Applications open for Venture Studio from Crisis Investment (UK)

Venture Support

• Investment
  • They invest for equity and will support follow on funding through their own fund and partner investors.
• Co-production & collaboration
  • They work with thousands of people experiencing homelessness every year; providing a natural test bed through which to drive the right solutions to market.
• Deep expertise
  • With over 50 years of homeless experience, they offer access to a wealth of evidence, data, insight and learnings that will accelerate your growth.
• Tailored support
  • Their growth programme of support will remove any barriers to scale, leveraging their network of cross-sector experts
• Mentors & Coaches
  • You’ll have access to mentors and coaches who’ve built businesses that balance profit and purpose.
• Network
  • Doors are tough to open when you’re a new business. But for their Venture Studio portfolio, they’ve done most of the hard work; creating a network of private and public partners to fuel your growth.

What they are looking for?

• Mission Focus
  • Your ambition to drive social change and end homelessness is integrated into your core business
• Traction
  • You are revenue generating with a product in market, and are ready to grow
• Scalable
  • You have the potential to end homelessness on a global scale
• Co-Design
  • You’re committed to embedding lived experience of homelessness into your decision making
• Diversity & Inclusion
  • You’re committed to embedding equity, diversity, and inclusion in your teams

Eligibility Criteria

• Legal: Companies limited by shares based, operating, and registered in the UK
• Impact: You can describe what you do and how it helps advance one or more of their fund ambitions. You capture or forecast data that shows positive change linked to your work. You are willing to introduce a mission lock to your articles of association. You might be working on areas such as:
  • Increasing high quality housing stock at affordable rent levels.
  • Making long term tenancies more accessible and sustainable for those on benefits or lower incomes.
  • Offering housing solutions for those with no recourse to public funds.
• Market: You have a clear understanding of the market you operate in. You have a strategy to overcome regulatory hurdles. You can describe why your product is best placed against your competition, why it is highly innovative and not easily replicable. You have evidence that customers will pay the target price. You can articulate what is your total addressable market (TAM) and the fraction you aim to capture over time.
• Business Model: You have a financial model with evidence of valid projections to reach positive unit economics.
• Growth Stage: You have a working product and are generating revenue. You are pre–Series A in your funding strategy. You have a path for financial sustainability and/or an exit strategy for investors.
• Team: You have a resilient management team, committed to impact and with the drive to build diverse teams. You have experience in the market you operate in. You are committed to embedding a homelessness impact framework to your operations and tracking performance against this.

Ineligibility Criteria

• Solutions that focus on ‘managing’ homelessness rather than ending it.
• Products or services that are paternalistic in their approach and perpetuate poor framing of homelessness.
• Business models that do not have social impact at the core.

For more information, visit Crisis.