Portfolio
Impact Multiplier
We meet the demands of complex challenges with creativity, a high tolerance for risk, a willingness to be catalytic with capital, and an emphasis on developing the next generation.
Our endowment is 100% mission-aligned, from the program work we perform alongside amazing partners to direct investments, alternatives, and public equities. We work to find and fund solutions that help more people thrive.
projects and companies we are proud to be a part of
VSCO Voices
VSCO Voices was a grant program we created and ran in partnership with VSCO for two years. Each cycle, it funded creators who use art as a vehicle to empower marginalized communities in the United States, giving them the money, mentorship, and platform to tell stories that too often go untold.
Feed Louisville
Feed Louisville is a team of professional chefs on a mission to solve two problems at once. Every day, hunger is a crisis for people in the community. Every day, perfectly good food is thrown into the landfill. Feed Louisville sits at the intersection of the two, rescuing overproduced food from restaurants, bakeries, caterers, and farmers, and using it to cook meals for the city's unhoused and food-insecure neighbors. Feed Louisville came to us through the Reconstruct Challenge, winning our Food Justice challenge with a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 grant.
Granny’s Birth Initiative
Granny's Birth Initiative supports families through pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum months, with a focus on those the healthcare system too often overlooks. Its work centers on carrying on the legacy of the Granny Midwives and ensuring Black and brown birthing people have a safe, supported place to give birth, especially those navigating incarceration, housing instability, a lack of family support, or the child welfare system. Granny's Birth Initiative came to us through the Reconstruct Challenge, winning our 2023 Maternal and Child Health challenge with a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 grant.
Hidden Ventures
Hidden Ventures was a fund started by Access Ventures focused on the future of creative work. We invested in pre-seed and seed stage startups building the next wave of creative tools, products, and services, the kind that unlock creativity and help creators build, earn, and flourish in the creative economy.
Catalyze
Catalyze is the platform for capital entrepreneurs, the fund managers working to move capital toward businesses the mainstream overlooks. It gives those managers the capital and support they need to build enduring firms, and it helps allocators find and back exceptional, differentiated managers. Catalyze was birthed out of Blueprint and today Access Ventures serves as its fiscal sponsor and a strategic partner, providing the charitable home, infrastructure, and partnership that lets the Catalyze team focus on its mission.
GoodMaps
GoodMaps is an indoor navigation app that uses LiDAR scanning and camera-based positioning to deliver high-accuracy, turn-by-turn guidance inside complex buildings with no beacons or hardware installations required. Designed inclusively from the ground up, it gives users spoken directions, on-screen visuals, and haptic vibrations to move confidently through museums, transit hubs, airports, and other public spaces. We are an investor in GoodMaps.
Peregrine Ventures
Peregrine Ventures forms leaders for a complex world. We co-created it because we believe the hardest problems of our time call for more than technical expertise, they call for clarity of purpose, moral courage, and rightly ordered desire. Rooted in Augustine's vision of ordo amoris — the right ordering of love — Peregrine helps leaders navigate complexity with clarity, courage, and conscience. As the programme puts it, "It's not just a programme, it's a pilgrimage."
Leadership Experience (LX)
The Leadership Experience (LX) envisions a future in which Christian marketplace leaders are known and supported through durable friendships that glorify God, friendships that produce contagious generosity and lives of integrity. We didn't invest in LX from the outside; we helped build it. Access Ventures became involved in 2015, and the vision solidified when the founding board incorporated LX as a nonprofit in 2019. We remain a committed strategic partner today.
AV Foundation
The AV Foundation is a donor's partner for impact, a public charity that helps people realize their philanthropic aspirations while fostering a sense of community around every challenge. We started it with friends, and we continue to support its vision and its growth. The team at Access Ventures provides management support to the Foundation and its donor-advised fund accounts.
Attane Health
Attane Health helps people manage chronic health conditions through food. It delivers personalized groceries, one-on-one telehealth coaching, and the data healthcare partners need to measure outcomes, all built to reduce the cost of care and improve people's health. We are an investor in Attane, and the company first came to us through our Reconstruct Challenge, where it won both Phase 1 and Phase 2.
Navigate Maternity
Navigate Maternity is a maternal health technology company that uses data to support both patients and providers through pregnancy and the year after birth. Its platform pairs FDA-cleared, connected devices with a mobile app and human support, giving moms real-time monitoring and clinicians the information they need to intervene early. Navigate came to us through the Reconstruct Challenge, where it won a Phase 1 grant, and we followed with a Phase 2 investment.
KNOW Homelessness
For many of us, homelessness feels like a problem that is too big, too complicated to address. We wanted to break through that fatigue with human connection, with attention, and with information We found that the common understandings and representations of homeless communities are incomplete.
The goal was to start a conversation.
CreativeMornings Louisville
CreativeMornings is the world's largest face-to-face creative community with free monthly breakfast talks held in cities around the globe. We founded, funded, and anchored the Louisville chapter, launching it in 2015 as a natural outgrowth of our creative-economy work in Shelby Park. What began as a way to find and connect the city's creatives became one of the most beloved recurring events in Louisville.
Mobileserve
MobileServe makes it simple to track, verify, and celebrate volunteer service. Its platform lets students and teams log hours in a few taps, verify service with signatures, photos, email, or geotagging, and roll it all up into clear reporting that shows an organization's real impact over time. We were the first check into MobileServe, and we've held a board seat since day one.
Samaritan
Samaritan is a mobile-first community built to support people experiencing homelessness designed with the input of people who've been homeless, social workers, developers, and experts in Medicaid and emergency healthcare. Its premise is simple and human: walk with, not by. Samaritan lets people learn the stories of the neighbors they pass every day, fund critical needs, and help create lifelines of hope linking individuals without a home to the social and financial capital they need to meet real housing and health goals.
Leap Fund
Leap Fund takes on the benefits cliff, also called the cliff effect: the moment a worker earns a dollar or two more an hour and, as a result, loses public benefits worth far more than the raise. People end up earning more and netting less. Leap Fund builds the tools, education, and data to expose these cliffs and help people make informed decisions, while pushing for the policy changes that would end them. Leap Fund came to us through the Reconstruct Challenge, winning our 2022 Employment challenge with a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 grant.
Virtuous
Virtuous is the modern fundraising platform built to help nonprofits create more personal donor experiences and grow giving with less work. Founded in 2014 by Gabe Cooper (a founder we're proud to call a good friend) Virtuous pioneered the idea of responsive fundraising: using data, automation, and now AI to help charities treat every donor as a person, not a transaction.
Nesterly
Nesterly is a home-sharing platform that helps people share a home with someone they can trust for stays of a month or longer. A homeowner with a spare room, often an older adult, is matched with a vetted renter, often a student or young professional, who pays affordable rent and can lend a hand around the house in exchange for an even lower rate. Nesterly handles the vetting, leases, payments, and support. The company came to us through our Reconstruct Challenge, where it won a Phase 1 grant, and we followed with a Phase 2 investment.
Hot Chicken Takeover
Hot Chicken Takeover (HCT) was a Nashville-style hot chicken restaurant founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 2014 by Joe DeLoss and was one of the country's most compelling examples of "fair-chance" employment. We were early investors in HCT, and we exited our position before the founder departed and sold the business. The company has since closed, but the model it demonstrated remains one we're proud to have backed.
Catchafire
Catchafire is a capacity-building platform that helps foundations and corporations go beyond the grant by delivering nonprofits the coaching, technical assistance, and skilled volunteers they need to grow stronger and work smarter. We are investors in Catchafire, and we remain invested today.