ImpactableX is helping companies quantify their impact

What is the “impact field”?

Catherine Griffin would call it an ecosystem of companies developing new technologies designed to affect change for social and environmental issues, along with nonprofits, municipal governments, brands, investors and grantmakers.

Griffin, the CEO and founder of ImpactableX, wants her company to be the “enabling technology” behind the impact field — “and we’re on track to get there,” she said.

InpactableX created data and analytics software for companies and funds to quantify the impact of their new technologies. The system allows investors and other stakeholders to use that information to show impact. The software launched in June, but before that, Griffin was doing the same work as a service.

“I started getting contacted by accelerators with 250 portfolio companies or pitch competitions expecting thousands of applications they wanted to screen for judges,” Griffin said. “And in order to service that level of volume, we needed to build software that really could scale and that’s what Impactable is designed to do today.”

Northern Liberties-based Griffin was previously the managing director of GoodCompany Ventures, where she worked with early-stage, socially minded entrepreneurs, especially those addressing issues such as public safety and climate change.

She found that companies didn’t know what their quantifiable impact was, and there weren’t many resources to determine impact for early-stage companies.

“We wanted to develop a way for companies to understand and optimize and ultimately articulate effectively the impact and impact potential of their technologies when they’re delivered at scale,” Griffin said.

The company sells its software to companies who may want to use the data of their product’s impact to support sales or fundraising. They — Griffin plus six employees, including four in the UK — also work with funds that are screening companies for impact potential or that want to track the impact of portfolio companies.

So far, the company has seen success such as participating in a Techstars accelerator earlier this year, and as of October, the company had raised $100,000 as part of a $500,000 round. Griffin said the money will be used for marketing, sales, analyst support and product maintenance. The company is focused now on showing interest and demand for its product.

“Impact operates in an ecosystem and everybody has their own perspectives and mandates, and so numbers are so helpful for grounding impact,” Griffin said.

Ultimately, she said, ImpactableX’s mission is to help companies creating impactful products access more capital.

P.S. ImpactableX is one of five companies in the running for Tech Company of the Year in the 2023 Technical.ly Awards. Voting is open through Thursday, Nov. 30.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.