Accelerating growth of local businesses for fair economic development.

Truvalu is all about creating true value in emerging markets

Truvalu is a private impact investor dedicated to creating decent jobs in emerging economies and opportunities for less privileged people and communities.

We promote an inclusive and fair distribution of value, power and profit throughout value chains, embracing partnerships for systemic change.

With a track record of investing in over 50 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and a decade of experience working with entrepreneurs and their scalable agri-SMEs, we provide patient capital and business development services (BDS).

We are a family of local investment companies with highly skilled and committed professionals located in Bangladesh, Colombia, Kenya and The Netherlands. 

We are supported by impact-focused, semi-institutional, and informal investors and providers of blended finance, offering them profit shares and the opportunity to make significant social and environmental impacts.

Our impact

Truvalu’s results in 2023 speak for themselves

Smallholder
farmers reached
9890
Jobs
5210
Women in SME
board positions
38 %
Women workers
in value chains
73 %

Co-entrepreneurship

We have found ways to sustainably invest in Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies! Enterprising with the businesses, we focus on co-entrepreneurship rather than finance alone.

We offer SMEs (our investees) private equity and loans, useful connections, concrete business advice, trade support, knowledge and access to technology. We support our investees in constantly enlarging their impact and monitor this carefully. 

We offer our investors an impressive social return on investment combined with an economic return.  

Partnering for social impact

We help innovative and scalable SMEs to grow and simultaneously develop fair and inclusive value chains. To do so, we bring together the (financial) resources from governments, NGOs, capital providers, academia, etc. in our ‘partnering for social impact programs’.

Through these programs we help high-potential SMEs to achieve the level of structure, organization, value chain stability, revenue growth and positive cash flows required by investors.

By joining forces with our partners with a long-term focus on private sector development and strengthened ecosystems, we can jointly create more opportunities and entry points to achieve more impact and create systemic, transformative changes. 

Capacity development

We equip SMEs, financiers, NGOs, governments, etc. with extensive online and offline training programs focused on ‘impact investment’. We offer trainings on impact investment, gender lens investing, our co-entrepreneurship investment methodology, good practices, and business acceleration.

We provide SMEs with practical hands-on tools and templates that are easy to apply in daily operations to grow their business in a truly sustainable manner.

We offer our partners in-depth and practical knowledge and tools to increase the social and financial impact of (joint) investment-readiness services, private equity investments, loans and other development services.

TruStories

"The entrepreneurs of our portfolio companies are the true heroes of impact. Together we build value chains based on a fair distribution of profit, power and value and together we shape business models for the future."

Picture of Jaap-Jan Verboom

Jaap-Jan Verboom

CEO/ Founder Truvalu