The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Orchestration

ImpactAlpha · February 20, 2026
Credit: Kazuo Ota on Unsplash

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

In today’s brief:

  • Roundup: Impact stack
  • Podcasts: Hear from Dimitry Gershenson, Erin Davis and Urmi Sengupta
  • The Call: Shaping the Algorithm for “Good AI”
  • Spotlight: Raven’s outcomes fund for Indigenous communities 

🗣 Impact stack. Data centers and large language models hog the AI spotlight, periodically ceding attention to a new gee-whiz application that zaps a whole job category, or perhaps an entire industry. But as the infrastructure of artificial intelligence springs into being, some of the most interesting action is taking place in other layers of the technology stack. “Assurance,” of course, is important to enterprise customers (and the rest of us) seeking, um, reassurance about the safety and reliability of AI systems. Even more intriguing is “orchestration,” the integration of agents, models, tools and data to optimize AI systems for the outcomes we want. “We need a mindset shift so that we’re thinking more about technology as tools and not as our masters,” Katy Knight of Siegel Family Endowment said to help kick off ImpactAlpha’s “Shaping the Algorithm” beat on this week’s Agents of Impact Call. “We start with the need to invest in the core AI stack to make it safe, secure, unbiased and aligned to the outcomes we want for humanity,” added Omidyar Network’s Chris Jurgens (see below for the recap and replay). 

Orchestrating such outcomes is, of course, the stock-in-trade of Agents of Impact – the human kind – who have already been shaping the algorithms of finance and business. ImpactAlpha’s Lucy Ngige traced the evolution of the London-based Private Infrastructure Development Group from direct lending to credit enhancement to local guarantee facilities that are drawing in pension funds and other local institutional capital for much needed infrastructure in Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya and elsewhere. Andrew Fremier, Ryan Johnson and Cody Petterson, representing new regional housing finance agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, outlined public-private financing mechanisms that reenvision affordable housing as necessary and sustainable civic infrastructure. Jessica Pothering spotlights Raven Group’s outcomes-based finance fund that lets Indigenous communities in Canada and the US design the solutions Raven invests in (see below). Erik Stein and Amy Cortese laid out policy initiatives and other strategies that impact LPs like Gary Community Ventures, Pivotal Ventures and MassMutual are deploying to support their fund managers long after the raise. 

The work of orchestration is far from done. Capital for Sustainability’s Marilyn Waite worked with Carbon Collective to tally nearly 1,000 publicly listed companies with climate solutions in the Global South, which has long been starved of climate capital. Less than 20% of those equities are available to US retail investors because of outdated investment barriers and complexities. “These are all surmountable,” says Waite, an ImpactAlpha contributing editor. In a separate guest post, Ceres’ Dazzle Bhujwala zeroed in on one major obstacle: mispriced risk. In AI, “orchestration transforms this cacophony into a symphony,” touts one tech provider. “Separate initiatives become a unified intelligence network.” Up and down the impact stack, let’s put Agents of Impact – including the AI kind – to work on orchestrating the outcomes that matter most. – David Bank

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Highlights from this week’s Agents of Impact Call on Shaping the Algorithm for good AI; how regional housing finance agencies in California are leveraging public funding to crowd private capital into affordable housing; and the emergence of local guarantee facilities for local investors in infrastructure in Africa and Asia.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Enduring Planet’s loans help climate startups overcome the chicken-or-egg dilemma. Enduring Planet’s Dimitry Gershenson and Erin Davis join David to discuss how their working capital loans help early-stage climate startups unlock other financing. Tune in

👩‍🏫 Women Changing Finance: Exploring catalytic capital. Host Krisztina Tora is joined by the MacArthur Foundation’s Urmi Sengupta to discuss how the Catalytic Capital Consortium has grown to include a dozen foundations and family offices, mobilizing hundreds of millions of patient, flexible dollars to bring in even more capital for climate justice, place-based investing and small business development. Listen.

The Week’s Call

(Human) agents of impact are shaping the algorithm for ‘good AI.’ Slowly, then all at once. Artificial intelligence, under development for years, is suddenly upending every facet of life. That is putting new urgency behind efforts to ensure that AI models are designed in ways that preserve agency, benefit humanity, and contribute to the public good. “There’s a very strong imperative from Big Tech to make us believe that the tech itself is the end,” said Katy Knight of the Siegel Family Endowment. “The reality is that we have the agency to choose what we adopt and what we don’t adopt.” ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact Call brought together Knight, Chris Jurgens of Omidyar Network, Paul Fehlinger of Project Liberty Institute, and Mohamed Nanabhay of Mozilla Ventures to sketch an investment thesis around responsible and ethical AI, and kick off ImpactAlpha’s Shaping the Algorithm beat, in partnership with Siegel Family Endowment. 

