRAMEWORKS
Artha has reviewed and drawn ideas about impact reporting from IRIS and other funds like Bridges Ventures Impact Radar; they have developed their own framework upon review of a range of methodologies. This framework benchmarks a number of priority areas in a scorecard format that adheres to the objectives of the family.
IMPLEMENTATION
In more recent investments, Artha include some impact assessment reporting criteria in term sheets, but in earlier investments did not integrate these elements in a systematic fashion. Frequently, they interact with their older investee pool through use of a survey instrument to establish progress against impact baselines. Artha tend to collect such data bi-annually/quarterly.
PRESENTATION
Rianta Capital’s Artha Initiative uses snapshots and aggregated scorecards to present their portfolio performance for internal purposes only.
In 2016, they are also exploring the use of fieldreporter.nl – a mobile app to make impact narratives and data capture more visually engaging.