ImpactAlpha LP/GP: Tapping family offices in India for impact investments

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.

📞 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. 

In this week’s newsletter:

• Raintree Family Office’s path to impact investing in India
• Resolution Investors’ climate-smart public equities
• Fund management solopreneurs
• Local institutional capital for Africa’s growth fund managers

Featured: Impact LPs in India

Raintree charts an impact investing path for India’s wealthy families. India’s economic growth surge has teed up an enormous transfer of wealth. The country’s wealthiest families are set to pass on some $1.4 trillion to the next generation over the next five to 10 years. In a country where few families have embraced impact investing, Leena Dandekar and her children are modeling how to marry investment growth and family values. The Dandekars are part of the family behind Camlin Group, an art and stationery supplier in India. Eight years ago, she and her two children, Abha and Vivek, sold their shares in the family business and set up the Raintree Family Office in Mumbai. “Everything we owned was an investible corpus at that point of time. We did not have any running businesses, just money to be invested,” Leena Dandekar tells ImpactAlpha. “How do we use it to drive a change?” With sufficient wealth for themselves, the family office became a vehicle for investing purposefully.

• Impact skepticism. India’s wealthiest family businesses have amassed around $1.6 trillion in value. Exits like the Dandekars’ have led to the establishment of about 300 family offices in India. Prominent names include Premji Invest, from the family behind information technology giant Wipro; automaker Anand Mahindra’s Mahindra Partners; and Reddy Ventures from infrastructure conglomerate owner GV Sanjay Reddy. A report by Delhi-based Impact Investors Council and Waterfield Advisors, a multi-family office and wealth advisory firm, found that “impact investing appears to remain in an experimental phase,” for India’s wealthy families. Just three of 17 family offices surveyed actively pursue impact investing. Most of India’s wealthy families separate their investments from values-based work, which is funded through charitable family foundations. For Priyavrata Mafatlal, of the textile company Arvind Mafatlal Group, to move his Mafatlal Family Office into impact investing, “I’d need to see more evidence – real case studies that show how this approach has worked in practice,” he said in the report. Read more about the report, “From legacy to leverage.”
  
• Direct investments. Leena Dandekar’s children urged the family to focus its investment strategy on climate change. They initially sought only to “do no harm,” but became unsatisfied with exclusionary screening or ESG investing. “‘Do no harm’ is not good enough,” says Dandekar. “We want to influence industries and economic measures.” They earmarked a third of their family wealth at the time – about $13 million – for impact investing, and plan to increase that share over time. The family makes direct investments in growth-stage companies addressing responsible consumption, circularity and sustainable tech. The Dandekars’ family foundation supports climate initiatives, such as land restoration, that don’t fit their investment strategy. That work is opening new investable pathways: the family is looking to work with other donors to incubate local small enterprises and sustainable livelihoods in climate-affected regions, Dandekar says. “We have flexibility to go as deep and long-term as we want in solving problems.”
  
• Keep reading, “Raintree charts an impact investing path for India’s wealthy families,” by Shefali Anand.

LP Scan: More than a dozen LPs fueling India’s climate and economic inclusion funds. Private investors, family offices and corporate backers are emerging as critical financiers of the country’s transition to an inclusive, low-carbon economy. ImpactAlpha has tracked more than a dozen LP commitments in India-focused funds over the past year, spanning development finance institutions, domestic institutional investors and family-backed ventures.

• Green transition. The Azim Premji Trust and the Self-Reliant India Fund invested in Avaana’s $135 million raise alongside Green Climate Fund and the UK-India Development Cooperation Fund. Female-led Avaana backs early-stage clean energy, electric mobility, agriculture and biomanufacturing startups. The US International Development Finance Corp. and Austria’s OeEB backed Chennai-based Northern Arc’s debut climate fund to provide debt financing in India’s agrifood supply chain. Singapore’s Temasek has earmarked up to $10 billion to invest in India over the next three years, in areas including the green transition, digitalization and healthcare.
  
• More. 

Sponsored by Dalberg

Investment lifecycle. Dalberg is relaunching its Dalberg Capital brand and capabilities at the GIIN’s annual Impact Forum in Berlin at a “Doing Impact Differently” side event co-hosted with 60 Decibels and Roots of Impact. Building on Dalberg’s global advisory platform, Dalberg Capital now offers end-to-end support across the investment lifecycle, from pre-investment strategy and transaction advisory, to post-investment impact management. The effort is spearheaded by partners Kusi Hornberger, Greg Snyders and Marcos Paya. The relaunch introduces responsible AI tools to strengthen impact diligence, reporting, verification and practice improvement for both LPs and GPs. Learn more.

Dealflow: Public Equities

Resolution Investors launches climate-smart public equities fund. The transition to a low-carbon economy is a long-term, structural shift. Yet many publicly traded transition funds treat it more as an asset-gathering exercise than a rigorous approach to investment. Resolution Investors, a London-based investment firm launched by former Generation Investment Management professionals, sees an opportunity to invest in climate leaders and deliver alpha in public equities. “Allocators and potential allocators to public markets climate-focused strategies have been poorly served,” Resolution’s David Lowish, a former partner at Generation, told ImpactAlpha. “Our approach at Resolution is laser focused on the underlying data around the climate performance of individual businesses and how that’s improving.” Tools to track emissions in operations and supply chains have improved over the past few years, making possible more rigorous analysis.  

