Impact Shakers launches free platform connecting impact founders with the programmes and funders looking for them

Impact Shakers today launched the Impact Shakers Platform, a free tool that brings together the funding and support opportunities available to impact startups across Europe with the organisations that run them. Founders can search more than 110 published programmes, 40 of them currently open, and apply using a profile built automatically from their pitch deck. Programme hosts can publish their own open calls and receive applications directly.

Impact Shakers has been building the European impact ecosystem since 2018, growing a network of more than 500 partners and publishing their open calls and funding opportunities to its community every week, on LinkedIn and in its newsletter. The platform is the next stage of that work: a piece of infrastructure intended to accelerate the transition to an impact economy and to widen access to capital for the founders building it. Eight years of making those connections one at a time also made the underlying problem clear.

Very little of this ecosystem is visible. There is no shared overview of the support and funding available to impact startups, so finding it is slow and depends heavily on who a founder already knows. Investment still runs largely on warm introductions, and financing outside venture capital is especially hard to track down if you are not already aware it exists. Nobody is keeping score of which kinds of support work at which stage. And the market is fragmented enough that organisations working on the same problem often have no idea the others exist. The result is an ecosystem that is far smaller in practice than it is on paper.

The platform is built to address that directly, with open access, collaboration and efficiency as the starting principles rather than features added later. Making opportunities visible in one place shortens the distance between a founder and the capital or support they need, and gives programmes a way to reach founders they would never have found through their own networks.

“The impact economy will not scale on warm introductions,” said Yonca Braeckman, Founder and CEO of Impact Shakers. “Today, whether a founder finds the right programme or the right investor still depends far too much on who they happen to know, and that is a poor way to direct capital toward the world’s hardest problems. We are building the infrastructure that makes this ecosystem visible to itself. When access is open, better solutions get funded, and they get funded faster.”

The platform is free, with no cost planned for founders or programme hosts. A founder uploads their pitch deck, and the platform reads it, builds a company profile from it, and uses that profile to fill in programme applications with AI assistance. The founder reviews and edits before submitting. One profile, every application. Programmes with the nearest deadlines are highlighted on the landing page, so the opportunities closing soonest are the first thing a founder sees.

For programme hosts, open calls can be published and managed on the platform, with applications arriving in one place rather than scattered across forms and inboxes. Organisations including INCO Group, Sie Ventures, Earlybird, Startup Guide and Pulse Foundation have already launched programmes on the platform to reach more impact founders.

The platform also carries a curated database of impact investors, built from the funds Impact Shakers has tracked for years. Founders can search it by stage, ticket size, sector and geography and build a shortlist to see which funds are a realistic match before they start raising.

From launch, the opportunities Impact Shakers shares with its own network will come from the platform, where anyone can publish them and any founder can find them.

Founders and organisations can sign up at https://impactshakers.org.