2023 Impact Report
As Quantified Ventures enters its 10th year, we celebrate our impact to date and re-affirm our commitment to work with partners to design, capitalize, and scale durable solutions that drive meaningful environmental and social impact.
In our early years, we focused on innovative, first-of-a-kind deals and transactions. As you will find in this Impact Report, in recent years we added a layer of intentionality around organizational and community capacity building.
This focus has enabled a wider array of philanthropic, private, and public organizations to grow the pipeline of impact-oriented projects, replicate our outcomes-based models, and deploy solutions for broader impact.
We continue to help our partners think bigger, get initiatives unstuck, assemble blended capital stacks, and create novel ways to deliver better outcomes for the well-being of people and planet!
2022 Year in Review
Another big year at Quantified Ventures! I always appreciate the opportunity to look back and reflect on the year that was, which started with some motivating awards from the likes of the EPA and Environmental Finance.
We think about our work in three categories:
What’s working? Let’s double down on it.
What’s adjacent to our successes? Let’s invest in some of these new areas.
What’s on the horizon? Let’s get smart on a few of these now.
In this end-of-year blog I review highlights from 2022 and encourage everyone to think bolder in 2023. A big thank you to all our clients, team members, partners, and changemakers who join us in shaping the future we all want to see.
Eric Letsinger
Founder and CEO, Quantified Ventures
2021 Impact Report
The past two years since our last Impact Report have been terrifying, inspiring, and productive. We have all witnessed monumental events, which have sent seismic shifts deep into the ways we think about and address equity, social justice, corporate sustainability practices, population health, our climate and natural resources, community resilience, and more.
As the world has changed, so too did Quantified Ventures. In the past two years we discovered new opportunities for all-in approaches to create bold, impactful solutions at scale. We're eager to share more about the results of our work!
What’s really exciting is that we feel like we're just getting started. The time is now to build and invest.…and we are doing just that. Thank you for joining us for this ride and helping us create a brighter future that we can be proud of together.
Eric Letsinger
Founder and CEO
2020 Year in Review
2020 took a toll on us all. While this year started like many others, our strategies quickly pivoted. As the virus hit us all hard in March, we were trying to celebrate QV’s sixth anniversary while closing our office, ceasing all travel, and transitioning to remote operations. A relentlessly steady drumbeat of virus surges, racial injustices, increasing rates of unemployment and economic anxieties, large natural disasters exacerbated by a warming climate, and a contentious U.S. election cycle have piled on to make 2020 a year most of us will be glad to have in the rearview mirror.
Through it all, I have been routinely blessed to work with caring, resilient, creative, and dedicated colleagues at Quantified Ventures. I’m continuously amazed and inspired by their drive, diligence, creativity, smarts and grit as they lean in every day to create solutions to massive health, environmental, and social challenges. Given all that this team pulled off in 2020, I’m already looking forward to seeing what’s possible in 2021!
Despite the headwinds, 2020 was a year of firsts at Quantified Ventures.
2019 Impact Report CEO Message
Our cities, our society, and our world face truly vexing challenges, from the ever more frequent natural disasters, to the sobering fact that life expectancy in the US is declining for the first time in decades, to the seemingly unthinkable concerns about the long-term viability of our civilization and our planet.
When I started Quantified Ventures in 2015, I wasn’t sure where the company was headed. All I knew was that there had to be ways to foster new solutions and approaches to these serious challenges. Having spent a third of my career in each of the public, non-profit, and private sectors running organizations, divisions, and strategic initiatives, I gained deep insight into where each sector excels. Equally, I had thoughts about how they could start benefiting more by working differently together.
That experience was the foundation for our first breakthrough. In 2016, we closed the first-ever Environmental Impact Bond (EIB), an outcomes-based financing vehicle, to fund the creation of new green infrastructure in Washington, DC. The EIB helped DC Water share the risk associated with an alternative approach to preventing flooding problems with investors and provided a way to demonstrate nature’s value as a more economically beneficial solution.
An innovation on the Social Impact Bond model, the EIB allows cities to tap the vast municipal bond market while enabling governments to pay for outcomes instead of process. The creation of this outcomes-based approach was a pivot point for the growing impact investing market. This was proof positive that there is impact attainable and financeable at scale.
We continue to see strong demand for investment opportunities that create impact at market-based returns, and we are just getting started. Since the closing of that first EIB, the team at Quantified Ventures has worked tirelessly to bring forth new solutions to big problems across the environmental and health sectors.
We help decision-makers in the federal, state, municipal, private, and non-profit sectors ‘unstick’ seemingly calcified issues through a variety of outcomes-based financing solutions. Our mission is to scale bold solutions for a healthier people and planet – reducing flooding, creating employment, funding outdoor recreation, improving water quality, reducing wildfires, caring for the homeless, feeding the elderly, and more. Our impact lever is tying investor returns directly to the achievement of outcomes.
Establishing an impact report card is critical to evaluating the success of our work – collectively and at the project level. This inaugural impact report serves as a moment of reflection for our first few years. We hope it will advance a culture of transparency and help us improve our work overall.
The numbers tell us we are onto something good. The outcomes confirm that, as a society, we can do better. And the stories compel us to try harder and do more. It’s the stories we celebrate here.
We invite you to review our outcomes and selected examples of work, which include our green infrastructure EIBs in DC and Atlanta, our urban wood project with Baltimore’s Humanim, and our work with Meals on Wheels in multiple geographies.
There is more to come. We see mounting investor interest and increased stakeholder receptivity to financing around outcomes. These landscape shifts are occurring right on time to leverage our strong and growing pipeline of ground-breaking deals under development. Stay with us. I hope this is the beginning of a long conversation.
Eric Letsinger
Founder & CEO, Quantified Ventures