Unlocking Enterprise Value: Innovest’s
Disruptive Approach to Embedded IMM

October 28, 2025

We at Innovest have spent a good portion of this year further deepening our approach to delivering Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) solutions, focusing specifically on how we work with impact investment fund managers to build lasting expertise within their portfolio companies. For these managers, alongside their financial objectives, their funds must also demonstrate progress towards the intended impact, for example, against specific non-financial metrics relating to social, environmental, and economic development objectives. Within this work, our focus is on the outcome level, trying to understand the net effect that an enterprise’s products and services have on the end-user, whether that’s a customer, supplier, or household. This work has reinforced a conviction: proving outcome-level impact doesn’t have to be a burden; it can, and should, be a part of long-term enterprise value creation.

Evolving IMM: Beyond Point-in-Time Reporting

The appetite for rigorous impact data is rapidly increasing. Investors are rightly demanding evidence of outcome-level change, moving well beyond simple outputs. The data supports this shift: the share of investors gaining input directly from end-user is rising significantly, from 11% in 2021 to 35% in 2024. For fund managers seeking to demonstrate the impact additionality of their investments, robust data is now essential for proving and improving impact.

However, the traditional models for obtaining this data often face practical challenges:

• Knowledge Concentration: Expertise for data collection and analysis often remains external, limiting the enterprise’s ability to own and act on insights.
• Proprietary Constraints: Reliance on closed, proprietary systems can create data silos and limit the long-term utility of the measurement investment.
• Infrequent Data: Measurement is often reduced to expensive, one-off exercises, meaning valuable insights are not captured regularly enough to inform continuous decision-making.

In essence, IMM has often been a necessary, yet extractive, compliance cost for enterprises and their investors. We believe we can do better, with a new disruptive approach for the sector.

Our Approach: Building Expertise for Dual-Purpose Insights

Our philosophy is that true long-term value lies in democratising impact measurement. We position the enterprise, who is closest to the end-user (consumer, household, community etc), as the central actor in the IMM process. By transferring the tools and knowledge required, we enable them to turn impact reporting into a growth-driving business function.

This is achieved through a structured, highly collaborative process that is focused on building expertise:

1. Developing an Impact Strategy: Our work begins with our team of experts supporting the enterprise to strengthen their Theory of Change and measurement priorities, ensuring full strategic alignment.
2. Co-creating the Assessment: We support the company in designing the research and capturing the data. By leveraging their existing communication channels (e.g. call centres, WhatsApp channels, digital outreach lists) with their users and integrating lean, digital survey technologies, we significantly reduce the cost and complexity of data collection, enabling higher frequency.
3. Building Long-Term Capacity: Crucially, we focus on transferring knowledge and providing open-source tools. This ensures the enterprise owns the solution, gains the capacity to collect, analyse, and act on data in the future, and is not reliant on expensive third-party deep dives. This is what we call impact insights.
4. Optional Ongoing Verification: Where required, Innovest can provide continued quality assurance and verification of the data for investor reporting. This optional extra means that, even when enterprises lead their own data collection and analysis, there is the option of a third-party verification to maintain investor confidence.

This approach means the data collected serves a dual purpose: it provides robust, outcome-level impact data for investors, while simultaneously generating commercially valuable consumer insights for the enterprise.

Delivering Sustainable Value: Evidence in Practice

This shift from external evaluation to embedded capacity is yielding exciting results in the market:

• Attracting Capital with Apis Partners & Cashfree: Our work with Apis Partners helped embed end-user assessment capacity into their portfolio. The findings for Cashfree not only showed that 60% of clients credited their services as directly leading to increased revenues, but the rigour of the assessment was cited by Apis as a material factor in their subsequent reinvestment. This is powerful evidence of unlocking value through IMM.
• Driving Business Strategy with KIMS Microfinance: In Somalia, we worked with KIMS to establish a digitally-enabled, regular data collection cycle run by their own field agents. The findings, which showed an average 40% increase in revenues and 40% growth in employment for clients, allowed KIMS to publish its inaugural impact report, proving and improving their impact while supporting their growth strategy to attract investment.
• Community Insight with Newmont: Our support for Newmont in Ghana, in tracking the impact of their community investment vehicle, demonstrated the power of deep end-user data, confirming outcomes such as 62% of local farmers viewing agriculture as a viable alternative livelihood to mining, resulting from community investments.

For fund managers, this model is a sustainable, cost-efficient path to demonstrating impact additionality. For enterprises, it’s an opportunity to leverage IMM as a tool for strategic growth. And more widely, it represents a market-building investment in lifting the long-term IMM capacity of the entire ecosystem.

We are proud to partner with leading institutions to make this vision for embedded, value-creating impact measurement a reality.