Greetings Agents of Impact!
In today’s Brief:
- Rey Ramsey on the tyranny of false choices
- Faster and safer battery charging
- Recycling steel waste streams
- A toolkit for impact-first investors
Featured: Impact LP
Rey Ramsey on moving from false choices to authentic leadership for AI and impact investing (podcast). Rey Ramsey has spent his career refusing the options he’s been handed. Instead, he’s expanded the range of available choices – in housing, technology, philanthropy and now, impact investing, as president of the $483 million Nathan Cummings Foundation. In his latest book, “The tyranny of false choices,” Ramsey plays out his underlying logic: that the either/or framing that dominates public debate, and private decision-making, is manufactured, agenda-laden and often worth rejecting in favor of what he calls “authentic decision making”. The operative words, he says, “and what I say is an antidote to making these inauthentic and false choices, is liberation of thought. Liberate your thought from all the biases [and] the algorithms, which are feeding you what you already believe.” Ramsey joins David Bank on the latest Agents of Impact podcast to talk about his book, AI governance, and the political pressures facing foundations today. Nathan Cummings has continued to describe its mission as advancing racial, economic and environmental justice, while ensuring its practices comply with nonprofit and civil rights law. “Let’s continue to do the right thing,” he says. “If we’re doing proper diligence and analysis with our work, why would we have anything to be worried about?”
- Mission alignment. Nathan Cummings Foundation is a founding partner of Impact LP, ImpactAlpha’s platform for asset owners for whom LP stands for “leadership potential.” In a world of tribal thinking, Ramsey says, authentic decision making resists familiar ideological positions. Rather than reacting to information that’s “loaded with an agenda,” decision makers should pause, examine the evidence and “expand your aperture.” In the early 2000s, as co-founder of One Economy, Ramsey insisted broadband had to be in the home, not only in libraries or community centers – a position that put him in conflict with the Gates Foundation and AOL, which at the time were pushing center-based models as the consensus choice. As CEO of Nathan Cummings Foundation, he’s built an “asset management” function for grants and program-related investments. In 2018, the foundation committed to 100% mission alignment of its endowment. In 2021, Ramsey oversaw the replacement of the foundation’s longtime investment advisor with Bivium Westfuller, a woman of color-led investment firm that has since built an impressive client list.
- Anthropic impact. Two years ago, Nathan Cummings, alongside Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network, took a small stake in Anthropic when most foundations were still debating whether to engage with AI at all. The foundation’s $1 million stake could return 30 times or more when the AI giant goes public (see, “SpaceX, Anthropic IPOs set to unlock billions in liquidity for impact LPs”). The investment was never primarily about financial returns, Ramsey says, but about ensuring foundations had “a seat at the table” as AI governance evolves. Public opinion on AI has largely been split between uncritical optimism and existential fear. “We know that it’s transformative. We know that it does increase productivity,” he says. AI, he argues, could lower barriers to entrepreneurship, expand educational opportunity and help more people build wealth. “If we play this right and make the right choices, it can enhance our agency rather than replace our agency. Those are choices. That is not destiny.”
- Keep reading and listen to, “Rey Ramsey on moving from false choices to authentic leadership on AI and impact investing,” by David Bank and Isaac Silk. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify or YouTube. And hear more from Impact LP members, including WES’ Smitha Das, Kathleen Simpson of The Russell Family Foundation, and Bryan Goh of Tsao Family Office.
Dealflow: Energy Transition
Gaussion lands $28 million to speed battery charging and boost performance. Batteries are a vital commodity powering everything from electric vehicles to drones and satellites. But as anyone with a smartphone knows, batteries have a limited life and degrade over time. London-based Gaussion spun out of the University College London in 2022 to advance its magnetic technology that makes lithium batteries charge faster while prolonging their useful life. Gaussion raised £21 million ($28 million) in a round led by UK-based investors AlbionVC and BGF. US-based deep tech investor Future Ventures, mobility-focused Autotech Ventures, the UCL Technology Fund, and DN Capital participated. “The battery decides whether the giant computers behind AI can keep running, whether a drone can stay in the sky, and whether a satellite survives out in space,” said Gaussion’s Tom Heenan. “Every battery faces a physics ceiling, and we move that ceiling.”
- Industry applications. Gaussion uses tiny electromagnets to help lithium-ion batteries charge faster while generating less heat, which is often the culprit in degradation. “With much of the global battery industry focused on advances in cell chemistry, technologies extracting more from existing cells are attracting greater attention,” the Albion VC team said. Its applications span EVs, drones and data centers. Gaussion was part of the Faraday Institution’s fellowship program, which is supported by the UK government to support research, development and early-stage commercialization of battery storage technologies (see, “Battery makers and investors pivot from EVs to grid storage for renewable energy in Europe“).
