The Milan-based sustainable investment firm surpassed its €450 million goal for the new strategy, which will invest in small, private businesses that improve resource efficiency or reduce pollution and emissions.
For Ambienta, a €4 billion asset manager which started out two decades ago backing sustainable family owned businesses in Europe and helping them scale, the new fund is a return to its roots of sorts.
“Europe is undergoing a quiet renaissance, with small-cap companies leading the charge and supporting domestic economies,” Ambienta’s Laurent Donin de Rosiere told ImpactAlpha. Such “environmental champions,” he says, offer global investors a unique window into the continent’s evolving economic vitality and sectoral transformation.”
The new fund raised the equivalent of $590 million from a mix of US and European endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and banks. The small cap strategy will invest in eight to 10 companies with revenues of up to €150 million and an enterprise value of €50 million to €100 million.
Trenchless water tech
The new fund will be able to invest in companies that are too small for Ambienta’s midcap fund, the fourth edition of which, Ambienta IV, clinched €1.55 billion in 2022.
Last week, the mid cap fund acquired a majority stake in Stockholm-based water infrastructure firm No Dig Alliance from Equip Capital, a Norwegian private equity fund that helped launch the alliance in 2021. The water companies that make up the No Dig Alliance use various techniques to install, maintain and upgrade underground pipes with minimal or no digging. The deal is Ambienta’s first in the Nordics. About a quarter of treated water in Europe is lost due to leaks in distribution systems.