• Transition leaders. Resolution will invest in 30 global corporations across three categories: climate transition leaders, smaller-cap companies with emissions-reduction solutions, and climate adaptation. The London-listed fund is open to retail as well as institutional investors and will seek Article 9 designation, the EU’s highest sustainability rating. The fund has raised an initial $25 million from institutions and expects to reach $200 million. Resolution’s equities basket includes Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corp., a provider of railroad equipment. “If you can move more freight and more people by train, there’s a 5x benefit [in emissions reduction] versus over-the-road trucking or driving a car,” explained Lowish. An adaptation play is Rentokil, a UK-based pest management company: planetary warming is fueling the expansion of insects and the diseases they can bring. And yes, the index includes Microsoft and Alphabet, mainstays of transition funds; most of the other “Mag 7” tech companies don’t make the cut.
  
• More. 

Yu Galaxy’s $90 million raise pushes ‘solo-GP’ venture firm over $500 million in assets. Silicon Valley-based Yu Galaxy has closed $90 million for its third fund, pushing the firm’s total assets under management past $500 million. This milestone makes founder PR Yu one of the few solo general partners operating at institutional scale who still have full control over their funds. Yu Galaxy invests from seed stage through Series B in healthcare, responsible AI and automation. The firm raised capital from entrepreneurs, high-net-worth individuals and family offices, many of whom Yu has worked with across multiple funds. “We don’t think social impact is separable from financial return,” Yu told ImpactAlpha. “When you solve a big social need and make a big social impact, the financial return will come. It’s two sides of one coin.”

• Fund solopreneurship. A solo GP fund, with a single decision-maker for fund deployment, is a model that has been gaining traction in Silicon Valley in recent years as exiting founders move from angel investing to fund management. In 2020, solo GPs were a minority among emerging fund managers. By 2024, they accounted for over half of all new VC funds. “Solo GP just means there’s one decision maker,” said Yu, who founded Optony, a solar tech company later acquired by DuPont. “Unlike most firms with committees, I make the calls myself. It’s the same mindset I had as a founder and CEO – making tough decisions quickly and serving entrepreneurs better.”

• More.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

• Funds managed by Apollo will acquire Eagle Creek Renewable Energy, an independent owner and operator of 85 hydroelectric facilities in 18 states in the US. (Apollo)
  
• EQT Ventures buoyed a $100 million round for Einride, a Swedish provider of electric and autonomous heavy-duty vehicles, charging infrastructure and an intelligent freight operating system. EQT is already one of the firm’s largest backers. (Einride)
  
• French investment firm Ardian agreed to buy Energia Group, an Irish utility, from US-based infrastructure investor I Squared Capital. The deal is said to value Energia at nearly $3 billion. (WSJ)
  
• Minnesota regulators paved the way for BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and the Canadian Pension Plan to buy Allete, the parent of Minnesota Power. Allete generates more than half of its power from renewable sources including wind, hydro, solar and biomass, and aims for 80% by 2030. (Reuters)

Signals: GP Strategies

‘Growth fund’ managers are tapping pensions to reshape development finance in Africa. A new crop of capital providers – call them “growth funds” – are emerging to meet the financing needs of growing, post-revenue businesses in Africa. The fund managers, largely local and still mostly small in size, provide enterprises with a flexible mixture of financing without the onerous collateral requirements of banks and with vital technical assistance. Such capital providers represent an emerging asset class that is proving attractive to both African pension funds and local wealthy families and high-net worth individuals, according to the Collaborative for Frontier Finance’s “state of play” report on small business finance in Africa. Still, the capital providers face what the collaborative calls the  “hourglass dilemma,” a choke point between the potentially large pools of capital available from institutional and development financiers and the smaller amounts such funds can absorb. New approaches to nurture such funds through what CFF calls “the Valley of Persistence.” “These models are proving that smaller-sized funds can meet small businesses where they are, in ways that nobody else in the market can meet them,” CFF’s Drew von Glahn tells ImpactAlpha. “The big challenge is, how do you move big capital to little deals.” 

• Market knowledge. CFF surveyed nearly 100 capital providers and found that most write checks of $20,000 to $1 million, with loan tenures of about four years, on average. In contrast, banks expect repayment within 2.5 years. Growth funds rely on their local networks for deal sourcing and proximity and market knowledge to adapt their financing to the needs of local businesses. Uganda’s Shona Capital, for example, provides non-collateralized loans to businesses in  agriculture and healthcare. The investor factors an entrepreneur’s character into its risk assessment. Shona has seen portfolio revenues shoot up by 1.5 times within the first year of providing its capital.
  
• Currency risk. Funding from local investors “provides a domestic solution to domestic capital challenges, and also bypasses the inherent risk of foreign exchange being managed by small businesses,” von Glahn says. Uganda’s $6.5 billion National Social Security Fund, of NSSF, is convening an All Africa Pension Summit in Kampala next month to advance the discussion of small business financing (see, “Ugandan pension fund is creating new savers with investments in small business and agriculture“). The CFF report highlights Mirepa Investment Advisors in Ghana, which raised its first fund almost entirely from local capital providers and pension funds in Ghana. “No foreign investor. No external investor,” Mirepa’s Samuel Yeboah told ImpactAlpha earlier this year. “For us, that’s pretty significant. It demonstrates that we actually can mobilize capital locally.”
  
• Keep reading, “‘Growth funds’ in Africa are tapping local pension funds to reshape development finance,” by Lucy Ngige and David Bank. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Kamal Prawiranegara, co-founder of the Global Landscapes Forum, takes the helm as director. GLF’s other co-founder, John Colmey, steps down from the role but remains engaged as a senior strategic advisor… The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is looking for a private sector development advisor in the London area… Systemiq is recruiting a sustainable finance and country transition strategy director. 

Microsoft seeks an impact investments manager for its sustainability group in Redmond, Wash… The International Finance Corp.’s Financial Institutions Group is looking for an associate investment officer in its upstream advisory team in Mexico City or Sao Paulo… Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion is hosting its 11th annual Financial Inclusion Week, virtually, through Thursday, Oct. 9.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– Oct. 7, 2025