ImpactAlpha LP/GP: For private equity players at SuperReturn, asset-light is out, HALO is in

Greetings, Agents of Impact! 

In this week’s LP/GP:

• The private equity buzz at SuperReturn in Berlin
• Seeding impact investment in Canada
• New Forests launches global natural capital fund
• How Capria leverages AI in its investing process

Featured: Overheard in Europe

At SuperReturn in Berlin, asset-light is out, HALO is in as private equity titans focus on AI, energy and defense. Private equity fundraising and deals are still in a slump and valuations are under pressure. But at the annual SuperReturn conference in Berlin last week, private market titans were giddy over the coming AI supercycle and the massive buildout of physical infrastructure it will require. The buzz among the 5,000 or so fund managers and limited partners in attendance was the wave of mega-IPOs kicked off by SpaceX and the new era for private markets they portend. “We are in a global industrial renaissance,” declared Scott Kleinman of Apollo Global Management. Trillions of dollars in capital will be needed for the digital infrastructure buildout and the concurrent energy transition, he said. Shifts in trade policy and geopolitical tensions are triggering a transformation of global supply chains around strategic resilience. “We spent the last 40 years globalizing our economy, and we’re going to spend the next five or 10 years reglobalizing it,” Kleinman said. Jeffrey Currie, a senior advisor to PE giant Carlyle, said some $10 trillion in investments in the US alone could shift in the coming decade from “asset-light” investments, such as software, to energy infrastructure, chips, robots and other physical assets. “We’re at the beginning of a decades-long rotation” to what Currie calls HALO – hard assets, local operation.

• AI disruption. Vice President Al Gore called out AI governance as a pressing area that needs more attention. “We really have to face up to the fact that this technology is advancing so quickly that it is going to challenge not only business models but societal models, civilization models, cultural models,” Gore said at a session with his Generation Investment Management  (Edge) colleagues David Blood and Lila Preston. “How do we govern the impact that AI is already beginning to have, and how do we guard against the use of AI to make deadly biological weapons?” Other worries centered on the impact AI is having on portfolios, especially those filled with software companies that for years generated oodles of cash from their near-zero marginal cost models. The so-called “SaaSpocalypse” has already wiped billions from the valuations of software-as-a-service companies. “AI might be one of the most massive repricings that we’ve seen in the history of technology,” said Seth Bannon of Silicon Valley-based deep tech investor Fifty Years (Edge). AI is making the creation of software “abundant and nearly free,” he said. “We are entering an age where basically all software will be written on the fly.”

• New joule order. Energy security trumped climate concerns at a two-day energy transition side conference. The event drew fewer LPs than in past years, and the family offices and other investors that showed up unabashedly made clear that oil and gas are part of the mix. But renewable energy sources for electricity have inherent advantages. Carlyle’s Currie used the forum to expound on his theory of change, which he dubbed the New Joule Order in a widely read essay. The energy transition, he argues, will be driven not by climate concerns, but by the desire for energy security and a diversified energy mix of “joules,” or units of electrical energy. An electron can be sourced from gas, sun, wind, or uranium. “A combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross someone else’s chokepoint,” he wrote in the essay. “Electrification is the purchase of optionality.” China is building out nuclear power, renewables and batteries with an eye towards the end goal of zero marginal energy costs, where “AI becomes infinitely scalable,” he said. “And isn’t this all one big AI race to begin with?”
  
• Keep reading, “At SuperReturn in Berlin, asset-light is out, HALO is in as private equity titans focus on AI, energy and defense,” by Amy Cortese and Danielle Rossingh. 

      🟢  Live on Edge. Check out 375 LPs investing in Europe on ImpactAlpha Edge.

Sponsored by Maycomb Capital 

Supporting better postsecondary outcomes. For high schoolers, access to college and career advising can mean a successful transition to postsecondary pathways. Maycomb Capital (Edge) made a $10 million loan to Commit Dallas, which works in partnership with Education is Freedom to expand access to college and career advising for Dallas County students. Advisors help students explore postsecondary programs based on personal interests, apply for financial aid, and sign up for standardized tests, among other services. Texas is supporting these approaches. In 2019, legislators set aside over $1 billion in annual incentive payments for districts that demonstrate improved postsecondary outcomes. Maycomb’s loan finances high touch advising, which in turn helps districts earn more. Read more. 

Dealflow: Power in Place

Realize Capital Partners’ fund-of-funds secures $277 million for Canada’s impact fund managers. Three years ago, the Canadian government set aside $755 million to jumpstart the country’s social finance market (see, “Canada’s Social Finance Fund aims to build an investment ecosystem with ‘wholesale’ impact capital”). The bet is paying off: Realize Capital (Edge) raised an additional $141.7 million in private capital to more than match the government’s $135 million anchor investment. Over two-thirds of Realize Capital’s more than two-dozen limited partners were first-time investors with the fund of funds. The firm’s backers include Royal Bank of Canada, Concordia University, Canadian Medical Association, and the Metcalf, Toronto, Waterloo Region Community, McConnell and Trottier Family foundations. “There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the importance of government initiatives to accelerate investment from Canadian wealth holders into domestic companies and projects that improve the lives of Canadians,” said Realize Capital’s Kelly Gauthier. “With this final close achieved, we believe Realize Fund I can provide a blueprint for achieving exactly that.”

