[Venture Capital Series] Investing in Purpose-Driven Companies With Eva Yazhari

Eva Yazhari is the Managing Partner of Beyond Capital Ventures, an early-stage impact venture capital firm investing in conscious leaders building businesses to solve critical challenges in emerging markets like India and East Africa. Under her leadership, the firm backs purpose-driven companies in healthcare, climate resilience, and financial inclusion in underserved markets. A former Wall Street executive, Eva leverages her institutional investment expertise to promote equitable ownership and long-term value across her portfolio. She is also the author of The Good Your Money Can Do and co-hosts The Beyond Capital Podcast, where she features mission-aligned global leaders.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:12] How Eva’s artistic upbringing shaped her investment perspective
• [06:00] What working investment banking hours taught Eva early in her career
• [06:56] Why Eva chose to start her own venture in Switzerland
• [08:15] Beyond Capital Ventures’ focus on investing in India and Africa’s underserved markets and conscious leadership
• [11:27] The essential criteria for Eva’s investment decisions
• [15:20] Why undervalued opportunities and a new debt fund are key parts of Eva’s investment strategy
• [20:49] Game-changing startups Eva backed in emerging markets
• [31:31] Why Eva chooses to invest in female fund managers and the firms that backed her
• [33:58] What makes a purpose-driven company and how intention fuels long-term success
• [38:09] Mentors and “expanders” who have influenced Eva’s leadership

In this episode…

In a world where capital often flows toward the most visible or hyped innovations, essential needs in emerging markets remain underfunded and overlooked. Entrepreneurs with purpose-driven missions in healthcare, fintech, and mobility often face structural barriers to scale — especially in regions like East Africa and India. How can investors and founders work together to create sustainable, impactful businesses in these challenging yet opportunity-rich environments?

Eva Yazhari, an experienced venture investor and advocate for conscious capitalism, shares how aligning investment strategy with social impact can unlock untapped market potential. Eva emphasizes the importance of backing founders who are in love with the problem — not just their own solution — so they can adapt and thrive in volatile markets. She outlines how early-stage businesses should demonstrate product-market fit, scalable unit economics, and a path to profitability in order to attract aligned capital. Her philosophy of “no investment is neutral” encourages both investors and consumers to intentionally direct resources toward businesses that reflect their values.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Eva Yazhari, Managing Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures, about purpose-driven investing in emerging markets. Eva discusses how to evaluate undervalued opportunities, why relational leadership matters in early-stage ventures, and what it means to build a business with stakeholder alignment. She also explores her investment thesis, personal values, and the power of aligned mentorship.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Eva Yazhari on LinkedIn
• Beyond Capital Ventures
• The Beyond Capital Podcast
• The Good Your Money Can Do: Becoming a Conscious Investor by Eva Yazhari
• Ampersand
• Lapaire
• Lal10
• Clinikk
• A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir by Colin Jost
• Lovebird Foods
• Mellody Hobson, Ariel Investments
• Aspire with Emma Grede

Special mentions:

• Christophe de Montille on LinkedIn
• Hooman Yazhari on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Crossing the Desert: Embracing Life’s Challenges With Payam Zamani of One Planet Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series & Top Author Series] How to Make Your Business the Next McDonalds of Your Industry with Michael E. Gerber Author of The E-myth” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Hostage Negotiator Loses The Hostage with Chris Voss of Black Swan Ltd” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Leading with Passion with Gino Wickman Founder of EOS Worldwide” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Black Business Leader Series] CAbikes: Barefoot until age 17 to PhD at Berkeley -with Christopher Ategeka [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Conscious leaders are always thinking about their customers, their employees, and their shareholders, but then they’re also thinking about the bigger picture.”
• “We are investing in human beings that are creating solutions — in other words, creative expression of solutions around problems.”
• “I’m looking for leaders who are in love with the problem and not in love with the solution.”
• “No investment is neutral; when you buy something or invest in something, there is a ripple effect.”
• “Purpose is what fuels success.”

