The Brief

ImpactAlpha LP/GP: The flip side of climate disruption: adaptation alpha

ImpactAlpha · November 12, 2025

Greetings, Agents of Impact! 

Welcome to this week’s ImpactAlpha LP/GP, where we take you inside the real business of impact investing and the dynamic relationships between owners, managers and intermediaries of impact capital.

☎️ Today’s Agents of Impact Call: Catalyzing local growth funds for growth firms in Africa. Join growth fund managers from Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya who are unlocking domestic and institutional capital to finance small businesses. WIC Capital’s Evelyne Dioh Simpa, Mirepa Investment Advisors’ Enyonam Kakane, Aruwa Capital Management’s Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, and Kenya Climate Ventures’ Victor Ndiege join the Collaborative for Frontier Finance’s Drew von Glahn and ImpactAlpha’s David Bank and Lucy Ngige to discuss what’s working, what’s not, and how catalytic capital can do more, today at 6am PT / 9am ET / 3pm Lagos / 5pm Nairobi. RSVP for login details.

In this week’s newsletter:

  • S2G Investments’ theory of change 
  • From biotech to bioeconomy
  • Vox Capital’s credit fund for regenerative agriculture
  • Benefit funds provide accountability for LPs 

Adaptation alpha: S2G Investments looks for outperformance as climate change drives ‘system-level shifts.’ The flip side of the rising risks and escalating damage from a changing climate is the huge opportunity to help industries and ecosystems adapt. This “Age of Adaptation” is defined by both “volatility and extraordinary opportunity,” Chicago-based S2G Investments declares in its first annual report since spinning out of Builders Vision, the family office of Walmart heir Lukas Walton. “This is a moment of massive reallocation of resources, and we see significant opportunity for those willing to lean in.” The firm, which has reached $2.5 billion in committed capital across a half-dozen funds, has become one of the most active climate investors backing companies positioned to lead the transition required in food, agriculture, energy and ocean resources. “Resilience and resource productivity will define the next era of alpha generation,” S2G’s Heather McPherson tells ImpactAlpha.

  • Portfolio performance. S2G has come fast out the gate as an independent fund manager. The firm has 106 portfolio companies, including 65 in food and agriculture, 23 in energy, and 18 connected to oceans. This year, it invested $40 million in Sojo Industries, which uses robotics to streamline packaging, eliminating millions of freight miles and reducing waste. “As complexity grows, brands need more agility,” said S2G’s Matthew Walker when the deal was signed. In June, S2G led a $16 million round for Washington DC-based Mealogic, which partners with healthcare providers to deliver medically tailored meals to patients with chronic conditions. “Food and healthcare have traditionally operated as separate systems, yet they are deeply intertwined, ” said Walker.
  • Theory of change. S2G’s annual report champions a “systems-based” approach that examines entire value chains to understand how investments can drive long-term transformation. “In practice,” McPherson says, “this means mapping system frictions, such as inefficient energy access or unsustainable input use, and aligning each investment’s value creation pathway to measurable changes in productivity, resilience and resource efficiency.” S2G’s managing partners say investing for the future requires capital that is adaptive and catalytic. “The next 30 years will look nothing like the last,” they write in the report. “This era will demand bold ideas, adaptive strategies, fit-for-purpose capital, and collective action. It is both a test of resilience and a catalyst for reinvention.”
  • Keep reading, “Adaptation Alpha: S2G Investments looks for outperformance as climate change drives ‘system-level shifts,” by Erik Stein.

Dealflow: Impact Tech

Forbion raises $234 million for first ‘bioeconomy’ fund. Dutch venture capital firm Forbion has invested in life sciences and biotech for 25 years. With its new BioEconomy Fund, it is applying that experience to solutions that improve planetary health. “Biotechnology is moving beyond healthcare to tackle global challenges in food, materials and resource efficiency,” said Forbion’s Alexander Hoffmann. Forbion surpassed its initial target of €150 million to close the fund at €200 million ($233.8 million). Investors included French family-owned impact fund Aurae Impact, Dutch bank ABN AMRO, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, KfW Capital, Novo Holdings, and the German state-owned bank Rentenbank. 

  • Software to science. Forbion has deployed more than €5 billion across 11 funds, mostly focusing on clinical-stage therapeutics companies. The BioEconomy fund will invest in a dozen or more Series A and B-stage companies developing sustainable solutions in food, agriculture and materials. Initial investments include Eeden, which recycles clothes made from recycling of cotton and polyester blends; bioinsecticide company SOLASTA Bio; plant-based meat producer Novameat; and PACT, a producer of collagen-based materials that can replace leather and plastics. Said Forbion’s Joy Faucher, “Capital is shifting from software to science.”
  • Gift this article.

