Greetings Agents of Impact!
Get PluggedIn: Latin America is the climate market US investors can’t afford to ignore. From bio-based materials to urban mining and distributed energy, Latin America is a proving ground for bold climate innovation. For the next PluggedIn, Savia Ventures’ Andres Baehr joins Sherrell Dorsey to detail Savia’s investment thesis, as well as practical steps for US and European investors trying to maintain momentum in the face of climate headwinds. Get PluggedIn, today, Dec. 2, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP for login details.
In today’s Brief:
- Factoring children into investment decisions
- Biotech investments to discover treatments for ALS
- Prime Coalition and Small Foundation get surgical about catalytic capital
Featured: Child-Lens Investing
Investing with a ‘child lens’ can deliver better outcomes for all generations. Today’s children are tomorrow’s youth and the future’s adults. Issues affecting children often get short shrift because young people can’t cast ballots or vote with their dollars. But as they’ve grown into young adults, Gen Z is showing up in the streets and forcing people to pay attention. In Nepal. In Bangladesh. In Kenya. In Madagascar, and elsewhere. Child-lens investing is an attempt to get ahead of young people’s social and economic development. The strategy takes a long-term investment view, focusing on businesses and projects that improve the lives of younger generations through better access to nutritious food, healthcare, education, safe digital and physical environments, and protection from exploitation and violence. “As a society, we still don’t treat children as the unique stakeholders that they are,” says Sjoerd Rosing of Netherlands-based Triodos Investment Management, which manages almost $7 billion in assets as an affiliate of the Dutch bank Triodos.
- Diverse portfolio. Triodos’ Future Generations Fund has adopted the child-lens investing framework, developed by UNICEF in collaboration with over 100 stakeholders, including Finnish development finance agency Finnfund (see, “Unicef leads investors to see their investments through children’s eyes”). It has reframed investment decision-making to consider the impact of companies’ operations, supply chains and policies on children and their caregivers. The fund backed SABESP, a Brazilian water utility and sewage services provider, because it supports children’s access to clean water. The basis for its investment in Kenyan telecommunications company Safaricom is better connectivity and access to digital services for households. For cybersecurity company Gen Digital, it’s about protecting children’s privacy and online safety. The open-ended fund has raised €95 million ($110 million) and made 35 investments since 2022. Rosing says it is one of Triodos’ best performing funds; the child-lens strategy gives Triodos the flexibility to invest in a diverse portfolio of companies that all touch on the lives of children.
- Nutritional gains. “Persistent child malnutrition can exacerbate social inequalities and contribute to social unrest, political instability and conflict, which can disrupt markets, supply chains and investment environments,” the Global Alliance for Nutrition found in a report with Criterion Institute last year. “It seems likely that not attending to the nutrition of young people would not be good for social stability,” GAIN’s Roberta Bove tells ImpactAlpha. GAIN in 2023 joined up with Swiss impact investor Incofin on its Nutritious Foods Financing Facility, which focuses on improving nutrition and food security for children and other vulnerable populations in Africa. The blended-finance fund has raised $11.5 million, with backing from the Eleanor Crook Foundation and the now defunct USAID. Bove said children consume nearly half of the products of the fund’s portfolio companies. Kenya-based Soy Afric provides fortified flours and porridges and blended foods for vulnerable communities in East Africa. Tanzania-based Rainbow Haulage sources grains from smallholder farmers and supplies them to school feeding programs.
- Anxious generation. Concerns over the negative impact of smart phones and digital immersion on young people cross partisan and geographic lines, especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” Hopelab, a nonprofit research and investment organization, is seeking to mobilize financing for “upstream” interventions that could have an impact on youth mental health (disclosure: Hopelab supports ImpactAlpha’s coverage of Healthy Youth). Finnfund is working to build a child-lens into its Digital Access Impact Fund, an €80 million fund fund for digital tools and infrastructure in emerging markets. “The whole agenda of promoting inclusive digital access or family-friendly workplaces is to address the root causes that are creating frustration among young people,” says Finnfund’s Kaisa Alavuotunki.
- Keep reading, “Investing with a ‘child-lens’ can deliver better outcomes for all generations,” by Lucy Ngige.
Dealflow: Investing in Health
ALS Investment Fund closes third fund to finance innovation for neurodegenerative disease. The Amsterdam-based venture capital invests in biotech companies developing treatments for the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS. The disease causes nerve cell degeneration, eventually leading to muscle wasting and paralysis. There is no cure for the disease, which affects roughly two to five of every 100,000 people, with no known genetic cause. ALS Investment Fund has raised $70 million for its third fund to advance promising treatments for the disease. “Our goal is to invest in companies where, in our view, the science has undergone significant de-risking while remaining positioned ahead of its largest value inflection point,” the team wrote. “We are confident that we are at a tipping point.”