Actions steps:

1. Explore emerging markets: Investing in regions like India and East Africa opens access to undervalued opportunities while addressing saturation in developed economies and tapping into favorable demographic trends.
2. Focus on conscious leadership: Evaluating leaders by their impact on all stakeholders ensures resilience and aligns business practices with long-term, values-driven success.
3. Embrace purpose-driven entrepreneurship: Companies grounded in clear purpose can stay resilient through market cycles and maintain focus amid volatility.
4. Consider debt as a financing option: Offering early-stage companies access to debt helps bridge capital gaps and avoid equity dilution, especially where venture capital is limited.
5. Align investments with personal values: Intentionally directing capital toward aligned causes enables impact-driven investing and connects financial growth with personal ethics.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Eva Yazhari. You can check her out on a couple sites, BeyondCapitalVentures.com and her book, which is The Good Your Money Can Do. It’s TheGoodYourMoneyCanDo.com. 

Before I formally introduce Eva, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. And since you know it’s part of the top author series here, some interesting books. We were talking about Payam Zamani, who wrote Crossing the Desert, an amazing story. And there’s overlap with Eva and her family too, with this story. So check it out. That episode was incredible. You know, kind of heartbreaking stories actually in it. 

Some other interesting ones kind of on the investment or business side, Verne Harnish wrote Scaling Up. That was a really good one. And Michael Gerber who wrote E-myth, and then Chris Voss, who wrote Never Split the Difference. That was also a great one, so check those out. Another fan favorite is Gino Wickman who wrote Traction, so check them out on InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect their dream relationships and partnerships. We do it in two ways: one, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution and production. 

And you know, my background, Eva, is I studied biochemistry as a chiropractor, but I started podcasting over 15 years ago and that turned into a separate business by accident. I never set out to have people and help them with their podcast. 

And number two, we’re an easy button for a company, other companies’ gifting. We make gifting staying top of mind of your clients, partners, prospects, and even from a cultural perspective, people send to their staff on a regular basis and you just give us a list of the people we’ll do everything else curate the, you know, the gifts and put your branding on and everything. 

We kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free to build amazing relationships. You know, for Eva, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships. I found no better way than profiling the people I admire on the podcast and sending them sweet treats in the mail so you can anyone out there go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. 

I’m super excited to introduce Eva. She’s an experienced investor, author, advocate for conscious capitalism and as managing partner of Beyond Capital Ventures. She leads early-stage investments in East Africa and India, focusing on essential sectors with the potential to impact millions. And we’ll show the website. Their investment portfolio spans over 50 equity and nine debt deals, reaching more than 100 million customers and championing equitable ownership for all founders. 

She has a very interesting background as well. Began her career in Wall Street as vice president at Entrust Capital, managing over 5 billion in investments. And she now brings that expertise to mentoring founders and scaling purpose driven companies, as I mentioned. She’s the author of The Good Your Money Can Do. And she also co-hosts the Beyond Capital Podcast, where she features Global Impact leaders. 

Eva, thanks for joining me.

Eva Yazhari: 03:50

It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:54

You know, we’ll get into the interesting part of your background is, I don’t know if this is the opposite, but your parents were both artists, and it’s interesting that I don’t know, what would you consider your path versus their path? How would you compare it?

Eva Yazhari: 04:12

Yeah, I love that. Question number one, when your parents are artists and you walk around, you grow up in New York City and you go to the galleries as a child, even though you hate it when you’re there and you’re 5 or 6 years old, you really get to develop an incredible eye. So art is a big part of my life. It’s definitely a happy place and a place of relaxation for me. But I think, you know, my parents were in the pursuit of creative expression.

And while I became a mathematician and I am an only child, so I was like the singular focus of all of their time and resources, treated like another adult, at times quite independent, very precocious. They let me go into Manhattan even though I grew up in Staten Island in eighth grade on my own. I mean, imagine letting your daughter do that. I have a daughter. I’m not sure I would myself. 

So they gave me the tools of deep self-confidence and also the modeling of what it looks like to look for creative expression. And I just took it in a different direction. I went into investment banking. Didn’t particularly love that for me. I think there’s a really important role in the world for bankers, and people really love that and make great careers. 

I then moved into kind of private equity and hedge funds primarily, and I loved the fund business, but it was because interest capital was so entrepreneurial. However, because my father also grew up in Africa, I thought a lot. I couldn’t get the itch to invest in emerging markets out of me. And that’s where the real nexus of creative expression and investment came into play. So I became a VC in 2011 and started investing in emerging markets using my Wall Street skills.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:00

What do hours look like in investment banking?

