Greetings Agents of Impact! Join ImpactAlpha’s Dennis Price, Amy Cortese and other team members and fellow Agents of Impact for a New York happy hour, Thursday evening, June 12. RSVP here.
📞 The Call: Ramping up green lending – even without that $20 billion. The pipeline was robust for the networks of green banks and community lenders set to deploy the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The abrupt shift in federal policy stranded deals representing tens of billions of dollars in community investment that stood to reduce energy costs, improve air quality, create jobs and boost resilience in communities across the US. That makes the moment ripe for opportunistic investors and for a rethink of impact investing more broadly. Join Climate United’s Beth Bafford, Justice Climate Fund’s Amir Kirkwood, NYCEEC’s Curtis Probst and other community climate investors who are shaping a new market for green lending – even as litigation continues, Wednesday, June 11 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.
In today’s Brief:
- Nine Dean’s ‘quality jobs’ holding company
- Scaling nutritious food production
- Getting the most impact per dollar invested
Featured: Returns on Inclusion
Backed by Ford Foundation, Nine Dean is building a holding company around quality jobs. Berkshire Hathaway has long had a hold on the imagination of impact investors, and not just for its $1 trillion-plus market capitalization. As a permanent holding company, Berkshire Hathaway can take ownership of companies, improve operations and hold for the long term, without the deadlines imposed by the 10-year structure of typical private equity funds. Efforts to create “the Berkshire Hathaway of impact” have foundered on asset owners’ concerns about liquidity – most want to know when they’re going to get their money back. The Ford Foundation is taking a longer view, making its largest mission investment to date to anchor Nine Dean, a permanent holding company launched this week by Aren LeeKong, who previously headed private lending for Carlyle Group. Nine Dean is seeking to buy middle-market operating companies with stable cash flows and to invest in what LeeKong calls their most valuable asset – their employees. “Nine Dean aims to be a permanent partner—one that measures success not in quarters, but in generations,” LeeKong said in a statement.
- Impact exits. The typical 10-year fund has long been an awkward structure for making impact investments. Just when a company’s operations are finally humming, it’s often time to sell. That not only deprives investors of the chance to build value, but subjects companies to the risk that the new buyer may not be truly committed to preserving the company’s social mission. “We’ve seen a lot of companies that did more traditional private equity or corporate sales end up finding that after two to three years of having good luck maintaining their mission, a lot of that started to fall off as the players changed,” said Andrew Kassoy, a partner in Nine Dean and a founder of B Lab, the nonprofit that certifies mission-driven B Corps. Kassoy is also an advisor to Singapore-based Arowana, which last month launched a $S120 million (US$93 million) B Corp holding company. Kassoy expects to see “more and more of these vehicles globally as people come to realize how broken are the existing capital markets for values-led businesses.”
- Quality jobs. Ford’s mission investment portfolio includes HCAP Partners, which helps portfolio companies add opportunities for career advancement, wealth creation and health and well-being (listen to the podcast, “Finding alpha with a ‘gainful jobs’ strategy”). Lafayette Square focuses on employee benefits through its “worker solutions” platform (see, “Lafayette Square is banking on low-income communities and worker solutions”). Roy Swan, who heads Ford’s mission investments, introduced LeeKong to Zeynep Ton, a co-founder of the Good Jobs Institute, which highlights companies, including Trader Joe’s, Costco and QuikTrip, that have outperformed their peers in customer satisfaction and financial performance, in part by prioritizing jobs fair compensation, comprehensive benefits, and career advancement opportunities. “World-class operations are not achievable without meaningful investment in corporate culture and human capital,” Swan said in a statement (disclosure: Ford Foundation is an investor in ImpactAlpha).
- Liquidity concerns. Impact-oriented holdcos have experienced varying degrees of success raising capital. In 2018, ImpactAlpha wrote that “breaking the chains of the 10-year fund is harder than it looks.” Ford did not disclose the size of its investment in Nine Dean, but Kassoy said the commitment “gives us the capital to make a pretty significant first transaction” of between $150 million and $300 million. He said Nine Dean was looking to raise several hundred million dollars. He said mechanisms are available to provide liquidity to investors, including redemption periods and public-markets strategies, but no such provisions have yet been made. “The kind of investors we are having conversations with are not demanding that,” Kassoy told ImpactAlpha. “In the short term, it’s important that we have the right kind of investors so we have the patience to build for the long term.”
- Keep reading, “Backed by Ford Foundation, Nine Dean is building a holding company around quality jobs,” by David Bank on ImpactAlpha.
Sponsored by Tideline
State of the impact investment market. Tideline’s fifth annual “State of the impact investment market” Compass Series will feature leaders at the forefront of sustainable and impact investing to take stock of how the evolving landscape is shaping opportunities and challenges. How are mission-driven investors responding to today’s market? Among the topics: How are institutional allocators’ preferences and requirements shifting? Is interest diverging by region, investor type or sector, and theme? How can capital be directed to underserved but promising opportunities? What is the role of the climate transition in an impact portfolio? Join the webinar, Tuesday, June 10 at 8am PT / 11am ET. RSVP now.
Dealflow: Agrifood Investing
GAIN and Incofin back three businesses to expand production of nutritious food. The Nutritious Food Financing Facility is an impact-first debt fund that backs small businesses producing nutritious foods for low-income earners across Africa. The fund launched in 2023 as a joint initiative of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, or GAIN, and impact investor Incofin. Investors include the government of the Netherlands, the Eleanor Crook Foundation, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the US Agency for International Development. The blended finance fund invests between up to $1 million and now has eight portfolio companies.
