The Soros Economic Development Fund has committed $5m to an early-stage venture fund that backs technology companies attempting to make opaque supply chains more transparent and accountable. The investment, into the Working Capital Fund III, is a repeat backing: SEDF also invested in the vehicle’s predecessor fund. The announcement comes at a moment when fast-moving developments in artificial intelligence and the scramble for critical minerals are concentrating new risks among workers in developing economies, particularly in Africa.
The Working Capital Fund III (WCF III) builds on a decade of investments at the intersection of labour rights, technology and responsible business. Its portfolio to date spans 24 companies and has touched workers in more than 60 countries. Fund III, which has reached an initial close of $31m and is targeting a final close of $100m, deepens that work in three areas: AI-enabled worker empowerment, climate adaptation for vulnerable supply chain workers and human rights due diligence tools designed to mesh with emerging regulations.
SEDF’s cheque is joined by capital from The Omidyar Group, Minderoo Foundation, SAP and the Stardust Fund, among others. For the Soros fund, the investment sits inside a human rights and justice portfolio that the organisation sees as a place where catalytic, risk-tolerant capital can shape market norms.
“Working Capital has demonstrated how innovative deployment of catalytic capital can drive meaningful supply chain transformation and scale tools that advance the dignity of work across the world,” said Georgia Levenson Keohane, CEO of SEDF, in a statement. SEDF is the impact investing arm of the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic network founded by George Soros.
The fund’s companies are a window into the quieter corners of the global economy. One portfolio company, Ulula, a voice platform recently acquired by sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis, uses mobile phones to crowdsource worker grievances from places that are physically remote and often politically sensitive: the Niger River Delta, highland Peru, mining zones in Rwanda. Workers dial in or use apps to report on conditions, wages and safety. The aggregated data is intended to give brands and suppliers a real-time view of what is happening far below the first tier of a supply chain, and to provide workers a channel that does not depend on in-person inspections.
Another, Altana, a supply chain mapping and risk assessment company valued at over $1bn, provides multi-tier visibility into global supplier networks. Its datasets and AI models try to surface labour rights and compliance risks deep inside networks where conventional audits rarely reach. A third, Sitration, is developing processes to recover critical minerals using less energy and fewer hazardous chemicals, attempting to lower the human and environmental cost of materials essential for batteries and the energy transition.
The fund’s premise is that technology, deliberately applied, can shift power and information towards workers who are otherwise invisible to the brands, retailers and consumers at the end of the chain. That premise is being tested in real time by the rapid growth of outsourced AI supply chains. Data labellers and content moderators in countries such as Kenya and Uganda are paid through multi-layered contracting arrangements to train and refine large language models. Workers, campaign groups and academics have documented low pay, psychologically damaging content and limited avenues for redress. These roles often sit in a regulatory grey area, outside traditional employment law and beyond the reach of company codes of conduct.
The investment also lands as demand for critical minerals — cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths — accelerates the expansion of extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Artisanal and small-scale mining, in particular, has long been associated with child labour, unsafe conditions and environmental damage. Tracing minerals from mine to market remains difficult, even as regulators in Brussels and Washington push mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence rules.
“Investors like SEDF — who understand both the commercial and systemic dimensions of this market — are essential to proving that supply chain accountability is not a trade-off but a competitive advantage,” said Ed Marcum, managing partner at the Working Capital Fund. “SEDF’s continued partnership is a meaningful validation of what we’ve built and where we’re going.”
SEDF’s reinvestment is a signal that the earlier fund performed well enough to warrant a follow-on, but the fund’s managers are careful to frame impact in terms of leverage and system change rather than venture-scale returns. The argument is that relatively small amounts of capital, placed early and with a high tolerance for experimentation, can influence the tools that global companies adopt to manage their supply chain risk. In that sense, WCF III is a bet that regulation, investor pressure and reputational risk will force companies to buy tools that do not simply audit for compliance but give workers a genuine say.
Whether that bet pays off depends on the willingness of large corporate buyers — the retail brands, electronics manufacturers and automakers that dominate global supply chains — to pay for these tools at scale, and on the willingness of their investors to treat decent work not as a cost to be minimised but as a prerequisite for stable supply.
The fund’s managers say Fund III will deploy capital across a mix of direct company investments and follow-on rounds, with an eye to preparing some companies for acquisition by larger compliance, procurement or sustainability platforms. Ulula’s acquisition by EcoVadis is held up as one such pathway: the voice tool, originally a niche product for artisanal mining, is now being integrated into a platform used by thousands of companies to assess supplier sustainability.
At a moment when AI is both exposing new forms of labour exploitation and promising new ways to detect it, the SEDF investment is an attempt to steer at least some venture dollars towards tools that, as its backers see it, might make the global economy slightly more legible — and slightly more just — for the people at its farthest edges.