About Mercy Corps Ventures

Our Manifesto

Backing Bold Builders of a Resilient Future

Around the world, visionary entrepreneurs are launching bold solutions to the defining challenges of our time: climate volatility, financial exclusion, and the fragility of food systems, supply chains, and vital natural ecosystems. These founders aren’t just innovating; they’re rewriting the rules for how underserved communities adapt, survive, and thrive.

Yet, too often, the ventures with the greatest potential to drive change are the most undercapitalized.

At Mercy Corps Ventures, we exist to change that.

We invest early, and we stay close, supporting founders with catalytic capital, deep market insight, and the tools to validate, scale, and lead. 

For founders, we’re more than investors, we’re long-term partners in growth, navigating complexity with you, unlocking resources, and helping scale your impact.

For LPs and partners, we offer a front-row seat to the next generation of climate and financial resilience solutions. Our portfolio is designed for scale and substance — targeting systemic change and outsized, measurable impact in the markets where it matters most.

This is smart capital, placed with purpose.

This is resilience, scaled through founders’ grit and tenacity.

This is how we shape the next decade — together.

Our Story

Our journey thus far

Founded in 2015 by a group of seasoned founders, operators and investors, Mercy Corps Ventures is now a leading early-stage climate resilience investor. Embedded in key ecosystems across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our team has had the privilege and honor to partner with some of the most compelling founders making a real impact today. 

To confront a challenge as complex as the climate crisis, we need a different kind of model — one with a truly global footprint, a broad toolkit, and the ability to source climate solutions from the ground up in frontier markets and scale them across borders. We embrace this complexity as a design principle for Mercy Corps Ventures: we are a family of funds that backs bold founders with the capital, support & pathways needed to scale. Our thesis guides each of our vehicles across the capital spectrum, enabling us to build a constellation of investments and pilots that collectively address key levers for climate adaptation and make a major impact.

We remain committed to the statement scrawled on a napkin from an Indian restaurant in Jinja back in 2015: let’s build the fund we wished existed when we were raising for our own ventures. We’ve made some great strides over the years, but the work is far from done. More importantly, as demonstrated by the founders we have the privilege to meet daily, the evolving opportunity set is still richly compelling. 


Onward. 

What makes us unique

  • Our team leverages Mercy Corps’ seasoned experts across climate, finance, agriculture, and frontier markets to conduct rigorous due diligence — ensuring investments are both commercially sound and contextually grounded.

  • Mercy Corps’ global operational footprint with presence in 40+ countries enables startups to enter frontier markets faster, test solutions with real communities, and build trust where it matters most.

  • We unlock high-value partnerships — across governments, NGOs, and corporates — to help ventures scale distribution, navigate policy, and deepen their impact.

  • Our ventures combine measurable, systems-level impact with scalable business models — driving meaningful outcomes and long-term, sustainable value creation.

  • Our team is locally embedded and globally connected — sourcing over 2000 deals per year.

  • Through our technical assistance facility, we provide tailored support and strategic partnerships to de-risk and scale up our portfolio companies. 80% of our companies raise follow-on capital, when less than half of companies in the US and Europe are able to survive and raise follow on capital.

Our Thesis

Investing in a resilient future

Globally, we’re undergoing dramatic advancements in tech and increasingly severe disruption. At this inflection point, we see the opportunity to scale companies creating a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient world.

Utilizing the capabilities of each of our funds, we focus on three areas as part of our Resilient Future Thesis:

Adaptive Agriculture & Food Systems

The speed and efficiency of food system innovation must rapidly increase to meet global demand. We invest in the tech and models reinventing agriculture to spur the next green revolution.

Inclusive Climate Fintech

The current financial system is not designed to serve the needs of 1.4 billion people who are currently unbanked. We invest in inclusive frontier fintech startups that enable people to be more productive and resilient.

Climate-Smart Technologies

Existing systems and tech infrastructure across natural resources, land use, and supply chains are fragile and extractive. We invest in startups reshaping supply chains and developing nature-based solutions.

Taking bold risks that fuel innovation

We lead with impact and back bold ideas, investing early in frontier technologies with the potential to transform climate and financial resilience for underserved populations.

We are willing to take risks others won’t — on new business models, technologies, and markets — because we believe in innovation’s power to unlock both impact and returns.