- Scaling up. The fund’s newest additions have been operational for two decades and are ready to ramp production. Kenya’s Soy Africa provides fortified flour and pre-cooked meals for low-income consumers and vulnerable populations across East Africa. Tanzania’s Mkuza Chicks is a vertically integrated family-owned poultry business supplying chicks to over 2,000 mostly female smallholder farmers. In Tanzania, Rainbow Haulage aggregates farm produce like maize, sorghum and soybeans from cooperatives and commercial farms and sells them to offtakers, including Tanzania’s National Food Reserve, the World Food Program, and Africa Improved Foods, a public-private partnership of the government of Rwanda, CDC Group and others tackling malnutrition.
Energize Capital raises $430 million to invest in ‘asset-light’ climate solutions. Energize Capital (formerly Energize Ventures) is betting on software tools to streamline electricity grid interconnections, next-generation manufacturing and the circular economy. Demand for such “asset-light” climate solutions is driven by the accelerating energy transition, the reshoring of manufacturing and global supply chain shifts. “Operators need specialist investors with deep domain expertise and operational know-how to help them scale their solutions and achieve enduring growth,” said John Tough of Energize. The Chicago-based fund manager is investing between $10 and $20 million in companies at the Series A, B and C stages, the “post technology risk, early commercialization” sweetspot, as Tough calls it. In February, the fund led the $30 million Series B round of Archive, a San Francisco-based company that helps retail brands monitor the condition of secondhand products. The Energize fund also backed Denver-based Nira Energy’s grid interconnection software for energy developers, and San Francisco’s Tyba, a maker of software to optimize battery energy storage performance.
- Riding the wave. Energize secured commitments from more than 80 limited partners for its third fund including Builders Vision, UBS, Första AP-Fonden, WEX Venture Capital, Capricorn Investment Group and other institutional investors in the US and Europe. It closed its inaugural venture fund at $165 million in 2018 and raised its $330 million second fund in 2021. WEX’s David Klein said he invested in Energize because of “their specialized expertise and investment theses across electrification, digitization, and energy infrastructure.” The fundraise brings Energize’s total assets under management to over $1.8 billion.
- Gift this post.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., raised $150 million from Chevron, Google and other backers on the promise that it can “deliver the cleanest, safest and most economical approach” to commercial fusion. (TAE)
- Latvia’s Aerones, whose AI software and robots are designed to monitor and repair damaged wind turbines, swept up $62 million in a funding round co-led by S2G Investments and Activate Capital. (Aerones)
- Untapped Global, an emerging markets-focused impact investor, backed Pobad International to expand access to EV charging for gig drivers and mobility entrepreneurs in Ghana. (Untapped)
- UK-based Valla clinched £2 million (roughly $2.7 million) in seed financing, led by Ada Ventures, to provide affordable legal support to workers who have been wronged by their employers. (tech.eu)
Impact Voices: Impact Management
A ‘hit list’ of global challenges aims to help investors allocate their capital more effectively. If you’re a venture capital firm focused on, say, the mobility sector, what problems should you focus on to make the most impact? That was the question that Lionel Kaufmann of güil Mobility Ventures, a Santiago-based venture firm, posed to Gilad Tanay of impact research consultancy ERI Institute last year, leading to a year-long research project to target the root causes of the biggest problems facing the planet. The research, which includes an open source database, is intended to guide investors amid a pullback in development aid by global governments. “We cannot expect impact investors to fill these funding gaps without clear, concrete data on how their capital can make a difference,” writes Tanay in a guest post.
- Big five. The database groups 30 global challenges across environmental, social health and violence. An in-depth analysis of five challenges — poverty, natural disasters, non-communicable diseases, air pollution, and road accidents — identifies ways investments can drive systemic change. To reduce harm from natural disasters, for example, alleviating climate change and improving disaster response capacity will have the biggest impact. For güil, with its mobility focus, that might mean finding investments to improve disaster response, such as vehicles that can better navigate disaster environments, or help get vehicles into the right place at the right time faster. Tanay hopes the tools will help investors think differently and ask deeper, difficult questions about their work. “Resources are too scarce to waste on well-meaning efforts that don’t actually move the dial.”
- Read Gilad Tanay’s whole post.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Indigenous Prosperity Foundation appoints Relay Tangie as acting executive director, temporarily replacing Michelle Okere, who begins maternity leave later this month… Mission Driven Finance promotes Peter Metz to portfolio manager… Columbia Business School’s Christian Carrion-Vera joins Uplifting Capital as an impact investment summer associate… Valerie Abbruzzese, an MBA candidate at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, joins Inspire Access as a summer venture fellow… Social Finance Institute welcomes Sahana Vivek, a rising senior at Georgetown University, as an intern.
Citi Impact Fund seeks a New York-based vice president… Builders Vision has an opening for an impact measurement and management VP in Chicago… New Majority Capital is accepting applications for its next bETA cohort in Detroit. The 10-week program will train up to 40 entrepreneurs to become business owners through acquisition… Mentor Capital Network seeks volunteer mentors for its latest cohort of social enterprises, convened in partnership with Unlock Capital… Leslie Maasdorp of BII will join other speakers later this Thursday for a hybrid in-person and virtual discussion on Mission 300, a new initiative to electrify 300 million people in Africa by 2030.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– June 4, 2025
