Catalytic Capital Consortium

Catalytic capital—debt, equity, guarantees, and other investments that accept disproportionate risk or concessionary returns compared to a conventional investment in order to generate positive impact—is an essential tool to support impact-driven enterprises and organizations that lack access to capital on suitable terms through the conventional marketplace.
The aim of catalytic capital is to unlock impact and additional investment that would not otherwise be possible. It expands opportunity and economic growth and fuels innovation for the well-being of people and the planet, while allowing mainstream investors to participate in transformative investments.

To make substantial progress toward a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world, we need more catalytic capital to flow. The Catalytic Capital Consortium, or C3, demonstrates the power of this form of investment to expand the reach of the impact investing field, helping to address the $2.5-4 trillion needed annually to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

For the C3 initiative, we selected a set of funds and organizations to receive over $128 million in impact investments. Collectively, this portfolio showcases catalytic capital across diverse sectors and geographies. It is designed to reduce risk, build track records, and increase the scale of promising fund managers. These investments set the stage for other investors—both impact-oriented and conventional—to participate and fuel additional growth.

The initiative’s pooled grant funding is supported by MacArthur and other funders. At C3’s launch in 2019, The Rockefeller Foundation and Omidyar Network joined MacArthur to support the initiative’s first three years of grantmaking. In 2025, a group of impact investment leaders—including Blue Haven Initiative, Builders Vision, Ceniarth, and the Ford, Surdna, Sorenson Impact, Lemelson, Small, and Walton Family foundations—added new grant funding to extend the initiative and further promote learning and collaboration, while also growing an energetic and activated community of practice.

As part of the C3 initiative, we have made 15 investments totaling over $128 million that demonstrate the use of catalytic capital across diverse sectors and geographies. As collaboration is essential to the successful use of catalytic capital, we use the term “field partnership” to describe the efforts that we support with our investments. The active set of field partnerships includes:

The funders of the C3 Grantmaking program, working through a project housed at New Venture Fund, have provided grants to fuel learning and market development related to catalytic capital. The C3 Grantmaking program has supported projects to equip the investor community with the information and tools needed to deploy catalytic capital. This has involved efforts to expand knowledge about catalytic capital, foster infrastructure, and increase practitioner engagement.

To date, the C3 Grantmaking program has funded work in three categories:

Strengthening the Evidence Base

The C3 Grantmaking program has funded organizations and projects that are expanding knowledge and information about why and where catalytic capital is needed, what it looks like, who is involved, how it is deployed, and what is the result, drawing on current and past experience from around the world.

Practitioner Engagement

C3 Grantmaking supports engagement and collective learning with leading catalytic capital providers to identify and share best practices. The goal is to help practitioners solve technical or practical challenges with guides, convenings, and other activities that support effective deployment of catalytic capital.

Fostering Infrastructure

To spur the use of catalytic capital and address barriers that impede transactions, C3 Grantmaking supports projects that make catalytic capital transactions faster, more efficient, and more effective.

As a complement to these workstreams, C3 Grantmaking is working with leading impact investing networks to engage investors and share learnings. Several of these networks are conduct catalytic capital programming with their members. These collaborations also are central to C3’s work to continue building a strong community of practice in the years to come.

Visit C3 website to learn more

The measurement and evaluation of the Catalytic Capital Consortium initiative includes questions that test our conceptual framework and underlying assumptions, assess our activities, and measure the extent to which we have met our intended outcomes. From measurement and evaluation, we expect to learn whether our strategy and investments increased the knowledge, awareness, and use of catalytic capital.

An interim C3 evaluation was published in October 2024, and new evaluations will be published as they are completed.

We encourage investors, entrepreneurs, advisors, researchers, and others to join us in expanding catalytic capital investment and learning.

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We encourage you to contact us to:

• Share your experiences with catalytic capital, including how you have invested or benefited from catalytic capital and lessons learned;
• Ask questions and propose research topics related to catalytic capital;
• Request information on how catalytic capital is used today and where more is needed.

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