Vox Capital raises $50 million to help farmers restore Brazil’s degraded farmland. São Paulo-based Vox Capital is taking a second run at financing Brazil’s regenerative agriculture transition. The impact investing pioneer launched the Catalytic Capital for the Agricultural Transition fund, or CCAT, with $50 million in anchor commitments from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative, the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, and local funders Instituto Arapyaú and Porticus. Vox hopes to scale the fund to $1 billion by 2028, blending concessional and commercial capital to finance sustainable land use in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado biomes (see ImpactAlpha’s video interview with Vox’s Daniel Izzo). The fund will extend flexible debt to farmers and supply-chain partners to restore degraded pastureland and scale regenerative soy, cattle and agroforestry production across the two regions. 

  • Blended finance. Vox’s first experiment in regenerative agriculture – an equity fund co-developed with land management firm Regai – sought to acquire degraded pasture land, restore it, and generate returns by selling the farms. The concept proved too early for investors and failed to attract sufficient capital to launch. Vox’s debt-based approach aims to leverage blended finance tools such as subordinated loans and guarantees to de-risk participation by mainstream lenders.
  • More.

Lightsmith gets $3 million to advance ‘one-stop-shop’ for climate adaptation. The Global Environment Facility and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided a $3 million grant to help New York-based Lightsmith Group advance its new fund for climate adaptation and resilience. The fund, known as SCALE, aims to provide equity, debt and technical assistance to companies building adaptation solutions (for background see, “​​Financing climate adaptation and resilience”). “Getting the right type and mix of capital needed to scale up each of these companies and technologies – that is the opportunity,” Lightsmith’s Sanjay Wagle told ImpactAlpha from Belém, Brazil, where the COP30 global climate talks are underway. Lightsmith’s expects to fully deploy another fund, its $186 million Climate Resilience venture fund, by year end.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • Pachama, a carbon credit startup backed by Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and others, is being acquired by carbon management advisor Carbon Direct, in what could signal a broader consolidation in the voluntary carbon market. (Carbon Direct)
  • Lowercarbon Capital is raising a second fusion energy fund, amid growing investor appetite for fusion (see, “As fusion energy advances, so does its capital stack”). (Bloomberg)
  • Japan’s Nippon Life Insurance invested 53 billion yen ($344 million) in DWS’s European Transition Infrastructure Finance Fund, a debt fund for European infrastructure companies whose emission reduction goals align with the Paris Agreement. (Nippon)

Impact Voices: Fund Structures

How ‘benefit funds’ align stakeholders and provide transparency for LPs. You’ve heard of public benefit corporations that bake their social missions into their charters. But what about public benefit funds? Delaware, where many US businesses are incorporated, introduced the public benefit limited partnership in 2019. Four years later, law firm Cole-Frieman & Mallon adapted the structure for venture capital funds, helping Samaritan Partners launch its first fund, which is likely the first institutional-level benefit fund. Like public benefit corporations, benefit funds provide a designated public benefit, such as improving education, the environment, health or specific communities. Benefit fund managers have an enforceable duty “to balance public benefit, the impact on stakeholders, and the financial interests of limited partners,” Cole-Frieman & Mallon’s Jon Tong and Frank Martin write in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. Benefit funds, they say, “offer a legal framework that aligns with purpose-driven investing while providing enhanced certainty, transparency and accountability for limited partners.”

  • Stakeholder alignment. “A big reason I set it up this way was for stakeholder alignment,” Samaritan Partners’ Chris Maher tells ImpactAlpha. That includes Maher and his team, their investors, portfolio companies and the community they aim to serve. “Everyone’s on the same page from the get-go.” The first-time fund invests in early stage companies building products, services and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. Initial investments include Wheel The World, a disability-focused online travel site, and Vertical Harvest, a vertical farming company that employs people with disabilities. Maher said the fund has attracted capital from wealthy individuals and families, many of whom, like Maher, have a connection to the disability community. Maher has two daughters with disabilities.
  • Read the whole post.    

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

💃🏽 Step up, step out – again. We’re reprising our successful SOCAP happy hour with an encore for Bay Area locals (and visitors!) with Morgan Simon and Iya Lingua. Join ImpactAlpha, Candide Group, Toniic, ImpactAssets, Echoing Green and the SF Impact Crew for jazz, soul and informal networking, Sunday, Nov. 16, from 4-8pm PT at Cigar Bar (no smoking on Sundays), 850 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. Admission is free, but please RSVP here.  

Steven Meier has left the New York City Retirement Systems, where he was chief investment officer… Harry Davies will step down at the end of this year as principal of Ceniarth, the impact family office of Diane Isenberg… The Rockefeller Foundation is searching for a vice president of catalytic finance in New York… Gap Inc. is recruiting a sustainability and climate senior analyst in San Francisco. 

The Center for Community Wealth Building is on the hunt for an anchor strategy director in Denver… Federated Hermes seeks a sustainability analyst in Pittsburgh, Pa… Stanford University has an opening for a nature finance specialist… Inspired Evolution is looking for an ESG and impact manager in Cape Town.

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

Thank you for your impact!

– Nov. 12, 2025