TGIF, Agents of Impact! You deserve a break, and so do we. ImpactAlpha will be on our summer publishing hiatus to let the team recharge for the busy fall ahead. While we’re gone fishing, look out for our series featuring some of our best stories of the year. We’ll be back on the beat Monday, Aug. 10.
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In today’s Brief:
- Roundup: Positive sum
- Podcasts: Eliza Foo, Roy Swan, Smitha Das and Adeshina Adewumi
- The race to commercialize nuclear fusion
🗣 Share the wealth. Torrential rains did not deter scores of impact leaders from the Ford Foundation’s launch of the new book by Roy Swan, who heads the foundation’s $1.3 billion mission investing portfolio. “Positive Sum” is a rebuttal to the mentality of zero-sum – for me to win, you must lose – that dominates thinking from Wall Street to the Department of War to Trump’s latest tariffs. “Humans are at their best when they’re collaborating, as opposed to competing,” Swan told the audience, which also heard from authors Antony Bugg-Levine and Jenna Nicholas. On our Agents of Impact podcast, Swan talked about weaving a much-needed economic primer with his compelling personal journey (disclosure: Ford is an investor in ImpactAlpha).
Positive sum economics are at the heart of impact investment. “There are no returns from a dead planet or a divided society,” Eliza Foo, who leads the impact investing team at Temasek, the $400 billion investment company in Singapore, told David Bank. Collective Action for Just Finance rounded up 25 transformative funds for which “financial returns and genuine systems change are not in tension, but in service of one another.” Indigenous-led Turtle Island Community Capital, for example, focuses on whether an investment “strengthens community control, creates durable local benefit, and helps reshape how capital flows in Indigenous communities,” Turtle Island’s Alexander Sterling told Tiffani Hart. In India, “Many of the most compelling businesses are solving essential problems: how people access healthcare, how small businesses get credit, how climate risks are managed,” Pooja Monga of Beyond Capital Ventures shared in a guest post. Much of Africa’s economic development is supported by a far-flung diaspora that sends back $95 billion a year, wrote ImpactAlpha contributor Mariyn Waite.
AI is often portrayed as the ultimate zero-sum game, in which a handful of tech titans get rich while society and the planet suffer. Human agency could help balance the accounts. Sami Saad of Raven Outcomes said the Indigenous-led impact investor moves forward only on AI projects that have “a net-positive contribution to the wellbeing of our communities and the restoration of a reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth, and with one another.” Consider: The rapid buildout of data centers to power AI is driving a resurgence in funding for renewable energy and clean tech, as Erik Stein reported. In Africa, Kenya Climate Ventures is helping dozens of climate adaptation startups become bankable, Lucy Ngige reported. Agents of Impact have been building a track record of outperformance with investments that share prosperity more broadly (July 29 is the deadline for reporting such results to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investing). Call it collinearity or win-win. Call it positive sum. Or call it impact alpha. It’s how the world moves forward. — Amy Cortese
This Week’s Podcasts
🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: How Temasek, Singapore’s $400 billion state-owned investment fund, positions itself as a generational investor; a look at three impact investing “beach reads,” out this week; and sustainable farm and timberland manager Alderpoint lands $4 million from the Rockefeller Foundation to ramp up land acquisitions in rural communities.
- Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
🦸 Agents of Impact: Roy Swan and Eliza Foo.
- The case for ‘positive-sum’ capitalism. Roy Swan, director of mission investments at the Ford Foundation and author of “Positive Sum: How Zero Sum Thinking Broke Capitalism, How We Can Fix It” joins the podcast to talk about shareholder primacy, “patriotic capitalism” and how AI is finally making externalities visible and actionable. Hear what he’s got to say.
- Where Temasek is looking for growth opportunities. Eliza Foo, who leads impact investing at Temasek speaks about the global investment company’s mission, Singapore’s impact ecosystem, and what’s next in emerging markets impact investing. Check it out.
