António, Rita, Cristina and Margarida
In 2024, we kept a relentless focus on our mission: to prove that impact is the greatest economic opportunity of our time. That north star guided every single member of our team, day after day, 366 times.
We wanted to be open about the questions that we pursued in 2024 and that we continue working hard to find answers to. To tackle them, we find solace in some of our core organisational values: audacity, navigating uncertainty, and innovation.
We embrace the audacity of building a category-defining organisation. Maze is an all-encompassing impact platform where investors, corporates, public sector leaders, and entrepreneurs, can find the tools they need to create positive impact. However, it continues to be challenging to describe who we are in terms that everybody can rapidly understand.
Maze manages venture capital funds and acceleration programmes in various thematic areas, advises corporates on impact, and incubates new financial instruments such as impact bonds. Where others see dispersion, we see a clear impact thread.
We will continuously refine the narrative of our work until it becomes unequivocal that no specific tool or financial product is a panacea. Lasting impact happens through a combination of tools that are made available to those who work to solve social and environmental challenges.
If we want to prove that our mission is attainable, we need to be able to measure it. In the face of such a challenge, we navigate uncertainty with intellectual honesty.
We were amongst the pioneers adopting an impact-linked carry mechanism, which offers a great starting point to measure the relationship between the impact performance and the financial performance of our investments. As a result, we have data points to make the investment case for impact. However, this approach is applicable mostly to our venture capital funds, and we ought to transpose it to the other tools that we work with.
During the past year, our team reflected on innovative ways to track the impact that we deliver through our projects. We will deploy them during 2025 and share them as part of our annual reporting exercise.