Greetings Agents of Impact!
In today’s Brief:
- Family businesses lean into impact investing in Asia
- Affordable housing for middle-income renters in Cleveland
- AI for the real economy
- Financing a slate of social-impact feature films
Featured: Impact in Asia
Asia’s family businesses drive impact in their operations as well as their investments. With their supply chains, manufacturing and operations, leading family business leaders in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and other Asian economic hubs seek to future-proof their businesses and the communities they serve. “We believe family businesses will ultimately play a central role in the capital stack behind impact in Asia, given their multi-generational perspective, tolerance for complexity, and deep roots in the real economy,” Hareesh Nair of Tsao Pao Chee Group said at the SFi Impact Summit, an annual gathering of Asia-based asset owners hosted by Sustainable Finance Initiative in Hong Kong. Nair says TPC, the Singapore-based family company rooted in maritime logistics and industrial supply chains, deploys the business, investment, advocacy and philanthropy as complementary levers to drive impact at scale. “As a fourth-generation family business, we believe long-term relevance requires adaptation, and this means preparing business for a world evolving beyond industrialization toward greater human and planetary wellbeing.”
- Risk and opportunity. In Hong Kong, Carissa He is helping her family’s manufacturing business, Actmax, reduce carbon emissions, cut material waste and improve supply-chain sustainability. “Corporations sit in a sweet spot between customers and consumers, the supply chain and the manufacturers, and also the government and regulation,” she said. “If the end goal for me was, ‘How can I create greater impact and leverage what I have?’ then family business was the right decision.” In Korea, Kyungsun Chung, grandson of Hyundai’s late founder Chung Ju-yung, is helping Hyundai Marine and Fire Insurance tackle social and environmental risks before they become liabilities. “This kind of preventative method, not just for healthcare but for prevention of climate damages and other things, could make an insurance company much more sustainable,” he said.
- Pulse check. Nearly 20% of the world’s 500 largest family-owned enterprises are based in Asia; together they generate $8.8 trillion in annual revenues. Nearly a third of the 300 or so asset owners at the SFi Impact Summit say they have more than half of their assets invested for impact or sustainability, according to a live poll conducted at the event. For Annie Chen of Hong Kong-based family office RS Group, the question is no longer whether impact investing works, but where capital can be most catalytic. “We’ve demonstrated that you actually could deploy across the portfolio,” said Chen. “That means that we can take more risk.” RS Group announced a new program providing patient, impact-first capital to nature-focused ventures and funds.
- Operator mindset. Asia’s operators are embedding impact into their core businesses rather than treating it as a separate investment theme. “When we describe what impact investing really is, [regional investors] basically said, ‘Hey, we’re actually doing that, we just haven’t called it that,'” said Chii-Fen Hiu of the Temasek Trust’s Centre for Impact Investing and Practices. The center’s survey of 165 investors, managing more than $1 trillion in assets, identified climate adaptation and resilience as the top impact priority. Sam Richards of Sydney-based Brightlight said the close links between business operations and capital allocation position Asia’s family businesses to scale their impact. “Don’t fight the pragmatism. Harness it,” he said. The family office clients of Pictet Group, a trillion-dollar wealth manager in Geneva, increasingly see sustainability as a lever for resilience and growth, said Pictet’s Marie-Laure Schaufelberger. “If you start to think about risk differently, you will construct your portfolios differently.”
- Keep reading, “Asia’s family businesses drive impact in their operations as well as their investments,” by Dennis Price and Jessica Pothering.
- ICYMI: Listen to SFi’s Katy Yung on the Agents of Impact podcast, “The ‘now generation’ shaping the future of impact investing.”
Dealflow: Affordable Housing
Cleveland Housing Investment Fund reaches $53 million with Huntington Bank commitment. Cleveland’s renters are among the most cost-burdened in the US. Last year, the city’s mayor, Justin Bibb, and LISC created a fund to finance housing for middle-income renters and buyers, seeded with $18 million from the city. KeyBank and Fifth Third Bank later committed $25 million. A new $10 million allocation from Huntington Bank brings the Cleveland housing fund’s total to $53 million, more than halfway toward its target of $100 million. “We are investing in neighborhoods across the city in ways that strengthen our communities and invigorate our economy,” said Kandis Williams, who heads LISC’s Cleveland office. Said Huntington Bank’s Jay Turakhia, “As a community, we are only able to fully thrive when all residents have access to safe, affordable housing.” The Ohio-based regional bank is also backing Warner & Swasey, a $64 million affordable housing and commercial project that broke ground in Cleveland earlier this month.
- Affordable housing. The Cleveland housing fund aims to create and preserve up to 3,000 new rental units for seniors and families earning less than 80% of the city’s area median income, and turn at least 100 of those renters into homeowners (see, “LISC’s fund gives renters a chance to become homeowners in Cleveland”). The fund provides loans and equity-like financing for small- and mid-sized affordable housing developments. The fund’s portfolio includes a $2 million loan to CHN Housing Partners, which is developing 55 lease-to-own single-family homes on vacant land in East Cleveland. In Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood, the fund backed the development of 49 affordable homes for aging renters priced out by market-rate rents.
