Impact Investing Unpacked: Inside EdTech’s Wild West as Investor and Investee

Jessie Haselton and David Helene are friends. Over the years, their partnership has taken many forms: investor and investee, board member and CEO and advice-giver and advice-taker, used interchangeably.

Jessie serves as managing director of Education Innovation Ventures (EIV), ECMC Foundation’s group that deploys program-related investments (PRIs) in order to achieve the Foundation’s charitable purpose of increasing postsecondary educational outcomes and economic mobility for learners from underserved backgrounds.

David founded Beam in 2016, a start-up focused on providing financial assistance and emergency aid to support students’ basic needs.

Beam received an investment from EIV in 2019, which is where this story begins. Investing for impact isn't just about capital; it is about relationships that demand shared risk, trust, and a tolerance for ambiguity that neither philanthropy nor venture capital is fully built for.

A Bet on an Underdeveloped Market
Jessie and David first met at a Lumina Foundation sponsored event in midtown Manhattan in late 2018. David was pitching his then tiny startup, Edquity, later renamed Beam. His goal was relatively simple: get fast funds to current students facing emergency situations, with no red tape.

While there was not yet much research to support the thesis, the problem felt obvious. When a student with limited funds is working toward completing their postsecondary education and hits an unexpected snag, fast money can be the difference between continuing and dropping out. Getting money to students was a slow, cumbersome process, especially during emergencies, often taking institutions two weeks or more to disperse funds.

David described the company as “a risky proposition dealing with a very real and niche student persistence challenge. Not one that was going to be catalyzed by private markets, but one I thought ECMC Foundation could uniquely understand.”

Jessie was intrigued. At the time, ECMC Foundation was primarily focused on grantmaking and had already made significant investments in emergency aid, knowing students were often at risk of dropping out over surprise costs. She believed the Foundation’s EIV would be willing to take a bet on a scalable solution to this problem.

Amplifying the Evidence
Beam’s solution thesis was twofold. First, reduce the time it took for students to receive emergency funds. Second, use data to prioritize which students should receive aid, and when.

Jessie and David were eager to have data to intrinsically prove the need for this tool. Early work from the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University found unexpected financial expenses were common barriers to persistence and completion. To address this barrier, ECMC Foundation invested in further research from the Hope Center on an overall theory of change for the technology and deployed the technology as a District-wide pilot across what is now known as Dallas College.

This collaboration highlights a key reality of impact investing. Even when a problem is widely acknowledged, innovation often outpaces evidence. Working together, EIV, Beam and the Hope Center embedded research in the Dallas deployment, accelerating the learning and identifying positive effects of the technology, showing a strong solutions-aligned relationship between the individuals as well as the organizations.

The Specificity of Impact Investing
Unlike traditional venture capital, PRIs can often take longer; founders find they must balance a sense of urgency with philanthropic expectations and timing. This can be difficult when board and investor expectations, government regulation, payroll obligations, and pressure to deliver on impact begins to mount. That tension was palpable for Beam.

Jessie expands on this reality. “Foundation capital is acting like venture investments yet restrictive timelines and due diligence processes, while important, can inhibit a company’s ability to make timely decisions.”

Beam was uniquely positioned as a for-profit company funded entirely by impact investors. Its mission first orientation aligned well with EIV. “Beam’s technology would not have the systemic impact it did without having impact investors in the seats they were in,” David says. “There is unbelievable nuance in this work, and it requires people who are in it for the right reasons.”

In it for the “right reasons,” Jessie joined the Board at Beam in 2019 and brought her understanding of this dynamic to the company’s governance. David noted that Beam’s trajectory was shaped as much by who held the capital as equally as the capital itself. “If it hadn’t been Jessie in that board seat,” he reflected, “this could have been a completely different experience.”

Exciting to Expanded Impact
In early 2026, Beam was acquired by Nava, a public benefit corporation with a fiduciary duty to its mission. The acquisition marked a major moment for EIV, Beam, and David.

“Beam being acquired by Nava is arguably one of the greatest exits our portfolio has had in terms of impact,” Jessie says, “because of the potential to scale and reach more people, not just students but underserved Americans more broadly.” Some of Beam’s outcomes before being acquired include $400M to over 375,000 individuals and families, in 40+ states, and beyond their roots of postsecondary emergency aid. They have reached public sector programs including rental assistance, disaster relief, childcare, transportation subsidies, and SNAP-related programs.

The decision was driven by the opportunity to expand impact combined with the limitations to scale due to challenges capitalizing. Nava’s focus on government services is consistent with Beam’s growth to include both the government social safety net and postsecondary students, where the north star is quite clear: help underserved individuals via the systems that support them.

In his new role at Nava, David participates in conversations with federal policymakers about supporting those furthest from opportunity. “The impact [continued at Nava] will get us closer to what we wanted to achieve when we started this work.”

Beam’s story is not a tidy case study. It is a reflection of how PRIs function in practice: passionate people looking to impact real lives while working in uncharted territories.

Jessie and David are still in continual contact. They see each other at gatherings like the ASU+GSV Summit, share musings from learnings in their fields and help each other understand their respective sides of the same coin. This PRI built a successful, exited start-up, impacted the lives of countless people, and birthed a special relationship. And this story isn’t one of a kind, it’s seen in investor/investee pairs across the field.