Greetings, Agents of Impact!
Welcome to this week’s ImpactAlpha LP/GP, where we take you inside the real business of impact investing and the dynamic relationships between owners, managers and intermediaries of impact capital.
☎️ Agents of Impact Call: Building an investment portfolio that makes aging an asset. We’re all getting older, creating compelling investment opportunities in companies and funds that expand opportunity, ensure health and promote social inclusion with and for older adults. Denver-based Next50 is aligning its approximately $265 million foundation endowment around an “aging investment framework” that steps up from age-friendly to age-inclusive to age-centered. What’s in and what’s out? Next50’s Peter Kaldes and Preeti Bhattacharji, head of sustainable investing for J.P. Morgan’s US Private Bank, will join other Agents of Impact to share tips for the construction of investment portfolios across asset classes that value and support aging, on Call No. 79, Wednesday, March 11 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. RSVP today.
In this week’s newsletter:
- Shared ownership as a wealth-creation strategy for workers – and private equity investors
- ALIVE Ventures’ $55 million Latin America impact fund
- Pension investments in venture capital in South Africa
- Chris Larsen’s Clean Break Fund
- Equity capital for food systems in the Caribbean
Featured: Ownership Economy
Sharing wealth with workers creates value for private equity buyout firms. So why not share more? For The Riverside Company, a $13 billion private equity buyout firm, broad-based employee ownership has evolved from a values-driven experiment into a proven lever for value creation. The New York and Cleveland-based fund manager launched its Riverside Value Fund six years ago with the thesis that hands-on operational expertise could revive distressed and undervalued businesses. To lead the $350 million first fund, Riverside brought on veterans Marc Jourlait and Sean Ozbolt, who advocated for employee ownership as both a market strategy and a moral imperative, in the belief that broad-based equity participation would deliver meaningful payouts for workers — and more attractive returns for investors at exit. “We took the leap of faith,” Jourlait tells ImpactAlpha. Jourlait said the Value Fund’s limited partners, which include pension funds, university endowments, high-net-worth individuals and other institutional investors, are on board. “Pension funds love it because you’re giving back not only to firemen, nurses and cops, but you’re giving to the blue-collar, hourly-wage workers,” he adds. “It’s the best thing you can do for your investors and an even better thing for the employees of your companies. It’s as simple as that.”
- Early exit. Employees of PFB Corp., a US and Canada-based manufacturer of insulation products for residential and commercial buildings, got a $9 million payout when Riverside sold the company to Carlisle Companies for $260 million in October 2024. The broad-based ownership program at PFB was launched at the beginning of 2024. With the sale, the equity payout to workers amounted to about three and a half months of pay, after only 10 months of the shared ownership program. Executives gathered employees in a company warehouse to announce the sale. “We literally hand them each an envelope that has the amount they’re going to get,” Jourlait recalls. “You’ve got people calling their spouses, calling their boyfriends and girlfriends, calling their parents, in tears, because they’ve never seen so much money.”
- Payout targets. Riverside is part of Ownership Works, an association of private equity firms that have committed to sharing a slice of their equity gains with the hourly and frontline workers at the companies they buy and sell. “Broad-based shared ownership can drive stronger business performance when paired with intentional culture transformation that inspires employees to think, feel, and act like owners,” says Ownership Works’ Anna-Lisa Miller. With such advantages, some advocates have argued that private-equity owners should share more of their winnings with workers. Jourlait said Riverside is targeting equity payouts of up to six months’ annual pay workers upon exit, Ownership Works’ minimum target for its members At PFB, the exit came less than one year into the five-year ownership plan. At KKR, the industry’s leader in shared ownership, the goal is to add a full year’s pay after five years. “What matters is dollars to workers,” KKR’s Pete Stavros told ImpactAlpha last year.
