The impact assessment firm BlueMark launched an integrated software platform to help financial advisors and their clients monitor and report on the impact performance of their fund investments and overall portfolios.
“We believe that the future of investing is impact driven, but for investing with an impact lens to become the new normal, investors need the right tools,” BlueMark’s Christina Leijonhufvud said at a launch event in New York last week. “Our vision is for BlueMark IQ to serve as the engine that allows investors to have access to better insights, driving better decisionmaking and ultimately greater impact, alongside financial returns.”
BlueMark has assessed and verified more than 300 impact funds and fund manager general partners, or GPs; the new platform is aimed at limited partners, or LPs, and other asset allocators, many of whom have been frustrated by fragmented reporting frameworks that make it difficult to monitor and report impact performance as rigorously as they do financial performance.
BlueMark said advisors and investors, including Caprock, Align Impact, GCM Grosvenor, Global Health Investment Corp., Letter One, Surdna Foundation and Tsao Family Office already are using the new platform.
Tsao also committed new investment capital to BlueMark, along with Ford Foundation, S&P Global and Temasek Trust Capital, all of whom participated in BlueMark’s 2023 Series A financing.
Spin out, in, and out again
The core of the BlueMark IQ software was developed by Caprock to streamline its own reporting to clients. To make it available to others, Caprock in 2016 spun it out as iPar, a venture-funded startup.
“That just didn’t work,” Matthew Weatherly-White, a co-founder of Caprock and now CEO of Align Impact, said at the launch event. Caprock reabsorbed the platform before transferring it to BlueMark this year.
“If we as a community adopt it, and we continue to lean into this notion of an independent third party, with verified impact data, that can do audited reporting, and we all agree on it, then suddenly we will no longer be arguing about a taxonomy,” Weatherly-White said. “That’s how we differentiate ourselves as investors – using the same dataset to make different decisions.”
