ImpactAlpha LP/GP: The growth opportunity behind S2G’s $1 billion raise

Greetings, Agents of Impact! 

☎️ Next week’s Call: Launching and building your career in impact investing. How best to establish a career in impact investing, or at least to land a job? Kimberlee Cornett, director of impact investments at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Aifuwa Ehigiator, investment officer at The California Endowment, Cynthia Wong, San Francisco’s director of strategic partnerships, Sherry Wang, partner at Vistria Group and other Agents of Impact will share advice and encouragement for students, recent grads, career switchers and anybody looking for pathways into impact investing, Monday, June 15, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.

• Find a job or post an opening on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub. And send your jobs and career questions in advance of The Call to [email protected]. 

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In this week’s LP/GP:

• S2G raises $1 billion in growth capital
• Scaling internships in the AI economy
• Battery energy storage in Europe
• Inspirit Foundation outperforms on journey to 100% impact

Featured: GP Profile

G is for growth after $1 billion raise for Lukas Walton-backed S2G Investments. Venture capital firms are placing increasingly large bets on pre-revenue startups. Infrastructure and private equity buyout funds are looking to take control of mature assets they can wring for cash flow. S2G Investments is charting a “third way.” To maximize both impact and returns, the firm is seeking to write large checks to profitable companies that still need capital to expand manufacturing, grow operations or pursue acquisitions. With its $1 billion Solutions Fund I, closed last month, S2G has the wherewithal to write those checks. The Chicago-based firm, founded by Walmart heir Lukas Walton with $100 million in 2014, now has $2.8 billion in assets under management. S2G – the moniker stands for “seed to growth” – typically take minority stakes of roughly $25 million to $100 million. “These companies often already have the impact,” S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan tells ImpactAlpha. “They already have the customers. They already have the revenue. What they need is capital to scale.”

• Third way. Last year, S2G invested $50 million in ANA Inc., a Nevada-based manufacturer of hybrid backup generators that can reduce diesel consumption by as much as 70% at industrial sites and data centers. The company was generating more than $100 million in annual revenue but had never raised outside capital and had no interest in selling to a buyout firm. What it needed was capital to expand manufacturing capacity fast enough to meet demand. “Most investors would have passed. ‘Too mature for venture.’ ‘Too independent for private equity,’” Krishnan says. “There’s room for a third way of operating companies that have revenue and EBITDA and just need capital to scale.” Today, S2G announced it is leading $10 million in Series A financing for SWARM Engineering’s AI platform for agrifood and manufacturing companies. Other recent investments include Oxzo, a Chilean aquaculture company, and Apeiron Labs, which helps shipping companies turn marine data into routing and operational decisions.
  
• Illusion of crowds. S2G spun out as an independent registered investment adviser and began raising from outside investors in 2024 (it has not disclosed the roster of pension funds, funds of funds, and family office LPs in Solutions Fund I). This week, the firm released new research that examined more than $88 billion raised by nearly 280 climate-focused venture, growth, private equity and infrastructure strategies between 2021 and 2025. The report found that roughly three-quarters of the largest “growth-stage” rounds actually funded companies generating less than $50 million in revenues, or no revenues at all. “Capital marketed as growth has often functioned as large-scale venture.” The report, “The Illusion of Crowds,” also argues that impact and climate capital is flowing through a narrow set of channels, with the same investors backing the same companies and the same rounds. “Diversity of opinion, independence of judgment, and decentralization,” the paper argues, “appear meaningfully weaker than the market’s headline figures would suggest.”
  
• Keep reading, “G is for growth after $1 billion raise for Lukas Walton-backed S2G Investments,” by Erik Stein on ImpactAlpha.

🟢 Live on Edge: Builders Vision

Dive deeper on ImpactAlpha Edge. You can see S2G Investments’ profile on Edge and explore ImpactAlpha’s coverage of the other funds backed by Builders Vision, including Mad Capital’s Perennial Fund II, Fractal’s Agriculture Regenerative Management Fund and Energize Capital’s Fund III.

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• Ready to scale your impact? Get in touch.

Dealflow: Future of Work

Achieve Partners backs Alchemy to fill the entry-level void. Artificial intelligence is rapidly eroding the entry-level jobs college graduates have long relied on to start their careers. Internships, an earlier entry point, are becoming an operational burden for businesses in the US. “Nearly all young Americans will require an apprenticeship or, at a minimum, an in-field, paid internship to successfully launch careers,” said Ryan Craig of Achieve Partners, which invests in workforce development and education solutions to drive economic mobility (see Achieve’s profile on ImpactAlpha Edge). Achieve is backing Charleston, SC-based Alchemy to handle recruiting, matching, supervision, payroll and compliance for internships so employers don’t have to. “We need intermediaries to do the heavy lifting of setting up and running these programs for employers,” Craig said. “Alchemy is the first company to crack the internship code for businesses, and we’re excited to help build the internship infrastructure America desperately needs.”

• Good jobs. Alchemy is among the early companies in Achieve’s $450 million second fund, backed by Cambridge Associates, JPMorgan Asset Management, Prudential, Ingka Investments and Zoma Capital. The fund, which closed in April, targets workforce disruptions driven by AI. “While AI will cause immense disruption, it will also reward companies that can effectively deploy talent to succeed in a technology-enabled environment,” said Achieve’s Daniel Pianko. “This is about helping companies develop AI-enabled workforces at scale — and in the process, putting thousands of Americans on new pathways to economic mobility.”
  
