Launching the Impact Seed Investment Readiness Platform
Discourse around impact investing often focuses on the capital deployed, yet a large part of the work happens earlier: preparing social enterprises to become “investable.” The investment readiness phase, during which a social enterprise refines its business model, impact metrics, and pitch for professional scrutiny, is often decisive in whether promising ideas ever make it into an investor’s pipeline. The new Impact Seed Investment Readiness Platform aims to help facilitate this process for impact-minded start-ups.
Impact Seed is an EU funded project coordinated by Impact Europe that seeks to strengthen the investing for impact ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Its main objective is to create financial instruments for early stage impact companies, with ticket sizes ranging from approximately €20,000–150,000 and larger investments up to €1 million, while building support infrastructure such as investment readiness tools. As part of this effort, the Impact Seed Investment Readiness Platform will serve social enterprises, accelerators, incubators, and other ecosystem actors that want to streamline their deal pipeline.
Although the project targets CEE countries, the platform is being designed in English and will be accessible to impact minded startups and support organizations more broadly. This reflects a deliberate push towards cross border investment and knowledge sharing, rather than a tool limited to a single national market.
The platform builds on a pre-existing platform originally developed in Croatia by Feelsgood Capital, the country’s first dedicated social impact venture capital fund. Over the course of the past year, work was done to introduce a cohort of impact driven companies from Croatia and Slovenia to the platform, which contains a structured curriculum, combining e learning, mentoring, and pitch preparation, culminating in live pitching opportunities such as the CEE4Impact Day in Budapest.
The move from this pilot to a more public digital, self service platform is driven by a practical need for scale and efficiency across the wider CEE region and beyond. In practice, many social enterprises in CEE struggle to secure funding not because their ideas lack merit, but because their documentation—business plans, financial models, legal structures, and impact evidence—is incomplete or misaligned with investor expectations. By offering a clear roadmap that covers legal structuring, financial modelling, and impact measurement frameworks (drawing on SDG taxonomies and IRIS type metrics), the new platform seeks to lower the barrier to entry for founders while making origination more efficient for investors.
Building Towards a New Fund
A second central pillar of the EU-funded Impact Seed project is the creation of a new impact investment fund by Feelsgood Capital called Feels Better, with an estimated total size of €60 million and around €10 million earmarked for early stage ventures. The fund aims to invest in companies based in EU countries, starting in Croatia and Slovenia and expanding into the Western and Eastern Balkans, using catalytic EU funding and co financing to crowd in additional private capital.
The investment readiness platform is intended as part of the infrastructure supporting this fund and the broader ecosystem. By standardizing how early stage social enterprises present their financial and impact data, the tool can help make the pipeline for Feels Better and other regional impact investors more predictable, transparent, and scalable.
Launch Event
The latest version of the Impact Seed Investment Readiness Platform is scheduled to be unveiled at a public digital event. Founders, accelerators, and investors interested in the technical features, methodology, and use cases of the platform are invited to join the Impact Seed Investment Readiness Platform Launch on 27 January 2026 for more information.
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