With new developments, a growing team and countless, inspiring, interactions with many amazing impact driven entrepreneurs, we can really say a lot of great things happened this year. We can’t wait for 2020 and all exciting things ahead. But first, let’s reflect a bit on what happened the past 12 months.

For the SEIF Awards, 2019 marked a new strategic focus on Tech for Impact. The applications exceeded our expectations both in quality and quantity. Meet the winners and all amazing finalists of the 2019 Awards here. And don’t miss the opportunity to apply for the Tech for Impact Awards 2020 in January.

New technologies and innovative applications of tech solutions have a great potential to solve some of our most pressing global challenges, in addition, such solutions often also have the scalability needed to achieve large scale impact. If you are interested to know more about why we need Tech for Impact, our founder Mariana recently published an article about that on LinkedIn. MSCI’s acquisition of Carbon Delta and Planted closing a successful seed round of CHF 7 million this year further underlines the relevance of this focus.

Over the year, we received very positive feedback on the Impact Academy, with close to 70% of the responding participants saying that they will stay in touch with their coach / coachee in the future. The goal of the Impact Academy is to make startups impact investment ready through targeted coaching, expert input sessions and a supplementing online library. In this context, the connection to our Impact Investors Circle (IIC) was highly appreciated by both startups and investors. 

We are proud to be the only organization in Switzerland to run trainings for social entrepreneurs on behalf of Innosuisse, both for Business Creation and Business Growth, in collaboration with Startup Campus and EPFL. The 5-day intensive trainings are practice-oriented, interactive and collaborative with highly skilled experts and practitioners as trainers.

All in all, we screened 800 impact business cases, had close to 250 impact startups in our programs and received over 300 applications for the SEIF Tech for Impact Awards this year. You could see or hear us in more than 20 speeches, panels, workshops and webinars. We were part of several interesting jury’s, both Swiss and international. Our white paper on Small Sized Impact Investing Funds was published, and we developed several new projects to support impact driven tech entrepreneurs to grow and scale their impact. We can’t wait to share more about that with you soon. 

But, before we move on to 2020, we would like to thank our partners, network and all impact entrepreneurs that have applied to, or been part of our programs this year. Let’s continue to work together to create a better and more sustainable world for all!


Are you interested in partnering with us for 2020 to support impact driven entrepreneurs and create positive impact? Get in touch with Aimée to discuss how we can work together. 

Would you like to share your biggest achievements, learnings our challenges with us? Let us know more about it here.