To date, this brings the $200 million Impact Fund’s total number of investments to 23 companies—more than half of which are founded by women and/or minorities.
Citi Impact Fund
Through our $200 million Impact Investment Fund we are using our own capital to make equity investments in "double bottom line" U.S.-based private sector companies that are applying innovative solutions to help address some of society's most pressing challenges.
Investments, which could be as high as $10 million, will primarily be made in companies that have demonstrated proof of concept, built an existing customer base, secured prior rounds of funding and exhibited the potential for scale in multiple markets. A portion of the fund is designated for earlier stage seed investments. We are actively seeking opportunities to invest in businesses that are led or owned by women and minority entrepreneurs to help combat the gender and ethnic gap that exists in the startup world. As part of this commitment, early stage seed investments are allocated to businesses that are led or owned by women and minorities.
The Impact Investing Fund team leads our Black Entrepreneurs Investment Initiative, a $50 million capital commitment from Citi to reduce the wealth gap by creating equitable access to venture capital funding for Black founders. The initiative was announced in September 2020 as a part of Citi’s $1 billion Action for Racial Equity Initiative. In the six months following, Citi made six early-stage equity investments in tech-enabled ventures led by Black founders.
Citi’s team of investors seek out tech-enabled startups with defensible moats and validated markets in high growth sectors. We primarily, but not exclusively, invest in four verticals: Workforce Development, Sustainability, Financial Inclusion, and Infrastructure. The team typically coinvests alongside other investors in the venture capital ecosystem, making equity capital commitments ranging from $250,000 to $10 million across the Seed to Growth stage.
Focus Areas
We are looking for companies with solutions that focus on:
WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
- Enable continuous learning for lifelong career development
- Connect people to meaningful job opportunities and/or entrepreneurial support
- Build professional networks
- Promote workforce diversity, equity and inclusion
- Provide career pathways for upward economic mobility
PHYSICAL & SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Housing- Help solve the global housing crisis
- Reduce cost and time for housing construction
- Help reduce traffic and pollution
- Reimagine the future of cities
- Improve quality of healthcare delivery
- Reduce healthcare costs for underserved and vulnerable populations
FINANCIAL INCLUSION
- Increase an individual's financial capability to improve their economic mobility
- Enhance financial infrastructures, business models, and financial products to better serve low-to-middle income communities
- Democratize access to financial services by decreasing costs and removing distribution barriers
SUSTAINABILITY
- Encourage efficiency through the use of fewer resources such as energy and water
- Promote clean and safe energy sources
- Develop products that can be recycled and reused
- Advance environmental justice
- Bolster adaptability and resilience
- Further Citi's Sustainable Progress Strategy
Our Current Portfolio
We will continue to update this page as we invest in additional companies through the Citi Impact Fund.
Clerkie is a Black-founded AI company based in San Francisco. Their proprietary financial automation platform streamlines the relationship between creditors and their consumers, and it is purpose-built to help over 100 million Americans ease their debt burden. After years of product testing and validation, Clerkie has helped thousands of borrowers get out of debt and build credit by negotiating up to 70% off users’ debt. It has quickly grown to become a go-to tool for creditors to manage their loan losses and the financial platform combines expert financial advice with one-click automation that makes it easy for users to take action.
Daylight is New York, N.Y.-based company and the first and only digital banking platform in the U.S. specifically designed for the LGBT+ community by the LGBT+ community. Led by LGBT+ entrepreneurs and co-founders Rob Curtis (CEO), Billie Simmons (COO) and Paul Barnes Hoggett (CTO), Daylight offers a holistic set of financial products, tools and advice to help the LGBT+ community simplify banking. Daylight's flagship products and services have been designed to improve financial equality and inclusion for the estimated 30-million-plus Americans who identify as LGBT+, a large, untapped market.
Flume Internet is a minority-founded internet service provider that enables high-speed low-cost internet access by leasing unused networks from cities and utilities. Based in New York, N.Y., Flume builds and installs optical edge technology designed to access these unused fiber assets in order to provide home broadband options for urban and suburban communities at low to no cost. Flume provides broadband access to customers along with premium WiFi management via tiered subscription options ranging from $35 - $50.The company will be expanding service to other cities on the East Coast in 2022 and strives to accelerate fiber to the home deployments all across the U.S..
Fulcrum BioEnergy converts municipal solid waste into low-carbon, renewable transportation fuels, including jet fuel and diesel, via waste processing and refining facilities. The company is diverting large volumes of waste from local landfills, many of which are overtaxed or at capacity, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 100 percent. Fulcrum’s products are certified as “below zero carbon” by the California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) given both avoided landfill methane and low carbon transportation fuel profile.