- The investment case. ALS Investment Fund is led by neuroscientist and ALS researcher Melanie Leitner, neuroscience startup founder Felix von Coerper, and private equity veteran Craig Boyce. “All three of us have been touched by ALS through colleagues, friends and Craig’s father, who was taken by the disease,” the team shared. (ImpactAlpha’s documentary, “Equity and ownership,” tracks Napoleon Wallace’s resilience in the face of ALS.) “ALS is only considered to be a rare disease because patients pass away so quickly… It is actually not all that rare of a disease,” they wrote. “So, we started to believe in an investor-return potential with asymmetric upside.” They point to increased awareness about the disease and development of drug therapies in the past decade, some of which could be relevant to other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
- ALS portfolio. The investment manager has 10 portfolio companies, including four from its third fund. Cambridge, Mass.-based QurAlis and New York-based ProJenX are focused primarily on ALS treatment discovery. San Diego-based Bloom Science’s research focuses on the gut microbiome and how it “modulates key processes in metabolism, the immune system, nervous system and brain.” It is studying obesity and metabolic syndromes, a rare form of severe epilepsy known as Dravet syndrome, ALS, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. VectorY in Amsterdam is researching “disease-modifying treatments” for ALS, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Afreximbank closed its second Samurai bond, raising $527 million through the Japanese markets to finance African trade. (Afreximbank)
- Zurich-based Candi Solar raised $58.5 million in a round led by the International Finance Corp. to develop commercial and industrial solar projects for companies in India and South Africa. (Candi Solar)
- Chilean biotech startup Frankles secured $1 million in early-stage funding to convert agrifood waste and byproducts into compounds to make new products and ingredients. (Startups Latam)
- Eluvo secured new funding to expand its fertility services, family planning and other health services for women in the Philippines. (e27)
Impact Voices: Catalytic Capital
Catalytic capital, clarified. From climate innovation to rural African enterprise development, “Addressing capital gaps,” a new guide from the Catalytic Capital Consortium, provides impact-first practitioners with a common framework for why capital isn’t flowing, and strategic interventions to unlock it. “It supports our commitment to be intentional, to intervene only where we add value, and to collaborate where others are better placed to act,” writes Karina Wong of Dublin-based Small Foundation. Her guest post, and a separate post from Anna Goldstein and Alban Yau of Prime Coalition, are part of a series of essays accompanying the guide. Wong explores how overcoming misalignments and mindset barriers can lead to more disciplined, targeted and impactful catalytic investing (disclosure: Catalytic Capital Consortium, or C3, sponsors ImpactAlpha’s coverage of catalytic capital).
- Surgical interventions. Prime Coalition has spent more than a decade deploying catalytic capital for climate innovation. The organization has repeatedly addressed new gaps as investors crowded into once-challenging sectors. “Effective catalytic investing starts by understanding why capital is not already flowing from other sources, both public and private,” write Prime’s Goldstein and Yau. Prime’s latest initiative, Trellis Climate, was launched to address the fraught stage for climate tech startups ready to build their first-of-a-kind, or FOAK, plants. “Before Trellis made a single investment, we commissioned in-depth capital gap substantiation research to identify where the blockages were most severe for FOAK projects,” the authors write. Existing infrastructure capital was misaligned with the needs of emerging climate infrastructure, the research found. Trellis provides development capital to help companies meet key commercial milestones and construction capital to derisk projects for access to private project finance capital. With GreenieRe, Trellis is building a new insurance program to free up capital for climate startups (see, “GreenieRe sees ‘impact insurance’ surety bonds as key to scaling climate tech”). Read on.
- Systems change. Rural African entrepreneurs are still overlooked by legacy investors. Catalytic capital is essential to unlock their potential, argues Wong. Through its work, Small Foundation quickly learned that the problem wasn’t a lack of capital but the wrong kind – ticket sizes too big, risk appetites too narrow, time horizons too short, and investor mindsets biased against rural markets. Those lessons pushed the foundation toward a systems-change strategy and a suite of catalytic tools, as well as partnerships with groups like Equity for Africa Group, I&P, Open Capital Advisors and Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (watch our video interview with Wong). Catalytic capital, Wong writes, is about being “usefully different,” collaborating and intervening only where a funder adds distinct value. Learn more.
- Collect the whole set. Catch up with earlier “Addressing capital gaps” guest posts from C3’s Harvey Koh, Ownership Capital Lab’s Alison Lingane and Transform Finance’s Julie Menter, and Spring Point Partners’ Margot Kane.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Renaissance Philanthropy welcomes Jason Palmer as a part-time senior advisor… Michelle Okere returns to Indigenous Prosperity Foundation as executive director… Accenture promotes Helen Elizabeth Old to strategy manager… The Homeownership Council of America adds Living Cities’ Joe Scantlebury and Guild Mortgage’s Nora Guerra to its national advisory council.
Energy Impact Partners is looking for an energy supply strategy associate in Atlanta… WaterEquity is recruiting a vice president of investor relations… Sustainable Conservation seeks a policy director in San Francisco… Dss+ is hiring a sustainable finance manager… Blue Earth Capital is on the hunt for a private credit vice president for the Americas… Camelback Ventures has an opening for a chief external affairs officer, a director of programs and a development manager in New Orleans.
The Regional MSME Investment Fund is awarded 2X Certification for gender-lens investing… Reframe Venture, through a partnership with ImpactVC and Project Liberty, is out with a survey of how investors are thinking about AI development.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– Dec. 2, 2025