Eva Yazhari: 06:05

Well, it’s funny because I started out in the night investment banking intern program. So I went to Barnard College, which is Columbia University’s all girls school. And as a mathematician, everybody assumes that you’re quantitatively oriented, which I am, that you would be good at finance. And so I got offered this position to go from 5 p.m. until about midnight and work alongside the analysts. But I was leaving at midnight and the analysts were staying.

And so they were probably there until three, 4 a.m., depending on, you know, what type of project they were working on. And I really got a flavor of what those hours were like. And let’s just say they were brutal.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:47

At what point did you decide because you know, you’re loving it. It’s entrepreneurial. What point do you decide, okay, I need to do my own thing.

Eva Yazhari: 06:56

Well, it came with a little bit of a personal change. So my husband was running a Swiss business, and we had to figure out how to combine our lives in this personal change. And I ended up moving to Switzerland. I mean, I grew up in New York City. I love New York.

It’s not going anywhere for me, but for me. I was looking for a little bit of a shake up in my location, and Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt. The firm I was working at was great. I was advancing, but it just made sense for me to kind of make the leap. And when I got to Switzerland, you know, I’ve said this on record before, the Swiss aren’t terribly entrepreneurial. 

And so I had to look for something that allowed me to keep the creative expression part of being in finance. And that’s why I launched my own firm. And I did that with the knowledge that there were really undervalued opportunities, and that that’s what I get up in the morning for every day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:55

If I want to go ahead. If someone’s listening to the audio, I’m going to go ahead and pull up right here Beyond Capital Ventures so we can look around here, but just talk about Beyond Capital Ventures and what you do. I know you just mentioned undervalued opportunities and emerging obviously conscious leaders. Talk about Beyond Capital Ventures.

Eva Yazhari: 08:15

Yeah. So we invest in two of the largest emerging markets. We call this the future of global growth. Because 53% of the world’s population growth in the next ten years will occur in India and Africa. Africa will have the world’s largest youth population, and India already has the world’s largest working age population.

And there are a number of other demographic tailwinds that support our investment thesis. You rightly pointed out conscious leaders. What are conscious leaders? They are leaders who are thinking about all stakeholders. Let’s just say that, you know, the businesses we are investing in are not enterprise SaaS. 

This isn’t a playbook of, you know, build a software that can be acquired by a large tech company and make billions of dollars. We’re investing in need to haves that are in the healthcare, fintech and mobility and sometimes ag tech spaces. And we’re doing this because the rising middle classes and the next kind of, you know, consumer classes are lacking access to quality products and services in these areas. And so the conscious leaders are important because in order to operate in a very kind of, you know, challenging operating environment, you know, you’ve got grid unreliability at times, you’ve got crossing borders if you’re an African business scaling across multiple countries. These are not insurmountable changes, challenges, but they do require a leader who’s willing to navigate. 

And conscious leaders are always thinking about their customers, their employees and their shareholders. But then they’re also thinking about the bigger picture, the community around them, the government as a stakeholder, maybe even the climate as a stakeholder, and how that could negatively impact their business. So conscious leaders are just a way for us to evaluate whether the leaders are really in the game to win. And one of the other things that’s important for us is that we’re looking for leaders who are in love with the problem and not in love with the solution. Because if they’re in love with the solution, only they will die with that solution. Whereas if they’re in love with the problem, they’ll be really willing to find the right solution. And that’s a really important part of our work.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:32

I’d love to hear you know what the criteria are. You mentioned some categories, right. Health tech, fintech, agtech. At what point are they in their business where you’re, I guess some of your criteria there? And I do want to mention that it reminds me of one of the guests, Chris Ategeka, one of the most impressive people I’ve met.

And he started one of the things he was doing, they were creating bike ambulances because one of his siblings died on the way to the hospital, and it inspired him because they had to walk. There was no transportation where he was in Africa. So he started getting used bike parts and creating these bike ambulances. It was just really inspiring. So but I’m curious, yeah, some of the criteria that you look at.

