Executive Summary

“Benevolent Disruption: The Fortune in Solving Humankind’s Biggest Problems” introduces a data-driven investment thesis: companies that address entrenched structural problems within society deliver consistently higher returns than traditional venture investments. 

For the last decade, there has been a pitched battle over the role of business. For proponents of unfettered capitalism, Milton Friedman had it right when he wrote “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…” and others, including proponents of the ESG movement, have fervently subscribed to the argument made by Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, who said: “Capitalism, as we know it, is dead. This obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency.“ 

Drawing on one of the largest private datasets in venture capital history — 40 years, 500 funds, 14,000 companies — this study has shown that this debate has missed the point. The research identifies a new source of alpha: ‘Benevolent Disruptors’. These businesses embed solutions to large-scale societal challenges (examples include financial exclusion, climate risk, knowledge access, and security) into their business models. Some do this directly, generating revenue by solving the problem itself (‘Direct Benevolent Disruptors’). Others do it indirectly, enabling systemic remediation of these externalities while monetizing elsewhere in the value chain (‘Indirect Benevolent Disruptors’). However, this trade-off is a false dichotomy, as the data tells us a different story: solving the world’s biggest problems is one of the most consistent drivers of outsized financial returns. A big problem is a big market, waiting to be addressed.

The findings are unequivocal: 

• Benevolent Disruptors deliver 51% higher returns than traditional venture investments 

• Indirect Benevolent Disruptors, whose business models solve foundational problems even if they monetize elsewhere, generate 67% higher returns than traditional venture investments (i.e. businesses that do not solve systemic problems at all) 

• Benevolent Disruptors are counter-cyclical, outperforming during downturns when systemic failures surface and demand for real solutions intensifies 

This outperformance can be explained by commercial dynamics. Companies solving foundational challenges benefit from stronger demand signals, broader stakeholder alignment, and faster and/or stronger regulatory tailwinds. These forces compound into what this paper terms ‘supercharged incentives’ — where customer need, policy relevance, and market pull combine in a multiplicative rather than additive manner to reinforce structural demand and long-term defensibility. 

Benevolent Disruption offers a returns-first framework. It is meant as a practical toolkit to identify companies with embedded commercial advantage, where business model design is aligned with addressing the largest unserved markets, therefore creating long-term relevance, defensibility, and scalable demand. 

This is not an aspirational view of what companies should do. It is a pattern recognition exercise based on what measurably delivers outsized performance within venture portfolios.