Cole, Jeng, Lerner, Rigol, and Roth build a novel database compiling nine separate sources to analyze 396 impact investors after filtering an initial pool of 2,747 candidates, finding impact investors funded 6,066 firms across 8,125 rounds, roughly 2% of all venture and growth equity activity, with 60% of those deals including a traditional, profit-motivated co-investor. The central additionality finding is that most impact-backed companies could likely have raised capital from mainstream investors anyway, since impact and traditional funds show similar portfolio sizes and fund age, though impact deals average smaller checks, about $5 million versus $8.7 million, and impact investors do differ by targeting disadvantaged geographies, emerging industries, more risk tolerance, and a roughly 25% longer path to success. A notable, unresolved finding is that employee satisfaction dropped roughly twice as much following an impact investment compared to a traditional one, which the authors flag as deserving further study since it complicates simple assumptions about impact investing's social benefits, framing their new dataset as a foundation for answering open questions about impact investing best practices.

Impact investors get a genuinely important, evidence-based test of the additionality question at the heart of their own investment thesis, since the finding that most impact-backed companies could likely have raised traditional capital anyway is a direct empirical challenge to the assumption that impact capital is reaching companies that would otherwise go unfunded. LPs allocating to impact funds get a specific, quantified comparison of portfolio characteristics, similar size and fund age but smaller average check size, against traditional funds, useful for setting realistic expectations about how structurally different an impact fund actually is rather than assuming impact framing alone signals a fundamentally distinct investment approach. The unresolved employee satisfaction finding is a genuinely important flag for impact investors and portfolio company leaders alike, since a result showing satisfaction dropped twice as much after impact investment complicates any simple story that impact capital straightforwardly benefits the people working inside the companies it funds, warranting real caution before assuming impact investing is uniformly positive for employees.