Greetings Agents of Impact!
🎥Motor city. ImpactAlpha’s award winning mini-documentary, “Equity and ownership: Napoleon Wallace and the Reconstruction of Black wealth,” will screen at Detroit’s Better Cities Film Festival, Sunday, Sept. 21 at 5pm ET. Reserve your tickets today.
In today’s Brief:
- Impact investing’s leadership moment
- Plastics alternatives in India
- Financing the future of community ownership
Featured: LP = Leadership Potential
GIIN’s Amit Bouri on how impact investors are meeting ‘this leadership moment.’ Private capital and private investors with the freedom to invest have a responsibility to lead. “This is a really important leadership moment for impact investing,” Amit Bouri of the Global Impact Investing Network tells ImpactAlpha, opening a conversation that can be expected to thread through this week’s Impact Week in Singapore, next week’s UN General Assembly and Climate Week in New York, and next month’s GIIN Impact Forum in Berlin and SOCAP in San Francisco. At stake: “How do we actually want to solve social and environmental problems, and how do we resource those solutions in a way that’s sustainable and scalable?” The US retreat from aid and climate finance, alongside global volatility, artificial intelligence and other disruptions, have triggered a reckoning. There are some indications that the pause in deployments earlier in the year as investors took stock of the new political climate may be easing. At least some impact leaders, Bouri says, are leaning into long-term opportunities amid short-term disruptions, particularly pension funds and other institutional investors. “While we do have tremendous volatility and uncertainty that everyone’s reckoning with, we are actually seeing quite a bit of interest and momentum from impact investors in many parts of the world.”
- Asia hub. In Singapore, the growing momentum of impact investing in the region will be on display at this week’s Impact Week festival. The government-owned investment vehicle Temasek, and other regional private and public investors including HSBC, poured more than $500 million dollars into Green Investment Partnership, a blended finance vehicle for sustainable infrastructure in Southeast and South Asia. Impact Week host Tsao Pao Chee Group, with its related entities Tsao Family Office and No. 17 Foundation, are keen to showcase how intergenerational wealth can be harnessed for human and planetary wellbeing (see, “Tsao Family Office expands the LP pool for impact strategies in Africa”). A new report details the impact strategies of eight wealthy Asian families, including the Tsao family, along with the families of RS Group’s Annie Chen, Gunung Capital’s Kelvin Fu and basketball star Jeremy Lin’s JLIN LLC. Speakers at Family Business Network Asia’s Impact International Forum include Ho Kwon of Banyan Group, Tharald Nustad of Katapult Group, and Kathlyn Tan of Rumah Group. “Many families and family businesses are thinking about their purpose and how impact investing fits how they want to contribute to the wellbeing of future generations,” Bouri says.
- Leaning in. In the US, investors are moving to fill gaps in climate finance. All Aboard Coalition last week launched to mobilize $300 million or more to co-invest alongside Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures and other climate tech VCs in climate tech startups building their first or second commercial plants. California’s two major public pension plans, CalPERS and CalSTRS, with combined assets nearing $1 trillion, are doubling down on emerging and diverse fund managers as a source of out-performance. In Europe, Dutch pension fund manager PGGM has overhauled its responsible investment team to boost impact considerations on par with risk and return across the portfolio. The result: PGGM dropped BlackRock and LGIM from its roster of managers as part of the sustainability realignment. The GIIN itself is working to mobilize capital for solution sets, not just to avoid bad investments. “Impact investors have been conditioned to operate in volatile environments – from currency fluctuations to political instability,” says Bouri. “That gives them an edge.”
- Keep reading, “GIIN’s Amit Bouri on how impact investors are meeting ‘this leadership moment,’ by Dennis Price.
Dealflow: Circular Economy
Avaana Capital stakes BacAlt to early financing to convert agricultural waste to consumer products. Bangalore-based BacAlt Biosciences uses fermentation to convert agricultural waste into alternatives to synthetic polymers used in textiles, cosmetics, detergents, dental care products, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. The female co-founded startup raised 180 million rupees ($2.1 million) in a pre-seed round led by women-led Avaana Capital. Lubrizol InnoVentures, the corporate venture capital arm of Ohio-based chemical manufacturer Lubrizol, joined in. “The demand for high-performance, cost-competitive ingredients is real, and we are building for scale, taking India from an import-dependent market to an export-ready bio-manufacturing hub,” said BacAlt’s Shruti Kutmutia. The two-year old startup says its fermentation technique uses half the energy of other fermentation processes.
