How to Valuate Impact Startups – Towards a Taxonomy

In recent years, impact investing has aroused growing interest in science and practice. Particularly for startup financing, the topic promises sustainable innovation and therefore, high expectations exist for young ventures which address ecological and or social challenges within the investors’ community and beyond. However, to date, there is little scientifically founded knowledge on how such startups can be valuated based on their impact. By addressing this research gap, we contribute to a better under-standing of impact investing in early-stage startups using a mixed-method approach. On that basis, we present the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals as the overarching framework and carry out an iterative process, to develop a theoretically sound taxonomy of the most important impact criteria to provide a better analysis of startups active in addressing societal problems. Further steps for this research in pro-gress will be introduced and critically discussed together with limitations.