Catalytic by Design: Audrey Selian on Impact Investing at the Right Scale

The BwB Talk Series gives our international network the opportunity to engage with and learn from innovative leaders in impact, finance, and the environment. The deep knowledge and experience shared across the series provides new perspectives, strengthens our market intelligence, and generates new ideas. This session provided expert insight and valuable lessons from real-world experience on a key structural issue in impact finance: not whether capital exists, but how to ensure it is deployed well. 

About the speaker 

Audrey Selian is the Director of Artha Impact and has led the Singh family's impact investment advisory since 2006. Across two decades, she has overseen a portfolio spanning health, livelihoods, agribusiness, and skills/education, with a consistent focus on inclusive, ‘last-mile’ business models that generate measurable social returns alongside financial ones. Artha Impact has helped establish and support several ecosystem initiatives, including Artha Networks Inc. and Impact for Breakfast, reflecting a conviction that the infrastructure around deals matters as much as the deals themselves. 

Her perspective carries particular weight at a time when the impact investing field is being stress-tested by geopolitical disruption, regulatory volatility, and growing pressure on development finance institutions to crowd in private capital more effectively. 

The India market  

India is a fragmented but increasingly investable market, with high concentrations of capital and innovation in equal measure, and a material improvement in management team quality opening up opportunities that patient, relationship-oriented capital is well-placed to capture. Place-based strategies, cross-border technology transfer, and sustained regulatory engagement are the practical tools Artha Impact uses to build resilient portfolios in this environment. 

Audrey explained that Artha Impact has operated for most of its life with deliberately smaller-sized tickets, allowing it to reach earlier-stage ventures where larger institutional capital is not prepared to play a role. The central friction in this space remains transaction costs: due diligence processes calibrated for larger deals routinely make smaller investments uneconomic before they begin. 

The impact investment landscape 

Looking across the impact investment space more broadly, Audrey identified a persistent gap between stated interest and actual deployment, with deal packaging and transaction cost reduction as practical levers to close it. In dealing with regulatory and other challenges, she highlighted that sustained local presence provides earlier warning than any desk-based model, and the response is engagement, not avoidance. 

Ecosystem building, Impact for Breakfast, and Artha Networks

Impact for Breakfast, supported by Artha Impact and now active across 50 cities worldwide with over 6,400 members, functions as a mechanism for frequent, decentralised knowledge sharing and community building such that trusted relationships can expand outside the formality of larger, highly structured conferences.  To enable deeper engagement, Artha Networks’ market network infrastructure is a white label platform designed to help reduce information asymmetries that keep transaction costs high. Audrey emphasised that ecosystem work and investment work are not separable: a thriving collaborative network helps drive impact, and social capital is critical to supporting exits – particularly where private equity investments are an instrument of choice.  

We extend our sincere gratitude to Audrey for sharing her expertise. 

To learn more about the BwB Talk Series or partner with us on future sessions, follow BwB on LinkedIn or reach out at contact@bwb.earth.