In 2013, as an Upaya board member, I had a meeting with our co-founder Steve Schwartz where he described a new (to us) company he’d just met in India. Steve was visibly excited by this company, but I have to admit that I couldn’t quite visualize what a plate made out of dried palm leaves looked like. I could, however, grasp how incredibly valuable a company employing people in remote villages with little economic opportunity could be to our mission of job creation.

Two years later, Upaya added to our initial support for this company, Tamul Plates, and joined with another like minded investor, Artha Impact, the impact investing arm of Rianta Capital Zurich, to place an equity stake in it. At the time, our $27K was a big investment for Upaya. 

Not long after this, I became Board Treasurer and I remember asking our other co-founder, Sachi Shenoy, when we should start forecasting returns from our investments. She looked at me kindly – and patiently – and said “not yet.” 

Patience isn’t one of my virtues.

But patience is a critical ingredient in the recipe of investing in “missing middle” companies. The reason these companies are considered “uninvestable” is not because they can’t return capital; it’s because most investors aren’t willing to be patient enough. Acumen Fund first coined this term, “patient capital,” 20 years ago to describe investing in companies for social impact with a different return profile and different timing than mainstream investments. These investments may look different, but they are investments, not grants. Acumen has just issued a report that shows that for every dollar they’ve invested, they’ve received 91 cents in return. (For the record, Upaya followed their methodology and calculated that in our history, we’re at $1.19 returned for every dollar invested.) If you are just thinking about the investment returns, you might consider Acumen to be unsuccessful. But it’s not just an investment. Compared to a grant, where zero dollars are returned, Acumen has created enormous impact AND gotten almost all of their money back to create more impact — by being patient.

The story of Tamul Plates is also a story of patience… and enormous entrepreneurial fortitude. Following our investment, the company began to grow and doubled their job numbers to 750 (our key metric) by the end of 2015. I joined Upaya as CEO in early 2016 and Arindam was the first Upaya entrepreneur I met face to face. Unfortunately, the week we met was within days of the controversial demonetization announcement by the Indian government that was ruinous to cash-dependent companies like Tamul Plates. The company’s jobs count fell 75% in 2016 and did not recover until 2018. 

That they recovered at all is remarkable, but they did more than that. By 2020, Tamul Plates was employing 4500 people and exporting to multiple countries. Based on their recent growth and forecast revenue, they signed a term sheet with a new investor for a significant sum in March 2020. And then, of course, the pandemic hit. As Covid shut down markets and India imposed the largest lockdown in the world, the investor disappeared, leaving Arindam with no revenue and very little cash. Another entrepreneur would have written off the enterprise, but Arindam doubled down, raising crowd-sourced funds to keep his home-based workforce paid even as he had no revenue and no salary. Upaya stepped in to offer our first-ever revenue-based loan – money that he wouldn’t have to pay back until his revenues returned. 

While Tamul Plates held on in 2020, they weren’t out of the woods. The vicious surge of Covid known as the “Second Wave” hit the company and its people very hard in the spring of 2021. Not only were they shut down again, many close family members and friends were lost. It was a very difficult time. Again, Upaya tried to help where we could and for the first time ever, we provided grants to our partners who were struggling. Tamul Plates and Arindam and his team pressed on, despite massive supply chain snarls and a soft events market that had been a key driver of revenue.

However, by early 2022 their job count was back up to 3,000 and the company had signed new export contracts. Patience was rewarded. Having toughed out some of the most unimaginable crises, the company had bright prospects again. Investors noticed. In the spring, an investor approached Arindam wanting to make a sizable equity investment, a development that Upaya welcomed as the new investor would buy out our stake. As it turned out, in August, we received back more than double our original investment, a sum that is now dedicated to new investment. 

This is the Upaya model come full circle. We could have made a grant to Tamul Plates in 2015 and watched their success or failure with interest. Instead, as an owner of the company, their journey was our journey. Of course, their effort, tenacity, and grit was all their own. As we toasted each other over a bonfire earlier this month in Assam, though, we decided that “exit” isn’t the right word for this stage in our relationship. We hope to always be Tamul Plates supporters even as our capital moves on to another “uninvestable” company.