  • AI stack. A growing number of impact investors are focusing on the underlying infrastructure of AI. “If we don’t have that core AI stack safe and secure, then all the things we want to do for AI for good on top of it aren’t going to work,” said Jurgens. Omidyar is prepping a vehicle, Project Alexandria, to invest in AI assurance and safety tech, such as algorithm auditing, and deepfake and fraud detection. “We need to treat that as an impact vertical, just as we would look at applications in health or climate as impact,” he said. “There’s a lot of need for innovation at the infrastructure level, the protocol level, of the AI economy,” added Fehlinger (see, “Shaping the algorithm: Investing across the tech stack to orchestrate ‘good AI’”).
  • Building bridges. Mozilla Ventures’ Nanabhay joined the Call from the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, where he said excitement and optimism around AI was tinged by “a palpable sense of fear” around job losses and other AI risks. Mozilla, an early thinker on building trustworthy tech, stood up a $35 million venture capital fund three years ago and has made 55 investments in startups developing safe and inclusive AI. A self-described techno-pragmatist, Knight staked out a middle ground between the doomers and the zoomers, or AI accelerationists. “How are we going to be savvy about making something out of the work that we’ve been invested in across the social impact spaces, with AI, and for AI,” she said. “It’s about narrative. It’s part of why we’ve invested in this beat.”
  • Keep reading, “(Human) Agents of Impact are shaping the algorithm for ‘good AI’,” on ImpactAlpha. Catch the full replay on YouTube.

The Week’s Spotlight

A fund for Canada’s Indigenous communities opens the tap of public finance. There have been many attempts to bring private and public finance together to fund social programs. Many have been unsuccessful (cf. “social impact bonds”). A first-time fund from Indigenous-led Raven Group in Canada has a fresh take on the “pay for success” model. Raven’s Indigenous Outcomes Fund this week reached a $32.2 million second close toward a $50 million goal to fund roughly a dozen green and community health-focused projects requested and designed by Canada’s First Nations and Native tribes in the US. Raven has three projects underway, with six more set to start this year. “Investors are asking us to scale larger than this fund,” Raven’s Jeff Cyr told ImpactAlpha. “If you want to have your money make systemic change, funds that will do that for you are really hard to find.”

  • Paid for success. Raven is working to channel public funding to issues that Indigenous communities want to address. It works with community leaders to design projects for, say, rooftop solar installations, or diabetes clinics that align with community culture and traditional diets. It then approaches public agencies to secure purchase agreements for the projects’ results. Raven fronts the capital, verifies the outcomes, and gets reimbursed by the government payers, with a small upside for Raven and its investors. Indigenous communities “are looking for capital to show up differently,” said Cyr. “They’re interested in the outcomes-driven approach where we co-design what we want to accomplish and reflect their values, their knowledge systems, their governance.”
  • Green energy, green jobs. Raven will invest 75% of its capital in Canada and 25% in the US. Every project in its pipeline has a green angle. Its latest project will fund geothermal retrofits for 100 homes for the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation in Manitoba. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and Efficiency Manitoba have signed on as the government payors. Raven is helping the nation set up a community-owned business and train local workers to do retrofits for other nations. “Indigenous energy sovereignty is a very big deal,” said Cyr. “Communities want to build resilience. We’re helping them build an energy company. It’s jobs, it’s economic development.”
  • US for Canada. Raven’s LPs include Quebec-based Cap Finance, California-based Natural Investments and New York-based Trimtab Impact (see related, “Trimtab’s unapologetic pitch to wealthy families seeking outperformance – on impact”). The only other outcomes-based investment fund in North America is Maycomb Capital in New York, which provides working capital for early childhood development, workforce development and health equity interventions (see, “How impact debt is filling a capital gap to expand educational opportunities“). Said Cyr, “I’m excited by the willingness of the American investment community to recognize the role that something like this can play in society and invest in a fund that is 75% Canadian.”

The Week’s Talent and Jobs

💼 See and share dozens of new impact jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub and view hundreds of more jobs in impact investing and sustainable finance. Have a job listing to post? Submit it here.

Inclusive Insurance Investment Fund welcomed Bethuel Muthiru, formerly with Bamboo Capital Partners, as an investment associate… S2G Ventures promoted Christopher Marshall to head of AI and technology solutions, Mason Leist to food and agriculture senior associate, and Drew Cochran to portfolio valuations and reporting director, among other promotions… New Jersey Redevelopment Authority tapped Ken Bland, previously with Prudential Financial, as chief operating officer… Green Impact Exchange appointed Alexis Levenson, previously with Visa, as chief communications officer.

Miguel Silva was promoted to sustainable investments manager at the California pension fund CalPERS… Christina Lukeman, formerly with MCE Social Capital, joined Climate Breakthrough as director of philanthropy partnerships… Parker Hughes left ReGen Ventures to become a principal with Mana Ventures… Jennifer Trivelli departed Mission Investors Exchange, where she served as senior director of communications and marketing.

Shalaka Joshi, formerly with the International Finance Corp., joined UNICEF’s global innovation office… Casey Johnson joined the Flexible Capital Fund from RSF. She takes on the role of fund manager… Boston Impact Initiative promoted Aliana Pineiro to chief impact officer, and Keyur Patel to director of portfolio management and programs… Paige Els joined Gaia Fund Managers full time as a private equity investment specialist… Jamey Spencer and Kurt Braitberg joined Builders Vision as managing directors, heading private markets and public markets respectively.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Feb. 20, 2026