Eva Yazhari: 11:27

So we invest seed to series A plus. So I would categorize that as early. But that doesn’t mean pre-seed where we’re just getting a business plan or an idea or a pitch for something that doesn’t have revenue. So all of the companies that we invest in need to be post revenue. We also need to have some element of product market fit within that business.

Of course, you already mentioned kind of our sectors and our geographies. And then we evaluate for conscious leaders in the beginning of our investment process. But one other area that we’re very focused on is really at post product market fit is the kind of ability for a business to add up to profitability at the unit economic level. So, you know, can this company not just grow? Can it actually become net profitable and when. 

And that’s very important for us because we don’t actually have the same free flowing tap of capital that Silicon Valley has available to us in our markets. While India does have a very thriving VC ecosystem, I mean, we know that the capital that flows through the US is one of the largest markets in the world, and therefore our companies need to work a little harder to have access to equity capital and sometimes have great access to debt capital. But it depends on what they’re using it for. And so we really want to make sure that they can reach profitability. And in some cases they actually don’t need to raise equity post a series B round for example. 

So that is one of the key criteria to think down the road. And then finally one of my colleagues says this really well. He says exits start on day one. So when we are looking for a business, we are immediately thinking who is the acquirer? Can this company IPO in India? 

Because we know that a number of our businesses will be able to go that route. Or, you know, is this a company where a larger stakeholder or kind of follow-on investor will help us have a secondary sale? Like how can we create value, financial value, which comes along with a strong purpose and impact, hand in hand for our limited partners?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:39

I’m sure it’s all over the map right with where they’re at in revenue and product market fit. Is there a low end to that or like listen, at a minimum, you need to be here for us to kind of just think about this is a fit.

Eva Yazhari: 13:55

You know, at the seed stage, we do see companies that are below a million ARR in Africa. However, in India we have a number of businesses at seed stage that are already there. The two markets are complementary, but they are also very unique and different, which is why they support each other in one diversified portfolio. So the answer is, as you say, it is a little bit all over the place because it depends on geography and sector. But I’ll tell you if the answer is you have tens of thousands of dollars of revenue, it’s not the right stage for us.

I mean, we’ve also grown into a firm which can select our deal flow. And so we are very cautious about models that haven’t been able to generate some elements of virality where they can then, you know, have at least $250,000 of annual revenue at like the super earliest stage. And typically we’ve seen around $500,000 at the seed stage in Africa and then in India. It steps, it doubles.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:04

You know, you talked about why emerging markets. It’s pretty obvious right. And then undervalued opportunities. Debt fund. We were talking before we hit record on debt fund. Can you talk about that?

Eva Yazhari: 15:20

Yeah. Let me double click on undervalued opportunities for one quick second. Because to your prior question it’s not just the level of revenue. It’s also what’s the valuation and what makes us say no a lot of the time is the valuation is too high. And so the average in one of our last venture funds, the average valuation across the entire portfolio was $18.5 million, which is half of the series A valuation of US venture backed businesses.

So even though the companies are kind of in some cases we’ve done series B, so there’s sometimes a little later stage in that average. We are able to find undervalued opportunities with very large total addressable markets. And that is what we’re really looking for. And we will say no if the valuation is too high. But absolutely on the debt fund side, our name is 

Beyond Capital, strategically and tactfully, because we are focused on providing more than money to our portfolio companies. 

As you’re scrolling here, you’ll see faces of our founders rather than just logos you hear on this podcast. Dr. Jeremy, you’re trying to bring together, bring forth the relational approach. We are doing exactly the same thing. We are investing in human beings that are creating solutions, in other words, creative expression of solutions around problems. And so when it comes to one of the offerings that we’ve provided to our founders, we did put together a debt fund, and we successfully closed that debt fund on June 30th. 

And why that’s really important is because while there are, you know, shops that have venture debt, mostly in the US, our founders don’t really have access to bank debt or even venture debt in the same way that US companies do. And so we’ve been able to provide really important working capital loans, bridge loans, as well as even regulatory requirement loans. And we’ve been able to generate a really strong IRR for our investors in doing this and build a track record with no kind of impairments to businesses, but still provide this critical credit that is so important to the lifeblood of early stage businesses.

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