• Social finance. Realize Capital says it has deployed $111 million into 23 funds. The portfolio includes Vancouver-based Raven Indigenous Capital Partners (Edge), which invests in early-stage Indigenous-led startups in Canada; Thrive Impact Fund (Edge), a place-based fund that invests in social enterprises in British Columbia; Regenerative Capital Group, another British Columbia-based fund that trains and finances local entrepreneurs looking to acquire small and mid-sized businesses in Canada. Gauthier said Realize Capital’s $276.7 million final close will expand the fund-of-funds’ portfolio, “enabling an inclusive and resilient economy of sustainable Canadian businesses that’s better able to tackle large, complex problems now and into the future.”
  
• Share.

New Forests launches first global natural capital fund. With a new global strategy, Australia-based New Forests (Edge) is evolving beyond the regional approach to forestry and agriculture investing it has pursued for the past two decades. The firm’s Global Landscape Opportunities fund will invest in forestry and agriculture, as well as carbon and biodiversity projects in an expanded set of markets, including Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. The fund will have earmarked allocations for emerging markets in Latin America, Asia and Africa. “There is a deepening understanding about natural capital as an asset class,” said New Forests’ David Shelton in a statement. The firm is looking to raise A$1 billion (about US$700 million) from institutional investors.

• Regional expertise. New Forests, which is majority-owned by Mitsui & Co. and Nomura, manages $7.2 billion in natural capital assets, and 11 million acres, through a series of regional investment strategies in Australia and New Zealand, the US, Southeast Asia and Africa. It is backed by Swedish pension fund AP2 (Edge), German pension group Bayerische Versorgungskammer, Australia-based Clean Energy Finance Corporation (Edge), Japan-based Kyushu Electric Power, and development finance institutions British International Investment (Edge), Norfund (Edge) and Finnfund (Edge). 

• More.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

• Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, put up $200 million for a stake in Greenlink, a company building sub-sea electricity infrastructure between the UK and Ireland. (Mubadala)

• Amsterdam-based Anterra Capital secured $100 million for its planned $200 million venture fund for startups supporting animal health, crop protection and other ways to improve sustainability and resilience in the food system. (WSJ)

• Societe Generale and French private equity firm Ardian launched an equity fund to invest in ecosystem preservation and restoration projects. Societe Generale committed €100 million ($116 million) to the fund. (Societe Generale) 

Impact Voices: Fund Management

How Capria is leveraging AI to support, not outsource, investment analysis. A little randomness can be useful in brainstorming. In investment decisions, it can be disastrous. One of the biggest challenges that Capria Ventures (Edge) has faced since going “AI native” in 2023 has been taming large language models that can produce different answers to the same question, explains Capria’s Francis Perelman. The firm has integrated AI into its workflows, from investing, marketing and investor relations to compliance and reporting. From the outset, the Seattle-based GP, which invests in the Global South, committed to “never outsource our thinking to it, let it reshape our thesis, or allow it to substitute our judgment,” Perelman writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “The call is still ours and will remain ours until we see the model making better decisions than we can.” 

• Math over magic. Capria breaks diligence into discrete metrics and applies the same scoring rules across every deal. The benchmarks draw on more than a decade of investment memos to reflect the fund’s own priorities rather than generic best practices. Scores are tied to source materials. “What we get back is not a long AI-generated report you have to decipher,” writes Perelman. “It is a transparent set of scores grounded in quantifiable data, with sources attached to every metric, that give you a clean read on a company in seconds.” Even then, judgment remains a human responsibility. “The model describes, compares, and flags,” writes Perelman. “It does not declare.”
  
• Keep reading, “How Capria is leveraging AI to support, not outsource, investment analysis,” by Capria’s Francis Perelman. This guest post is the second in a series from Sorenson Impact Foundation and its GPs that explore how the firms are using AI (disclosure: Sorenson Impact Foundation is an investor in ImpactAlpha). 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Michiru Toda joins the management team of SIIFIC Wellness Fund. He is continuing in his current roles at Japan Social Innovation and Investment Foundation, a co-manager of the Wellness Fund, and with GSG Impact Japan… Serena Ventures has an opening to support investment and due diligence on its team in New York… Education and skills-focused nonprofit Britebound is looking for a director of mission impact investing… The William Penn Foundation is recruiting a communications officer, based in Philadelphia… Village Capital is hiring an investment officer for its pilot Innovative Capital Facility for Northwest Arkansas.

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

Thank you for your impact!

– June 17, 2026