How Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures Supports Founders
Applications for the Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures 2026 cohort are open through March 31. Apply here.
Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures (MSISV) provides early-stage innovators with access to capital and resources. During the five-month program, founders receive mentorship and networking with experienced industry leaders. The accelerator’s mission is to catalyze innovation and impact by supporting startups and nonprofits building a more inclusive and sustainable future.
Meet the founders
Miho Shoji, co-founder of Moodbit, developed autonomous AI agents that act as digital teammates and seamlessly integrate with enterprise business management systems to automate repetitive tasks. Drawing from 15 years spent in multinational HR organizations, Shoji observed recurring challenges within HR departments.
“HR teams are drowning in manual, repetitive work because their critical workflows live in disconnected systems that can’t talk to each other,” Shoji tells POCIT.
“Together with my co‑founder, Alfredo Jaldin, who brings deep machine learning expertise, we built Moodbit to automate the ‘toggle tax’ in HR and give companies a way to scale people‑centric practices without scaling manual work,” she adds.
Chris Smith is the founder of COUNT, an AI-native accounting platform. COUNT automates bookkeeping, saves time, and strengthens collaboration for small- and medium-sized businesses and accountants. “We connect directly to the tools businesses already run on, like banking, credit cards, Stripe, and Square, and we turn that raw activity into clean books, real-time reports, and workflows that actually move the business forward.”
Smith believes entrepreneurs deserve tools that function like partners, not burdens. “COUNT is my attempt to take something that has historically been intimidating, expensive, and reactive, and turn it into something proactive that helps founders make decisions with confidence.”
James Jones is the co-founder of Bump, a platform that equips content creators with tools to manage finances, understand market values, and discover new revenue opportunities. Bump enables creators to link accounts across all income streams—from royalties and publishing rights to physical merchandise sales and NFTs—providing a unified view of their earnings.
The idea for Bump emerged after Jones watched his father—a software engineer and music-business owner—struggle to secure funding due to restrictive underwriting requirements.
“I was also inspired to create Bump by the creators, artists, and athletes that I once represented as an entertainment lawyer, who, like my dad, struggled to obtain funding due to their volatile revenue streams. Armed with these experiences, Bump was born.”
Challenges faced by business owners
One of the biggest challenges Shoji encountered while scaling Moodbit was integrating with each customer’s unique and fragmented HR stack. “Every company has its own mix of systems like SAP, ADP, and Workday, and we had to make our AI agents robust enough to automate workflows across all of them while remaining secure, reliable, and low‑friction for HR and IT.”
Shoji credits Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures with helping Moodbit evolve from a compelling idea into a focused, scalable product. “Through their mentorship, we made the strategic decision to concentrate on three core workflows—recruitment, employee engagement, and operations—rather than trying to tackle every HR process at once.”
As Bump began to grow, Jones says the company was exposed to numerous opportunities, particularly from enterprises seeking better ways to understand creators and the broader creator economy.
“We had to quickly prove that we had enterprise-grade products and were ready for enterprise customers. Once we convinced the first few enterprise clients, the next challenge was figuring out how to scale that part of the business.”
Jones notes that MSISV played a critical role in helping him understand how enterprises operate and how startups like Bump can engage with them effectively.
For Smith, the most difficult part of scaling COUNT was balancing speed with trust. “When you build in fintech, you can’t just move fast—you have to move fast while being right,” Smith says. “That means having a strong security posture, auditability, data integrity, and real controls behind the scenes, even when the team is small, and the product is evolving weekly.”
He adds that the accelerator helped bring clarity. “It forced me to translate what we were building into a crisp narrative that investors, partners, and customers could immediately understand. That sounds small, but it changes everything when you are trying to scale.”
Creating long-lasting impact
Since its inception, MSISV has distributed more than $38 million in capital to over 140 startups and organizations.
Smith says that participation in the program expanded both his credibility and his network. “The moment you are associated with a program like this, conversations change. Partners take you more seriously, investors lean in faster, and it opens doors that normally take a long time to earn.”
He also emphasized the value of the founder community. “Being surrounded by other founders building under similar pressures is energizing. It reminded me that the hard moments are part of the process, not a sign that something is wrong.”
Jones found the curriculum sessions and one-on-one coaching with members of the Morgan Stanley ecosystem particularly valuable. “It helped us create a clear plan for partnering with enterprises, while also increasing the value we deliver to creators.”
MSISV also helped Bump become pitch-ready, culminating in the company advancing to the final stage and qualifying for funding consideration at the Creators Venture Accelerator program’s 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai this year.
“The funding consideration tied with reaching the final stage, along with the opportunity to further develop a potential partnership with the competition’s creator, is a clear example of how Morgan Stanley has added value to Bump.”
Shoji describes the MSISV experience as transformative for both her and her company. “Beyond the product work, they opened doors by introducing us to industry leaders and investors, connections that would have taken us much longer to access on our own.”
Applications for the Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures 2026 cohort are open through March 31. Apply here.
**This article was created in partnership with Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures