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SKF Ventures backs Anferra to recycle steel waste for industrial uses. Swedish industrial conglomerate SKF Group launched SKF Ventures late last year to back early and growth-stage companies in industrial innovation, manufacturing optimization and sustainability. It aims to build a pipeline of future business opportunities from the outside in. The corporate venture arm’s first investment is in Anferra, a Swedish startup that uses water-based chemistry to recycle steel-grinding sludge, a hazardous byproduct of manufacturing metal products such as turbines or gears that has long lacked a viable recycling path. “Grinding sludge is one of the toughest recycling challenges in the steel and bearing industry,” said SKF Ventures’ Mikael Krook. “Anferra’s approach represents a way forward and positions us well to drive circularity and decarbonization.” Stephen Industries, a Finnish family office, joined SKF in the round alongside Swedish VC firm Chalmers Ventures.
- Upcycling. Anferra’s patented process converts steel grinding sludge into ferric chloride, a widely used water and wastewater treatment chemical. It also produces hydrogen gas, which can be captured and used as an energy carrier. Anferra says its technology uses relatively little energy and recovers up to 90% of the iron in steel grinding sludge, creating a valuable resource stream. “Our ambition is to significantly reduce the landfilling of grinding sludge while increasing circularity and resource efficiency on a global scale,” said Anferra’s Ebba Adolfsson.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Norwegian climate tech startup EQON clinched $6 million in seed financing from Azolla Ventures, Wilstar Innovate, Climentum and Gain Venture Capital to reduce energy waste and emissions from industrial heating cables. (EQON)
- Dutch impact firm Oxano Capital invested in Delta Bee, a Uganda-based company that offers equipment, market access and other support for smallholder beekeepers. (Oxano Capital)
- Houston-based Altillion secured $5 million in seed funding, led by EIC Rose Rock and Flathead Forge, to extract critical minerals from oilfield-produced water, geothermal brine and other liquid waste streams. (Altillion)
Impact Voices: Impact First
Building the toolkit for impact-first investing. A resurgence in impact-first investing means more investors are thinking about how and where their capital can be most purposeful. It can also be lonely, uncharted work. An interactive tool for the impact-first curious aims to reduce the guesswork. The aptly-named “impact-first finance tool” from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the Social Finance Institute allows investors to simulate different portfolio allocations to better understand how they affect financial and impact returns. It attempts to “turn an abstract guessing game into economic scenario modeling,” explain Chicago Booth’s Robert Gertner and Social Finance’s Tracy Palandjian in a guest post. “If there is an investible solution to a given challenge, then what is the effect of moving some capital into that solution?” A foundation that shifted even 10% of its $100 million endowment to impact-first investments, for example, would deliver greater overall impact than a traditional grants-plus-investments strategy. “The IFI tool can help make conversations about impact and return clearer,” the authors write, and chart “whether the right type of capital is being used.”
- Cost / benefit. The tool, funded by Lukas Walton’s Builders Vision, builds on efforts by a core group of family offices and foundations to demystify impact-first investing and encourage peers to engage (see, “The surprising resurgence of impact-first investing“). Early impact-first mover Ceniarth revealed in its report, “Now more than ever,” how it’s supporting financial inclusion for smallholder farmers by renewing a credit facility for lender Acceso. The family office stepped up after Acceso lost more than $4 million in funding from USAID. It also invested $1.8 million in Fòs Feminista’s procurement service Innova Health Supplies, to help reproductive health organizations secure contraceptives at bulk pricing. Ceniarth’s portfolio of $320 million in impact-first investments represents 40% of the family office’s assets. “We do it for impact,” say Ceniarth’s Diane Isenberg and Greg Neichin. “Impact comes first because without it, there is no point.” (Disclosure: Ceniarth supports ImpactAlpha’s Impact-First Investing coverage.) Go deeper.
- Keep reading, “Building the toolkit for impact-first investing,” by Robert Gertner and Tracy Palandjian.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Enterprise Community Partners promotes Ayonna Blue Donald to vice president and market leader for the Midwest region… Pymwymic welcomes Josep Segarra, previously with SG Advisory, as an investment manager… GLIN Impact adds Yutaka Ishikawa, formerly with McKinsey & Co., as an associate… Olivia Matta, a USC Marshall School of Business MBA student, will join Supply Change Capital as a summer fellow.
Ford Foundation is hiring a program associate for mission investments in New York… BlueHub Capital seeks a credit director in Boston… NeighborWorks Capital is looking for a senior portfolio manager in Maryland… Clean Energy Group is recruiting an impact associate… Galvanize Climate Solutions is on the hunt for an analyst or associate for investor partnerships.
Black Farmer Fund seeks an impact lending and relationship associate and a seasonal community engagement intern… KKR has an opening for an impact portfolio management analyst in London… Phenix Capital Group is looking for an impact investing research and programming manager in Amsterdam.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– June 30, 2026