Greenwood is a Black-founded, tech-enabled, financial banking platform built for African Americans, Latinos and allies of the culture. Historically, these communities are denied access to credit and other financial services at much higher rates than white customers. Greenwood's mission is to bridge access and wealth gaps via initiatives and solutions that promote financial inclusion and wellness for all, inspired by the community and culture of Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District. Along with partner banks, Greenwood is developing a suite of financial products that support sustainable entrepreneurship, empower wealth creation, and promote financial literacy.
ICON is an Austin-based company developing technologies that advance humanity. Using proprietary 3D printing robotics, software and advanced materials, ICON is shifting the paradigm of homebuilding on Earth and beyond. The company recently received Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Award for building a 3D printer that has 3D printed resilient, dignified homes in Mexico and the U.S.
Jetty is a New York, N.Y.-based financial services company on a mission to make renting a home more affordable and flexible for everyone in a way that benefits both property owners and renters. Using a deposit replacement product (Jetty Deposit) as well as a flexible rent payment product (Jetty Rent) property managers can increase lease conversion, reduce bad debt, and streamline operations. For the renter, Jetty products lower the barriers to renting, saving residents thousands of dollars and providing them with flexible rental payment structures.
KETOS addresses a number of the world’s water challenges with the goal of preserving this quintessential resource for years to come. The company delivers a vertically integrated platform—an intersection of robotics, data science and IoT for the world of water. This enables operators to proactively solve mission-critical efficiency and quality challenges in real-time and ensure that water used in municipal, agriculture and industrial applications meet specific compliance and sustainability standards. Founded in 2015, KETOS works tirelessly to transform the water industry with the goal of making water safe, consistent and sustainable for today and for future generations.
Lacuna Technologies is a software company based in Palo Alto, Calif, and it builds and manages open-sourced digital tools that allow cities and municipalities to create, communicate, and enforce dynamic transportation policies. Streets are packed with new forms of mobility – delivery services, rideshare vehicles, and even drones. Lacuna's solutions, built on open-source technology, give cities a full and reliable picture of how their roads and airways are changing so that they can create evidence-based policies to address congestion, pollution, access and safety issues, and more. Lacuna paves the way for commercial operators to integrate their modern technologies into cities equitably in a way that works for everyone long-term.
MedHaul, a Black and female-founded company based in Memphis, operates an end-to-end platform that helps healthcare providers (e.g., hospitals, physician groups) find and book safe, skilled and personalized non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for people with special needs. Every year, nearly 4 million Americans with chronic conditions miss their medical appointments due to transportation issues. Particularly for low-income and/or older patients with diabetes, asthma and arthritis, this can mean the difference between managing chronic conditions at home and ending up in the emergency room. The cost of missed appointments and ambulance abuse costs the healthcare system about $200 billion per year. MedHaul provides a cloud-based, mobile-optimized marketplace that automates the transit management process and links healthcare providers with specialized transportation services.
MoCaFi is a Black-owned fintech offering mobile banking, credit building and wealth empowerment tools to underserved communities. Our innovative banking platform addresses communities challenged by limited economic mobility and financial equity. Throughout the pandemic, MoCaFi has assisted individuals, families and businesses in need through partnerships with organizations and cities providing direct services. MoCaFi’s technology solutions target financially underserved consumers in the U.S. who spend billions of dollars in fees and interest on alternative financial services. MoCaFi’s financial products save users time, stress and unnecessary transaction fees while delivering essential banking services at a low cost.
The Mom Project is a female-founded and -led job marketplace based in Chicago that connects women to companies that are committed to designing and supporting a better workplace. For women using the platform, The Mom Project provides job opportunities and a community with guidance and insights into various aspects of integrating motherhood and work. For companies, The Mom Project not only provides access to an experienced talent pool of more than 300,000 women, but helps build the infrastructure needed to recruit, retain, and promote women. This includes an analytics platform called WerkLabs that evaluates flexible/remote work arrangements and provides resources on best-in-class practices, policies, and processes for supporting women in the workplace.
Moving Analytics is a telehealth company that has helped thousands of patients across multiple states access life-saving cardiac rehab after they have experienced a heart attack or cardiovascular complication. The company eliminates common barriers to access like need to travel, high co-pays and long waiting lists by offering care to patients through an innovative, app-based, virtual program. The program, built in conjunction with Stanford and validated over multiple clinical trials, combines behavior science, remote monitoring and personalized coaching. Moving Analytics helps patients avoid worsened health outcomes while significantly reducing readmissions rates and 300%+ improvements in cardiac rehab completion rates. The company has partnerships with Kaiser Permanente in California, CDPHP in New York, Highmark Health Plan, Allegheny Health Network and the Veteran Affairs Medical Center with plans to expand to more states in 2021.
OhmConnect is an Oakland-based energy demand response company that enables hundreds of thousands of customers to reimagine how they use energy, to choose clean energy over dirty energy when required, and to be rewarded for timely, smarter, home energy use. OhmConnect pays its users—California residents—to reduce their energy consumption during peak times when the grid is at risk of using dirty power. They sell those aggregated energy savings in the energy market and then pass a portion of those earnings back to their users.
