Unitus is a family of entities with a common mission to reduce global poverty through economic self-empowerment
Unitus was started with the strategy of leveraging business principles and market mechanisms in order to have a long-term, sustainable and widespread impact on reducing global poverty. As Unitus has identified new innovative opportunities for impact, Unitus has supported the setup of a family of independently managed entities with high quality teams to focus on being changemakers in their respective areas of focus.
Unitus Labs, founded in 2001, is a USA 501(c)(3) non-profit which manages the strategic direction and initiative to achieve the Unitus mission of reducing global poverty through economic self-empowerment. Unitus Labs also manages the Unitus brand.
Unitus Equity Fund (UEF), founded in 2006, was the first 100 percent privately-funded venture-stage equity fund focused on microfinance. Unitus Labs conceived and launched UEF to demonstrate that the microfinance industry was a viable market for social impact investors looking for large scale impact and reasonable returns. UEF helped catalyze the market, particularly in India, and as a result, there are now over a dozen equity funds and more than many hundred million dollars in private equity investment in the Indian microfinance sector. In 2009, Unitus Labs hired Elevar Equity to manage UEF.
Unitus Capital was founded in 2008 as a spin-out of Unitus Labs’s capital markets team. As this team grew more sophisticated and gained momentum, Unitus realized that it could serve many more MFIs and other economic base-of-pyramid (BoP) focused enterprises with corporate finance services outside of the Unitus Labs non-profit structure. Unitus partnered with forward-thinking impact investors who provideed seed funding to launch Unitus Capital as a stand-alone social enterprise with ambitious goals to accelerate the growth of the fast-emerging sector of businesses serving BoP markets.
Unitus Impact was founded in 2011 to identify new opportunities to accelerate economic self-empowerment in innovative ways. Unitus Impact is an early-stage impact investing firm focused on creating new or improving existing livelihood opportunities for millions battling poverty.
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