Are we accelerating equity investment into impact-oriented ventures?

•Impact-oriented accelerators represent a new type of entrepreneurial support program that is spreading around the world.•Using data from 77 accelerators, we find accelerated ventures raise more outside equity investment than rejected ventures.•This positive equity bump is not due to programs picking obviously-promising ventures during their selection processes.•The positive equity bump is tied to the number of accelerated months in the follow-up year.•Virtually all the equity gains flow to ventures in high-income countries, and those started by all-male founding teams.