Andreas Renner

Background

About Andreas Renner

I had the luck to form part of the impact investment community even before the notion of impact investing was coined and – having founded several social businesses myself – to know the impact sector from scratch. I believe in the power of blended finance to unleash the power of entrepreneurial solutions to make the world a better place, particular in places where capital would otherwise not go to. It is highly rewarding for me to be able to contribute to initiatives which help to transform entire sectors- to boost social entrepreneurship initiatives across the world through our digital startup Good Search (while spreading the most exciting stories to an ever growing community of people)- to unleash the power of the corporate sector to use business as a force for good by having founded the German chapter of Certified B Corps (under the roof of the B Lab Europe Foundation)- to use the power of carbon finance or of crowd investing to regenerate rainforests in Central America or restore mangroves in threatened coastal eco-systems across the world through my engagement with Goodcarbon and, beforehand, with The Generation Forest Cooperative. I have bundled many of my activities under the brand of Gexsi. This stands for an initiative of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship which I had joined back in 2005, when my impact journey started. While we pivoted the business model and the legal structure of Gexsi several times, the mission remained the same: to close the finance gap for social entrepreneurs and social businesses who design their business models entirely focused to tackle a social and/or environmental problem. Gexsi originally stood for the UK Charity, which at the time Pamela Hartigan and Maritta Koch-Weser had founded in London under the name The Global Exchange for Social Investment. Today, it stands for our social business development company, which I run jointly with my co-founders David Diallo and Kevin Fuchs. Gexsi provided the framework for many of my initiatives including our current flagship, the search engine for a better world, which we currently run on our own domain Having completed the beta stage, we will soon rebrand it as a powerful, sustainable alternative to Google.