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Corporate Social Investing June 2020 To the Editor of SSIR, I was pleased and encouraged to see your piece on The Rise of the Corporate Social Investor by Karoline Heitmann et al. New CSI approaches offer the potential to reimagine relationships between corporations and change agents and in the process do away with broken, old and limited...

June 2020 The Working Capital Fund seeks to scale innovative approaches that solve longstanding problems of labor exploitation in supply chains. One of the most persistent and egregious causes of labor exploitation in global supply chains is the requirement that migrant workers pay illegal and exorbitant fees to secure jobs overseas. As has been...

April 16, 2020 Several WCIF portfolio companies are making services available to help mitigate COVID-19 impacts. All are well-suited to support a transition to a scalable, impactful, digital future of supply chain social responsibility As you can see from the announcement of our investment in Kenzen the Working Capital Fund is moving forward,...

April 16, 2020 Why we invested in Kenzen Hundreds of millions of workers around the globe face dangerously hot conditions in their workplaces. This includes over 700M people in critical industries such as construction, manufacturing, mining, energy, and maritime who are at risk of heat stress. A globally warming climate will only make conditions...

April 16,2020 We hope this communication finds you, your loved ones and your colleagues safe and healthy, and your communities resilient. We write to update you on some significant institutional changes at the Working Capital Fund. First, after being launched and incubated within Humanity United, Working Capital has now transitioned from being...

We invest in companies that will decrease worker vulnerability to exploitation and increase respect for labor rights in global supply chains. We do this within a detailed Theory of Change that aims to build the sophistication of tools which improve transparency of supply chains, enhance worker voice, facilitate risk-based decision-making, and...

Working Capital is delighted to announce its investment in OpenSC’s $4 million round of seed funding. OpenSC is an impact venture that uses advanced technology to enable more sustainable, ethical, and profitable supply chains. The OpenSC platform allows companies to verify claims about sustainable and ethical production, trace products throughout...

We are very pleased to announce that The Sustainability Consortium has selected SupplyShift, one of our portfolio companies, as its new partner and reporting platform for The Sustainability Insight System (THESIS) Index, formerly and most widely known as The Sustainability Index. The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) is a global organization...

In our last newsletter, we mentioned that we’d be taking a closer look at some of the themes that emerged from our recent annual reflection on our progress, and our learnings on those themes thus far. We’re starting with transparency and risk assessment tools, which play a large role in our theory of change. We invest in tools that can be used by...

From day one, Working Capital has been focused on accelerating supply chain innovations to enable corporations and employers to operate more transparently and responsibly around the world, based on the recognition that the private sector is increasingly accountable for labor abuses that exist in its supply chains. Until now there had been no...

Read our latest news here Reflections from Working Capital’s Impact Report (AKA: How are we going to measure the big changes we aim to help create?) Dear friends, The Working Capital Fund is committed to tracking and reporting on the impact of our work. We assesses four dimensions of impact: on workers in global supply chains; on the portfolio...

Working Capital is thrilled to announce its investment in Phylagen’s $14 million Series A financing, alongside Cultivian Sandbox and Breakout Ventures.  The San Francisco-based data analytics company is building the world's largest environmental microbiome database, and revolutionizing the way products are traced through their supply chains. The...

The complexity and opacity of global supply chains are a major roadblock to companies maintaining ethical supply chains; transparency and access to reliable information about working conditions are key to overcoming that obstacle. In the growing field of ethical supply chain products, innovators can improve the impact of their tools by working...

SupplyShift, a leading supplier management, responsible sourcing, and supplier engagement platform, has secured a Series A round of funding to further enable responsible sourcing in global supply chains. Tenfore led this investment round based on SupplyShift’s significant momentum over the past two years. Other investors participating in this...

By Ed Marcum, Working Capital Managing Director, and Ryan Heman, Humanity United Investments Manager In today’s complex, globally distributed supply chains, labor exploitation often takes place in the dark—out of sight and invisible. Despite gains in human rights made for workers over the past several decades, severe and systemic abuses persist....