ImpactAlpha Open

‘Impact insurance’ for climate tech + flexible capital for local businesses

Dennis Price · October 7, 2025

Hi there, Agents of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free weekly sampling of the top news and views from ImpactAlpha.

📞 Get PluggedIn, today: Building an inclusive future for climate and capital. VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson talks with ImpactAlpha contributor Sherrell Dorsey about unlocking capital for diverse leaders to drive impact alpha and accelerate climate solutions at scale. Get PluggedIn, Today at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP now.

✅ Investments news for a sustainable edge. Enjoying ImpactAlpha Open? Go daily, and deeper, with an all-access ImpactAlpha subscription. Subscribe today. 

In this week’s Open:

  • GreenieRe is derisking climate tech with “venture surety bonds”
  • Building an investment ecosystem for entrepreneurs in Baltimore
  • Podcast: Leslie Maasdorp of British International Investment
  • Agent of Impact: Edgar Montenegro of Amanpuri

Let’s dig in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • GreenieRe sees ‘impact insurance’ surety bonds as the key to scaling climate tech. Investors are helping capital-intensive climate tech startups navigate the tricky shift from promising technology to commercial success. The latest tool in their arsenal: insurance. “A lot of folks are talking about insurance and its criticality to this particular scaling gap,” says Lara Pierpoint of Trellis Climate, a catalytic funder created by Prime Coalition to help startups build first-of-a-kind plants, reports Amy Cortese. Read on.
  • Innovation Works: Flexible early capital is helping local entrepreneurs revitalize neighborhoods in Baltimore. In Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly” neighborhoods, local developers are rehabilitating rows of abandoned and blighted houses. The nonprofit Innovation Works is seeking to prove out a model for localized, bottom-up economic development by providing patient, flexible capital for Baltimore’s social entrepreneurs, reports Roodgally Senatus. Learn more
  • Investors who refuse to take a loyalty oath to ExxonMobil should decline to join its ‘retail voting program.’ Earlier this month, ExxonMobil announced its offering of a “retail voting program,” an opt-in service that automates proxy voting for individual shareholders, with the stated goal of increasing retail investor participation in such votes. What the program actually does is lock retail investors into “blind faith support for management,” writes As You Sow’s Andrew Behar in his latest Fiduciary Future column. Hear him out.

Agents of Impact

🇨🇴 Edgar Montenegro, Amapuri: Building livelihoods in sustainable agroforestry in Colombia

Edgar Montenegro started Bogotá-based açaí company Amapuri so that rural Colombian families wouldn’t face the income insecurity and fear his family experienced when he was a child. When Montenegro was 12, his father, a timber worker in Colombia’s Putumayo rainforest, could no longer make ends meet harvesting trees. His parents, like thousands of other families, resorted to working in the coca industry. With Amapuri, Montenegro is demonstrating that farming families in Putumayo have other lucrative options to earn a living. 

🏃 On the move

  • Social Finance welcomed Yiping Li, former fellow at the US Department of Justice, as a data analytics senior associate.
  • Apollo Global Management named Jaycee Pribulsky, former chief sustainability officer at Nike, as partner and chief sustainability office.
  • LISC Fund Management added Brian Maddox, previously with KeyBank, as vice president of fund development.

The Week’s Podcast

🎧 This Week in Impact

Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editors David Bank and Amy Cortese. Up this week: At Neighborhood Economics in Chicago, entrepreneurship through acquisition and other promising ideas are filling out our “Playbook for shared prosperity.” ExxonMobil’s new proxy voting program for retail investors aims to change the balance of power in corporate governance. And, how reinsurer GreenieRe is reinventing surety bonds to help climate startups scale.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Leslie Maasdorp and BII are making climate investing in emerging markets safe for institutional LPs. Leslie Maasdorp, who took over as CEO of British International Investment last year, is pushing the UK development finance institution to mobilize institutional LPs around climate and development finance in emerging markets. There’s been a lot of introspection by the development finance system,” he tells David Bank on the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast. “We want to see to what extent we can be more catalytic.”

Pop Impact

🔍 Investigative journalism at the Climate Film Festival

Politicians, investors, CEOs, scientists and activists are mainstays at Climate Week NYC. This year, storytellers were also out in force. Creatives could be found at the third annual Climate Film Festival. ImpactAlpha contributor Dmitriy Ioselevich made the scene and shared his take on two documentaries that showcase the power of investigative journalism. 

  • Trade Secret: Extinction as a business opportunity.This documentary from director Abraham Joffe and executive producer Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”) goes behind the scenes to investigate the thriving trade in polar bear fur – despite the animals’ precarious existence in a warming world. Check it out.
  • Black Snow: The real costs of cheap energy. Kiselyovsk, located about 310 miles north of Russia’s southern border, is nicknamed the “town with black snow,” due to the nine open-pit coal mines that surround it. Director Alina Simone trains her lens on Natalia Zubkova, affectionately dubbed the “Erin Brockovich of Russia” for her efforts to call attention to the health problems caused by the pits for the town’s 90,000 residents and hold the government accountable. Read the review.

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation seeks an impact analyst in Kansas City.
  • Incofin Investment Management is looking for an investment analyst in Bogotá.
  • Invest-NL is hiring an ESG Associate in Amsterdam.

Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

🤝 Meet up

Subscribe to ImpactAlpha to access significant savings on events.

Bring your team onto ImpactAlpha. Save with substantial group discounts. Start here.

Lead the conversation. Sponsor a beat, newsletters or calls with ImpactAlpha. Get in touch.