- Waste to value. Avaana’s other circularity-focused investments include Dharaksha Ecosolutions, which makes biodegradable packaging from grain harvest waste; insect farming startup GreenGrahi; and WasteLink, which produces poultry and cattle feed from wasted food. Avaana closed its $135 million climate and sustainability fund last year, with $24.5 million from the Green Climate Fund and additional funding from the UK-India Development Cooperation Fund, the Self-Reliant India Fund, the Small Industries Development Bank of India, the Azim Premji Trust, and the US International Development Finance Corp. and others.
- More.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Biotech startup Lila Sciences raised $235 million to speed the discovery of new materials, drugs and chemistry using AI. The round, led by Braidwell and Collective Global, an investment firm co-owned by California pensions, values the company at $1.2 billion. (Bloomberg)
- Australian Retirement Trust has invested almost A$1 billion (US$660 million) in Macquarie’s Green Energy and Climate Opportunities Fund. The trust, Australia’s second-largest pension fund, is looking to invest another $1 billion in impact investments. (Financial Review)
- Chennai-based Unico Housing Finance secured backing from Anicut Capital and UC Impower to provide home mortgages to first-time homebuyers in India’s smaller towns and cities. (YourStory)
Signals: Ownership Economy
Financing the future of community ownership. Community land trusts. Co-ops. Resident-owned communities. Such solutions to housing reduce displacement, preserve long-term affordability, and provide steady equity gains for low-income households. Funds like Grounded Solutions Network’s Homes for the Future Fund and Enterprise Community Partners’ Renter Wealth Creation Fund are positioned to broaden access to these models (see, “Putting an ownership lens on the preservation of affordable housing”). Building market infrastructure to scale the sector is the essential next step, write Grounded Solutions Network’s Devin Culbertson and Integrated Purpose’s Devin Murphy in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. “Without shared definitions, standardized products and accessible capital pathways, innovative approaches remain underfunded,” they say. “Assembling capital for community ownership deals – which involves coordinating stakeholders across philanthropy, impact investing and institutional capital – takes much longer than it does for typical real estate ventures.”
- Aggregating capital. “We welcome the opportunity to invest more capital in community ownership housing funds with ambitious scaling goals,“ Neha Shah of Charles Schwab offered at a recent investor convening hosted by Grounded Solutions Network. “Better definitions, data on the track record of the industry, and well-supported fund managers with some early wins are all necessary to increasing the scale of our investment.” One opportunity: capital aggregation. Culbertson and Murphy argue that “aggregating national opportunity pipelines, grouping opportunities with similar capital needs, and offering fewer, clearer investment lanes would streamline capital deployment.”
- Keep reading, “Financing the future of community ownership,” by Grounded Solutions Network’s Devin Culbertson and Integrated Purpose’s Devin Murphy.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Join ImpactAlpha at these upcoming partner events:
- Sept. 29 – Oct. 1: Neighborhood Economics, Chicago. ImpactAlpha subscribers can use the code IA495 for $200 off (expires Sept. 22h).
- Oct. 3: Swiss Impact Investment Association’s Impact Summit, Lausanne.
- Oct. 7: Ownership Economy Summit, New York. ImpactAlpha subscribers can use the code IA-2025OESummit for 30% off.
- Oct. 7-9: GIIN Impact Forum, Berlin. ImpactAlpha subscribers are invited to use the code Berlin-IMPACTALPHA for 15% off (the code is good for first 50 signups).
- Oct. 27-29: SOCAP25, San Francisco.
Andres Baehr, managing partner of Savia Ventures, is appointed head of climate tech of the Mexican Association of PE & VC Funds… Blume Equity taps Jenny Keisu, former and CEO of Summa Equity, as an advisor… Joseph Rowntree Foundation welcomes Erinch Sahan, previously with Doughnut Economics Action Lab, as associate director of investments… Align Impact adds Efrata Kirose, previously with Working Within, as a client service associate.
Breakthrough Energy’s 2025 cohort of climate innovation fellows include Beyond Silicon’s Jason Yu, Qarbotech’s Suraya Abdul Rashid, and Teragon Energy’s Luis Delfin… Pivotal Ventures seeks an investment platform manager in Washington, DC… Also in DC, the Gates Foundation is looking for a senior program officer for policy and sector engagement… UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has an opening for a sustainable and impact finance lecturer.
Environmental Resources Management is looking for a New York-based partner to grow its M&A advisory business… CommonSpirit Health is recruiting a community investment analyst in San Francisco… Conservation International is hiring a director of Indigenous and community-based ocean governance… Brookfield is on the hunt for a director of ESG and risk management in Toronto… CEO Africa and AVPA are seeking case study examples on blended financing in Africa for a forthcoming report.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– Sept. 15. 2025