- Hourly workers. Last week, Ares Management launched a “Shared Prosperity Plan” at Landscape Workshop, an Alabama-based grounds management company with 1,622 employees. At a time of widening wealth gaps, private equity’s move from cost-cutting through layoffs to sharing a portion of its upside with workers is strikingly timely. Only half of US households have some form of retirement savings, and nearly two-thirds of workers live paycheck to paycheck. Riverside has launched board-based ownership programs at six of its Value Fund’s eight portfolio companies, including SCRAM Systems, a Colorado-based provider of electronic monitoring technology, and Siffron, an Ohio-based business-to-business retail merchandising company. Riverside also launched the program at The Vomela Companies, a Minnesota-based graphic design company it acquired last year. About 1,900 of Vomela’s 2,100 employees are hourly wage workers. “In the traditional model, they get nothing. They just get their paycheck,” Jourlait says. ““Here we say, ‘You’re no longer renting, you’re owning.’”
- Keep reading, “Sharing wealth with workers creates value for private equity buyout firms. So why not share more?” by Roodgally Senatus. ImpactAlpha’s coverage of the Ownership Economy is supported by Sorenson Impact Foundation.
Dealflow: Second Funds
ALIVE closes Latin American fund with backing from Proparco and Impact Fund Denmark. Bogota-based ALIVE Ventures has closed its second impact fund at $55 million, drawing commitments from a mix of development finance institutions, foundations, and regional lenders. Proparco, FMO, Impact Fund Denmark, the Dutch Good Growth Fund, which is managed by PwC and Triple Jump, and the MacArthur Foundation invested alongside regional investors Bancoldex, Cofide, Mexico’s Fondo de Fondos and Sonen Capital. Foundations Fundación Bancolombia and Fundación Women’s World Banking Colombia also participated in the round. ALIVE, formerly Acumen LatAm Capital Partners, was established as the Latin American arm of impact investor Acumen. It now operates as an independent firm, backing companies with climate-smart and inclusive solutions that lift up low-income communities across the Andean region of South America. Acumen also invested in the round.
- Regional firsts. The fund marks the first Latin American venture investment for both Proparco, the private-sector financing arm of France’s development agency, and Impact Fund Denmark, Denmark’s state-owned development finance institution. “We were capable of showing them that it is possible to deploy a [Latin America] strategy where you can have deep social impact, as well as investing in scalable businesses with strong track records and very good financial perspectives in terms of return to investors.” ALIVE’s Santiago Alvarez tells ImpactAlpha. ALIVE’s debut fund closed at $28 million in 2020, targeting clean energy, education, and agribusiness. Its portfolio includes Solfium, a Mexican solar energy provider to small businesses; AgriCapital, which provides affordable credit to Colombian smallholder farmers for equipment purchases; and Creditú, a mortgage lender to first-time homebuyers.
- More.
Hlayisani Capital lands $30 million for financial inclusion, health and education in South Africa. South African venture firm Hlayisani Capital manages nearly one billion rand ($60 million) across three venture capital and private equity funds that support growing businesses, mainly in South Africa. Hlayisani has secured 500 million rand ($30 million) in commitments to reach a first close of Hlayisani Venture Fund II, including funding from South Africa’s Public Investment Corp., the SA SME Fund, and family offices and private investors. The fund will back Series A rounds for AI, digital infrastructure and tech-based solutions to financial inclusion, health and education. It aims for a June final close. The fundraise marks “a significant shift in institutional investing as pension funds show a real interest in venture capital,” the firm said (see, “Putting Africa’s pension funds to work for Africa’s social infrastructure”). Early investments include Spatialedge, which helps companies make faster, data-driven decisions, financial risk modeling provider Cogitait AI, and media company Tractor Outdoor.
- Black managers. Hlayisani, which means “to nurture and grow,” is among the largest Black-owned venture investors in South Africa. It qualifies as a Level 2 “Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment” fund manager, a designation established in 2014 to support local managers and share wealth more broadly. “In markets which are skewed and unequal such as ours, we do come as one of the bigger supporters of [Black managers],” Sifiso Sibiya of the 2.3 trillion rand ($163 billion) Government Employees Pension Fund, managed by PIC, told ImpactAlpha.
- More.
Clean Break Fund aims to do climate investing differently. Philanthropist and Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen has launched a climate fund that will combine grants, investments and support for leaders working to shift policies. “We’ll be investing in the people, organizations and companies that are doing some of the most important work on climate change in the US and around the world,” said Michael Brune, the CEO of the Clean Break Fund, in announcing the news. The former executive director of The Sierra Club, Brune has worked with Larsen to shape his climate investments.