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Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners sells minority stake in battery energy storage projects. The 500 megawatt Devilla battery energy storage project in Scotland is expected to be one of Europe’s largest energy storage projects, helping to store surplus from wind-generated sources in Scotland. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which is developing the site to support renewable energy integration and grid stability, agreed to sell a minority stake in the project to the UK-based Nuclear Liabilities Fund and Scottish National Investment Bank (the Nuclear Liabilities Fund was launched to meet the costs of decommissioning eight nuclear power stations, six of which are in England and two in Scotland). “The delivery of Devilla, alongside CIP’s Coalburn one and two projects, will improve the UK’s energy security and reduce costs for British consumers through enhanced system flexibility and access to more low-cost renewables,” said CIP’s Nischal Agarwal. 

• Grid integration. Renewable energy capacity is expected to double between now and 2030. However, grid limitations in integrating that power drove curtailment levels by around 55% in 2024. Devilla is one of three projects that Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is constructing to store and supply the grid with up to three gigawatt hours of electricity. The firm had secured $1.5 billion earlier this year for its second green credit fund to support the development of renewable energy infrastructure.
  
• More. 

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

• Nigeria-based ARM-Harith Infrastructure Investments raised $76 million for its climate transition fund towards a $200 million target. The fund was anchored by FSD Africa Investments and the African Development Bank to crowd in capital from pension funds and other African institutional investors. (ARM-Harith)
  
• San Francisco-based Forage raised $40 million in a Series B round backed by Mouro Capital, NextLadder, and Pivotal Ventures to help retailers accept government benefits like SNAP. The company’s new app helps low-income families check their balances and get rewarded for daily purchases. (Forage)
  
• Enable Ventures led the $5.7 million funding round of Kalogon, a Florida-based company that specializes in creating smart seating for wheelchairs users. Other investors include Florida Opportunity Fund, Castellan Group, DeepWork Capital, Sawmill Angels and Black Opal. (Kalogon)
  
• Gender-lens impact fund manager Aruwa Capital invested $2 million in Sika Financial Group, a Delaware-based firm building infrastructure that allows African institutions to settle trades directly in local currencies. (Aruwa Capital)

Signals: Impact LP

Canada’s Inspirit Foundation says its 100% impact portfolio outperforms benchmarks. A decade ago, the board of Toronto-based Inspirit Foundation committed 100% of its portfolio, in public and private holdings, to impact. In 10 Years Later, a report released today, the foundation says the bet has paid off. Inspirit says its fully impact-aligned, $33 million portfolio has outperformed a benchmark composed of traditional public and private market indexes over the past decade, despite experiencing greater volatility. “We made the commitment before we had a detailed plan to move forward, but we were very confident in our hypothesis,” Jory Cohen, who has managed Inspirit’s private investments in-house for the past decade, told ImpactAlpha. “Our hypothesis was that if we invested with the lens for impact, we’d increase the probabilities of higher returns, especially over the long term.”

• Harder way. The board of the foundation, endowed by the sale of the multifaith broadcaster Vision TV, made the decision to apply the foundation’s mission of pluralism and inclusion to its investments, not only its grantmaking, in 2016. Inspirit had fully re-allocated its portfolio by 2022. The foundation now has a decade of performance data to test its original hypothesis. According to the report, its portfolio outperformed a benchmark of conventional indexes by a cumulative 0.7% over the period. Results swung more sharply against the benchmark than the foundation expected, Cohen says. “This is undeniably a harder way to invest. It takes more effort, it takes more care, it takes more intention.”
  
• Impact portfolios. Inspirit joins a small club of institutions aligning their entire balance sheets with their missions. World Education Services, which manages roughly $300 million, formalized a 100% mission-alignment commitment in late 2023 and has moved from a carve-out of 4% or 5% of its balance sheet to about 60% aligned (listen to the podcast, “World Education Services aligns its balance sheet with immigrants’ success”). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which divested from fossil fuels more than a decade ago, says its portfolio outperformed its benchmarks by more than 100 basis points each year from 2014 to 2024 (see, “Without oil, Rockefeller Brothers Fund demonstrates mission-aligned outperformance”). The McConnell Foundation, one of Canada’s largest foundations with nearly $1 billion in assets, has committed to a fully impact-aligned portfolio, citing Inspirit as an inspiration.
  
• Keep reading, “Canada’s Inspirit Foundation says its 100% impact portfolio outperforms benchmarks,” by Erik Stein on ImpactAlpha.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Joanna Reiss is moving on from Apollo Global Management after almost six years with the firm. She helped launch Apollo Impact Mission, the firm’s impact strategy (see, “Ownership, collinearity and KPIs: Apollo’s Impact strategy turns five”)… John Pion is stepping down as director of impact investments at Social Finance… Enduring Planet promotes Daim Ashraf and Ramsha Rizvi to vice president. The firm raised a $12 million second climate fund last week. 

Monarch Investment Partners welcomes Kyle Lind, a former principal with Ares Management Corp., as an investment principal… BlackRock promotes Louise Kooy-Henckel to managing director and global head of sustainable and transition solutions… HealthQuest Capital promotes Witney McKiernan to partner… Nolan Henson, previously with Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Flint, joins Kellogg Foundation as a program specialist… Shannon Nash joins Vibrant Planet as chief operating and financial officer. 

Zenith Wealth Partners taps Kristen Yu, Anyae Jordan and Ali Anderson as summer interns… DC Green Bank hires Renee Scott as chief of staff and Christian Perkins as originations director…  Social Investment Managers and Advisors brings on Lan Anh Pham as vice president… One Acre Fund is looking for a global investor relations manager… Pacific Community Ventures is on the hunt for a chief lending officer and a data scientist in Oakland… SAI Santander Alternative Investments seeks a climatetech and deeptech VC director. 

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– June 10, 2026