Luis Javier Castro spent nearly 30 years doing private equity and infrastructure deals across Latin America as co-founder of Mesoamerica, a Bogotá-based firm he helped build into a regional force in energy, telecom, and infrastructure.
Brian Gallagher ran United Way for two decades, overseeing $5 billion a year in philanthropic capital.
When they left those roles to work together, they set out to rethink the structure and role of an impact investment fund entirely.
“Instead of jumping ahead and raising a traditional fund, we said: why don’t we design from scratch?” Castro tells ImpactAlpha.
They hired the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and gave it an untraditional brief: design an impact fund that draws on three concepts: collective impact, the practice of aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared problem; conscious capitalism, the idea that markets can be designed to put people and planet first; and systems thinking, the discipline of seeing problems as interconnected rather than isolated.
The design firm itself looked to biomimicry, or the way nature organizes itself, to shape the architecture of what became Abundance Circle.
The result is an evergreen, global fund of funds structured as a donor-advised fund and administered by ImpactAssets. The vehicle uses philanthropic capital to take first-loss positions in a portfolio of “consciously capitalist funds” organized around thematic clusters.
The goal is to prove that solving large planetary problems can generate market-rate returns, and use that proof to draw institutional investors in at scale.
“Instead of trying to create a new animal, we set out to build a bridge between philanthropy and conscious capitalism,” Castro tells ImpactAlpha. “We structured it as a fund of funds, designed it to be catalytic, and made Abundance Circle evergreen so it can operate for the long term.”
The model is already attracting early backing. The NoVo Foundation, the foundation co-chaired by Peter Buffett, has provided an anchor gift, and the fund has begun making commitments.
Abundance Circle is seeking to raise $100 million in philanthropic catalytic capital in its first year, with ambitions to scale to $1 billion within five years and $5 billion over the next decade. Castro presented the fund last month at the Latin American Impact Investing Forum in Mérida, Mexico, where more than 1,000 investors and practitioners gathered.
Activating the ecosystem
Rather than treating philanthropic and private investors as separate sources of capital, Abundance Circle is designed to have them operate in tandem.
The fund uses its philanthropic donor capital to play a catalytic role and takes first-loss positions in deals, absorbing early risk and making it easier for other investors to come in alongside it.
As investments generate returns, those proceeds are recycled back into the vehicle, creating a self-reinforcing pool of capital. The evergreen structure removes the pressure to exit on a fixed timeline, allowing investments to mature at a pace more aligned with social and environmental change.
The firm’s investment strategy focuses on three sectors: deep tech, which Castro defines as basic science applied to climate, food, health, and agriculture; energy transition and circular economy; and community-based economic development.
Within each theme, Abundance Circle plans to back three to four funds across different geographies, then actively connect them.
“By activating this ecosystem of foundations, funds, and companies, we expect to increase the probability of success of the whole system,” Castro says. “It becomes evident that you have to move from a siloed mentality to systems thinking.”
The team is currently analyzing roughly 20 funds and expects to make up to 10 initial commitments, holding 5% to 10% of each.
Castro hopes that pension funds will find a global cluster of market-rate impact funds easier to back than a single small vehicle in a single market. He worked with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in his prior role at Mesoamerica.
“If within a cluster you can bring together a North American fund, a Canadian fund, one in Latin America, and others in Africa, Asia or Europe, and frame it as a global strategy, I think that’s what will catch the attention of large investors,” Castro explains.
Individual emerging market funds are typically too small for institutional investors — ticket sizes fall well below minimum thresholds, and diligence costs are hard to justify at that scale. Grouping three or four funds per theme into a single global strategy gives large allocators a viable investment opportunity.
Guardians of humanity
Abundance Circle is building a layer of AI agents to connect foundations, fund managers, and portfolio companies in real time. Castro envisions a network of ten foundations, fifteen funds, and five hundred portfolio companies — each sharing data, contacts, and capital across the system to improve the odds of success at every level.
The fund holds quarterly gatherings it calls “collisions,” small curated meetings with outside thinkers. The first, held alongside the Latin American Impact Investing Forum in Mérida, drew Salim Ismail of Singularity University, Peter Buffet, and former GSG Impact CEO Amit Bahtia, among others.
“I believe that we have the possibility of going back to a more sustainable planet. If we look at this right, we can be like guardians of humanity,” Castro says.
Castro is based in Bogotá. Gallagher, who leads the fund’s philanthropic strategy and donor relations, is in Washington, DC. A third team member is based in London.
“Understanding how AI and all the innovation could help us reverse some of the big problems that we’ve caused in the last 200 years, and maybe move to a space in which we humans have more time to enjoy, to share, be more respectful with nature, with the other species that share with us this amazing house.”