- Carbon removal. As the name suggests, Clean Break Fund wants to do things differently, leaving behind “pessimism and doomerism, ideas that don’t work anymore” and “dogmatic thinking,” according to Brune. Take carbon dioxide removal, an early stage technology that sucks carbon from the air; some critics argue the approach distracts from stopping emissions in the first place. “CDR is no longer an optional ‘insurance policy’; it is a foundational pillar of climate stability that must scale rapidly to rebalance our atmosphere,” Clean Break declares on its website. The fund has invested in carbon removal startups Heirloom, Twelve and AirCapture (see “Capturing the market for carbon by removing it from the air more cheaply”). Clean Break has made grants to advocacy organizations including the Carbon Removal Alliance and Carbon 180.
- More.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Three Hills, a Europe and North America-focused private investor and B Corp., raised €300 million ($349 million) for Three Hills Impact, which invests in mid-sized European companies. Early investments include UK-based SmartBox, which makes speech assistance tools. (Three Hills)
- BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, EQT, California Public Employees’ Retirement System and Qatar Investment Authority teamed up to buy AES, a global sustainable energy company. AES said the take-private deal will give it the backing it needs to meet growing demand for power. (Global Infrastructure Partners)
- Dutch pension fund investor PGGM led an €83 million ($96 million) Series B investment in Dutch climate tech company RIFT to commercialize its iron fuel technology for industrial decarbonization. Invest-NL, Oost NL and Rubio Impact Ventures also participated. (PGGM)
GP Snapshot: Intentional Asset Management
CaribGROW fund seeks to bridge equity financing gaps for Caribbean food systems (podcast). The C in LAC is for Caribbean, as in Latin America and the Caribbean. Even for LatAm investors, the 16 small island markets, from Jamaica to French-speaking Martinique, are often an afterthought. High interest rates, a lack of scaled investment opportunities and mounting climate threats have kept private capital on the sidelines. Intentional Asset Management’s John Morris and Tirtha Patel are seeking to raise $100 million for the CaribGROW fund to finance upgrades to more robust food systems in the region. “There’s been no equity going into the region, and therefore initiatives don’t turn into businesses,” Morris, the former head of Merrill Lynch’s Latin America private banking and wealth management strategy, says on the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast. CaribGROW takes minority stakes in portfolio companies, allowing existing owners to retain control; investors receive a preferred return before profits are shared.
- Import substitution. Caribbean nations import roughly $6 billion in food each year, despite having the productive capacity to supply more of their own demand. That mismatch is the foundation for CaribGROW, the debut fund of Intentional Asset Management, a unit of 17 Asset Management. The fund aims to provide equity capital to Caribbean-based food companies that reduce imports with local production or boost value-added exports, including through hydroponics, aquaponics and vertical farming. The fund has already warehoused its first deal, an investment in Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee and Bottled Spring Water, a producer of premium coffee and spring water sourced from sustainably run Jamaican farms. The team is in discussions with large US and international food companies that could serve as potential acquirers of portfolio companies.
- Keep reading and listen to, “CaribGROW fund seeks to bridge equity financing gaps for Caribbean food systems.” Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Christophe Defert and Mike D’Aurizio and their six-person team at Climate Growth Partners, a unit of HSBC Asset Management, decamp to Bridges Fund Management, in what Bridges calls a “spin in.” The new Bridges Climate Transition Partners will continue to manage the Climate Growth Partners fund and portfolio; HSBC will remain a limited partner… Tellef Thorleifsson steps down after 8 years as CEO of Norfund… Charlotte Reinnoldt joins climate consulting firm Driftwood Climate as principal.
Capricorn Investment Group is hiring an investment director in New York. JPMorgan Chase has an opening for a sustainable research analyst… Allianz Global Investors is seeking a portfolio analyst for its development finance and impact credit team in London… The Inter-American Development Bank’s private sector arm, IDB Invest, is looking for a portfolio management director for infrastructure and energy… The National University of Singapore is hunting for a fellow in sustainable finance to support research within its Sustainable and Green Finance Institute.
Latimpacto, a network of Latin America-focused impact investors, has issued a call for content proposals for its Impact Minds conference, set to take place in September in Manaus, Brazil.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– March 4, 2026