- Share.
Base10 raises $850 million for ‘real economy’ AI. Base10 Partners raised $850 million across two new funds to back companies using AI to modernize financial services, healthcare, logistics, transportation and other industries. The raise includes a fund for seed- and Series A investments and a separate vehicle targeting Series B-stage deals. Belgian family investment group Sofina and California public pension giant CalPERS backed the funds, alongside sovereign wealth funds, endowments and other institutional investors. “The automation of the real economy is here,” said Base10’s Adeyemi Ajao. “Those companies are where the new capital is going to go.” The Black-led venture firm also reaffirmed its “advancement initiative,” which commits up to half the firm’s carried interest to support scholarships for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and to shore up HBCU endowments. Base10 is expanding the initiative to include on-campus training, internships and job placement programs for HBCU students.
- Real economy. Since it was founded in 2018, San Francisco-based Base10 has backed more than 200 companies modernizing workflows. Among its portfolio companies are Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank; Waterplan, a startup that helps companies measure and address water risk; and August Health, which makes software for caregivers. Base10 does not label itself an impact investor, but it incorporates ESG, diversity, climate and responsible AI considerations into its governance model designed for early-stage startups. When it raised its first fund in 2018 to focus on what it called “applied AI for the real economy,” said Ajao, “LPs told us applied AI was too ‘niche’ and ‘not a thing’, so we had to change it to automation.” He added, “Today, we have several portfolio companies applying AI to the real economy that are growing from zero to tens of millions [of dollars] in revenue in under 12 months – that is unprecedented.”
- More.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Offshore geothermal energy developer Endurance Energy raised $54 million in a Series A round backed by Founders Fund, Voyager Ventures, First Round Capital, Point72 Ventures and others. (Endurance Energy)
- The International Finance Corp. invested $15 million in the Caribbean Community Resilience Fund, a debt fund for mid-sized enterprises and job-creating climate resilience and sustainability projects in the Caribbean. (IFC)
- The Richard King Mellon Foundation invested $400,000 in Landseed, a Ventura, Calif.-based measurement and verification startup that combines AI sensors and data with “earth credits” to turn protected land into financial assets. (Landseed)
- Voltus, a San Francisco-based virtual power plant developer, acquired Brightfield AI, an energy storage software company backed by Energy Impact Partners and Overture Ventures. (Voltus)
Signals: Pop Impact
Harbor Fund is rewriting the playbook for financing social impact feature films. It’s never been harder to get an independent film financed, let alone secure the kind of distribution deal that can help a film turn a profit. A venture-style approach that spreads the risk of any single bet across a diversified slate of projects could help close the gap between funders who want to support movies and TV shows, and filmmakers looking for financing for projects with the potential to inspire social change. Salt Lake City-based Harbor Fund, founded in 2024, has raised $15 million from more than 80 donors. “These funders care about social impact, and they see Hollywood as the ultimate PR engine for social causes.” Harbor Fund’s Lindsay Hadley tells ImpactAlpha contributing editor Dmitriy Ioselevich. Movies, she says, “are empathy-making machines.”
- Diversified slate. Hadley has deployed $10 million across more than 20 film projects, many of which come attached with A-list talent. Coming up is “By Any Means,” a civil rights crime thriller starring Mark Wahlberg. The upcoming biographical drama, “Hershey” (see trailer), based on the life of Milton Hershey, stars Finn Wittrock and Alexandra Daddario. The chocolate millionaire built Hershey, Penn. as an “industrial utopia” with affordable homes, schools, public parks and transit, and kept his workers employed during the Depression. In 1918, he transferred his controlling interest in Hershey Chocolate Company to a perpetual trust that still supports a school for orphaned and disadvantaged children. The feature, distributed by Angel Studios, will be released in theaters this November.
- Keep reading, “Harbor Fund is rewriting the playbook for financing social-impact feature films,” by Dmitriy Ioselevich. Catch up on all of Dmitriy’s Pop Impact columns.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Jennifer Acker Ayer is stepping down as co-head of impact strategy and wealth management at AITi Tiedemann Global… Don Hinkle-Brown, who is transitioning out of his role as CEO of Reinvestment Fund, is launching a new consulting firm called Emergent Impacts… Mathilde Reynes, former investment officer with Proparco, joins Meliquina as a senior finance associate… IDB Invest seeks an environmental and social senior officer in Brazil.
JPMorgan Chase has an opening for an impact finance associate… The Denver Foundation is looking for an impact investing director… The Nature Conservancy has an opening for a policy advisor for climate and biodiversity finance… Project Equity is on the hunt for a capital deployment manager… Anthropic is partnering with Social Finance and CodePath on Claude Corps, a $150 million national fellowship program to place 1,000 early-career fellows at hundreds of nonprofits across the country.
The UNICEF is accepting proposals for developing public guidance and market resources to help investors, issuers and financial institutions explore how bonds and loans can contribute to better child-related outcomes (see, “Child lens: UNICEF leads investors to see their investments through children’s eyes”).
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– June 15, 2025