PadSplit, headquartered in Atlanta, is a mission-driven marketplace that provides lower income workers with safe, clean and affordable housing. Founded by an affordable housing advocate, PadSplit incentivizes more affordable housing creation by monetizing underutilized rooms in single-family homes and increasing profitability for property owners, without requiring public subsidies. Each PadSplit home includes furniture, utilities, wifi, laundry, 24/7 access to telemedicine and credit reporting with its weekly rent payment. By having a lower rent burden, PadSplit residents are able to save more of their income and work toward financial independence.
Pathstream is a female-founded company, which supports working adults to transition into high-demand digital skill careers by providing best-in-class online education and job placement. Headquartered in San Francisco, Pathstream builds programs in fields such as data analytics and project management in direct partnership with industry-defining work-tech companies. Pathstream's programs have been increasingly used by Fortune 100 employers as a competitive advantage to recruit, retain, and upskill their frontline workforce.
Perch is a Black-founded Los Angeles-based company designed to empower unbanked and underbanked young adults with tools to properly manage their credit. Perch has designed a platform that helps young adults learn sustainable credit habits and build credit without having to go into debt or increase expenses. Using the Perch platform, users are able to report recurring monthly payments (such as rent payments and subscription services) to U.S. credit bureaus and begin to build a credit profile.
Recycle Track Systems (RTS) is an environmentally-focused, technology-enabled provider of waste and recycle management services for commercial, public and private entities. Founded in New York City, RTS uses a software platform and proprietary tracking system, leveraging a network of partner haulers, to track materials as they travel to recycling or composting facilities and provides companies with reports that show how much material was diverted from landfill, recycled, and composted. RTS’ objective is to treat waste like a commodity and keep that material in the virtuous cycle from waste generation to its final destinations, contributing to the circular economy.
Shift.org, Inc. (“Shift”) is a San Francisco-based and veteran-led career advancement company where current and former members of the U.S. military discover careers, acquire and demonstrate new skills, and embark upon new job experiences at the best companies in the world. Shift’s talent-acquisition services provide corporate partners with a talent pipeline of diverse, non-traditional, experienced and prepared candidates.
StackShare is a minority-founded and San Francisco, Calif.-based enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides tech stack collaboration for developers. StackShare has a community of more than one million developers and over 40,000 companies that have shared the tech stacks they use. StackShare utilizes a freemium model, offering developers free access to the platform as well as an enterprise subscription tier for companies, which helps companies automatically map out, document, and discuss all the tech stacks being used across their internal engineering teams through deep Git integration. It gives companies real-time visibility into their tech stack inventory, tech data for engineering planning & coordination, and tooling to drive internal collaboration – enabling engineering teams to save hundreds of engineering hours, reduce their potential attack surface, and more easily coordinate with governance and compliance teams.
Superpedestrian is a transportation robotics firm that develops the technology inside the LINK Scooter, the safest, most reliable lightweight electric vehicle in the world. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Superpedestrian was spun out of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 2013 with the mission of developing safe and reliable lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs). Superpedestrian’s first endeavor was to engineer a system to manage micro-vehicle safety and performance. This effort culminated in a patented Vehicle Intelligence System (VIS), a collection of sensors, firmware and onboard diagnostic technology that monitors the mechanical and electrical status of an entire vehicle in real time and autonomously resolves a majority of potential issues. For Superpedestrian and its LINK Scooter service, the results have demonstrated that VIS leads to best-in-class reliability, safety and operational efficiencies.
Sweeten is a New York-based, Black female-founded digital platform that matches residential and commercial construction projects with vetted general contractors, while offering guidance and financial protection—at no cost to the client. Sweeten simultaneously delivers general contracting firms an efficient growth engine, by streamlining marketing, lead acquisition and bidding, and by vetting all renovation projects for budget and readiness. The sophisticated digital platform empowers owners and contractors alike with transparency, data and an expansive online library of renovation knowledge. Sweeten launched in 2011, with headquarters in New York, N.Y., and has expanded into the top 10 American cities.
Vyv (formerly known as “Vital Vio”) is a New York-based and female-founded health tech company that has created a new kind of cleaning protection. Vyv, formerly Vital Vio, offers proprietary continuous-use, non-UV antimicrobial light technology for homes, public places and industry. Unlike hazardous UV light, Vyv meets international standards for continual and unrestricted use around people, animals and plants. Today, Vyv delivers a unique approach to cleaning continuously. Vyv LED light creates environments inhospitable to the growth of bacteria, fungi, yeast, mold and mildew. As overhead lighting, Vyv can be found in food manufacturing and services, healthcare facilities, travel and hospitality, retail, commercial and public buildings and many other places. Vyv technology is also embedded into commercial and consumer products and applications—shower lights that stop mold growth, behind cleaner elevator buttons and in many other diverse and creative ways.