Eight of the 94 social ventures funded by the Cabinet Office’s £10m Investment and Contract Readiness Fund have won funding worth a total of £35m, according to an independent report into the fund published today.

And 74 charities are still partway through business support programmes paid for by the Fund, suggesting that this level could significantly rise, according to the Social Investment Business, which administers the Fund.

The fund, which opened in 2012, offers grants of between £50,000 and £150,000 to charities and other social ventures which are seeking social investment or are hoping to win significant contracts.

The largest investment was £10.1m, raised by Empower Community, which funds energy projects and which received funding from an institutional pension investor. The largest contract was won by Pure Innovations, which won an £11.7m contract to deliver learning disability services in Kingston.

The report by Boston Consulting Group, entitled Ready, Willing and Able: An interim review of the Investment and Contract Readiness Fund, found that the ICRF had already had a “significant and positive impact” against these obstacles.

The funding won with support of the ICRF was “impressive” and in line with expectations, the report says.

Jonathan Jenkins, chief executive of the Social Investment Business, said the review had found that relatively small grants were effective in generating a high level of social investment.

“At the moment we’re only part way through the process,” he said. “We’d expect significantly more than this level of funding to be won.”

He said that the ICRF had provided proof of a concept, but that now charities and investors must find a way to embed the cost in money borrowed.

“In a commercial setting you would expect to pay around £150,000 to raise investment, and it wouldn’t change much whether that was £1m or £2m or £5m,” he said. “That seems pretty similar here.

“You would expect it to be embedded in the investment, and I’m confident that’s what’s eventually going to happen with social investments.”

He said that at the moment it was expensive for charities to raise investment compared to other sectors, but that as social investment became more common, those costs would go down.

Jenkins also said that charities were mostly seeking relatively simple investments – either loans or bonds.