Today we talked to Adrian Fuchs, transaction manager at the Financing Agency for social entrepreneurship (FASE), an organisation dedicated to building bridges between social entrepreneurs and investors. We talk about the evolution of the German impact investment ecosystem, about the effects of the coronavirus crisis on the investors and investees, the actions that can be taken by both sides to best tackle the crisis, and much more.

“To start with the venture side, volumes might drop depending on the idea”.

That’s on the venture side, on the investor side I would say it’s twofold. First, private investors are more reluctant to invest because they saw a drop in their share portfolio and are maybe struggling with the real estate market, so they are not investing or are reluctant to do so. On the other side, institutionally invested investors that don’t have a large portfolio of investments yet are still investing. If you already have a large portfolio it’s important that you provide the ventures, you are already invested in some cash. They need the cash they have at hand to provide liquidity. When you don’t have a large portfolio yet and you just want to start investing and there are some players out there that just recently closed some funds, they want to start now, and I think they are naturally affected by that. I would say for those cases from institutional money you would see longer transaction times.