🧑🎓Impact(ed): Smitha Das on the pros and cons of private equity. Private equity can feel as though it has always existed. But it hasn’t. The decades-old industry’s legacy of financial engineering may be giving way to new practices, where profits are generated by actually building better businesses, World Education Services’ Smitha Das tells hosts Rodney Foxworth and Eric Horvath.
Criterion Institute Podcast: Trade Lenda and the power of informal markets. What happens when finance starts with trust instead of control? Host Joy Anderson and Adeshina Adewumi explore how Trade Lenda has built financial infrastructure around the realities of informal markets in Nigeria.
The Week’s Spotlight
Race to commercialize fusion power goes thermonuclear. Add tokamak vs. stellarator to the list of legendary technology battles like VHS vs. Betamax, Windows vs. Mac, and Anthropic vs. OpenAI. The competition among startups racing to commercialize fusion power is heating up like the plasma in the magnetic fields of a fusion reactor. Those magnets can be donut-shaped, as in tokamaks, or twisted, in the case of stellarators. This month, Munich-based Proxima Fusion announced it had raised $468 million from investors including Google and RWE, the German utility, at a valuation of $2.7 billion, for its stellarator approach. Next week, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is expected to announce major new financing to build out its tokamak-based fusion reactor. Commonwealth has already raised nearly $3 billion, including an $863 million round last year, and has a valuation estimated at between $8 billion and $12.5 billion. Google is an investor in Commonwealth as well.
- Heated rivalry. The contest is raising geopolitical rivalries, with Europe seeking to secure its place in the fusion future, along with the US and China. Fueling it all is the insatiable appetite for energy from datacenters for artificial intelligence (see also, “AI power demand revives climate tech funding”). Adding to the competitive drama is that Proxima’s Francesco Sciortino and Commonwealth Fusion’s Bob Mumgaard both come out of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “Until 2022 I was in the world of tokamaks, and I had been taught that stellarators are just not reasonable,” Sciortino told ImpactAlpha. Last year, Proxima published the engineering design for its Stellaris reactor. “We wanted to convince the world that this is a new era for fusion.”
- Design challenge. Decades of work has gone into the donut-shaped tokamaks, which are considered easier to build (it’s all relative), but harder to control. Stellarators are easier to operate but harder to build. The three-dimensional magnets must be precisely designed, a formidable challenge. In 2022, a seminal research paper declared that the design challenges could be knocked down one step at a time. “As founders, we came together and we said, ‘We bet we can optimize for all of them at the same time, between physics and engineering,’” Sciortino said. “We are rephrasing the problem as a design one. We’re trying to use machine learning to come up with better designs that make the control effort completely redundant.”
- Keep reading and catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.
The Week’s Talent and Jobs
Djalal Khimdjee, formerly with Proparco, will take the helm of Africa50’s Principal Investment Fund in August… Reinvestment Fund appointed Frank Fernandez, formerly with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, as president and CEO, starting in September. He succeeds Donald Hinkle-Brown, who is launching a new consulting firm called Emergent Impacts.
Kari Groth Swan stepped down as executive director of the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority… Aligned Climate Capital welcomed Meg Sprotte, previously with Greenbacker, as an associate… Boston Impact Initiative tapped Leah Brickman as an impact investing intern… Laura Green Zeilinger joined Enterprise Community Partners as senior vice president of community impact and resident services.
The Social Finance Institute welcomed Maoz Michael Brown as a senior fellow… GLIN Impact hired Satsuki Aoyama as a senior associate… Appalachia Funders Network tapped Chelsea Naughton as narrative and communications coordinator… Kirk Hourdajian joined Climate Lead as its first vice president of impact-first investing… Imtiaz Saithna joined British International Investment as its Pakistan lead.
💼 See and share more than a dozen new impact jobs posted this week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub and view hundreds of more jobs in impact investing and sustainable finance. Have a job listing to post? Submit it here.
That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend.
– July 24, 2026
