ImpactAlpha LP/GP: The family offices behind Trimtab’s impact-first capital structure

Greetings, Agents of Impact! 

Welcome to this week’s ImpactAlpha LP/GP, now delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning.

In this week’s newsletter:

• For Trimtab, fiduciary duty means maximum impact
• Climate Fund Managers’ billion-dollar adaptation fund
• Scoop: Ultra Capital clinches $130 million for energy transition fund
• Overheard at the GIIN Impact Forum

Featured: Catalytic Capital

Trimtab’s unapologetic pitch to wealthy families seeking outperformance – on impact. The new kid on the impact investing block is not a fund or a fund of funds. It’s not a registered investment advisor or wealth manager. It’s not a tax-advantaged foundation or donor-advised fund. Instead, Trimtab Impact is an “unapologetically impact-first” holding company that has raised more than $60 million from seven wealthy families looking to generate the highest risk-adjusted impact possible. With their blessing, Trimtab’s fiduciary duty is to maximize impact, not profits. “Being a corporation that can raise common equity – if you can access that capital – operationally and strategically makes an enormous amount of sense,” Trimtab’s Caleb Ballou tells ImpactAlpha. Trimtab, which was incubated by The ImPact, a community of high-net worth families, has made 10 investments totaling $15 million. The thesis: More asset owners, particularly family offices, would be willing to make high-impact catalytic investments if only the process wasn’t so difficult. “Many people have asked us, ‘How do you identify investments that are pursuing the highest return on impact for each dollar?’” said Blue Haven Initiative’s Liesel Pritzker Simmons, who helped hatch Trimtab and became one of its earliest investors. With Trimtab, she tells ImpactAlpha, “That legwork on identifying teams that live and breathe maximum impact is removed.”

• Trust stewardship. What Trimtab is not, Ballou acknowledges, is tax-efficient, as investors gain no tax deductions. Nor is it low-risk. For all that, the company is targeting a portfolio-wide return in the low single-digits. The company, a public benefit corporation registered in Delaware, is governed not only by its board of directors but by the “trust stewardship committee” of its perpetual purpose trust. The trust controls a “golden share” that gives it veto power over major decisions and can even shut the company down if it strays from its mission. “That orientation enables those who contribute capital to trust that it is being used in pursuit of the highest additional impact – and empowers the team to make decisions aligned with that pursuit, free from the traditional forces that shape most asset-management businesses,” says Julie Engelhorn, of POLLEX, an impact advisor in Hamburg, Germany, and a member of Trimtab’s stewardship committee.
  
• Family offices. “Trimtab could be catalytic for a transformation of the existing financial system, or it could be a waste of time and money, or anything in between,” says Manuel Contreras Pietri, one of Trimtab’s founding investors. “But if we do not invest in what we believe in, then we are part of the problem.” Trimtab investor Steven Bonsey, who freely acknowledges that his family’s inherited wealth comes from “an extractive economic system,” said he had long sought to invest in generative enterprises among people and in places that have been left behind. “We found other investors that shared this vision but were surprised to find that many expected a market-rate return on their ‘impact’ investments,” he tells ImpactAlpha. “What on earth for?” Hanson Gong, who invested through his family office, Oogway Capital, says he was attracted by Trimtab’s “unapologetically impact first” tag line. “Trimtab combines both capital innovation and mission-lock through governance innovation that enables it to push boundaries.”
  
• Multi-additionality. Trimtab’s $4 million investment in Acre Impact enabled the London-based private-debt manager to access a $40 million commitment from the European Investment Bank and reach a $100 million first close of its Export Finance Fund last year. Other investments include Blue Forest’s FRB Catalyst Fund, which is financing wildfire risk-reduction and forest restoration; Mombak’s Amazon Reforestation Fund; and Outrigger Impact, which focuses on ocean resilience and small island countries. Under its strategy of “annihilating extractive systems,” Trimtab has backed Common Trust to spur business transitions to employee ownership trusts, and Seven Generations Capital, which is helping Canada’s First Nations communities build wealth through real estate development partnerships. Trimtab is an experiment in making it easy for asset owners to seek risk-adjusted impact, rather than returns, says The ImPact’s Sam Bonsey, Steven’s son. “Unless asset owners set a different objective, we cannot expect the financial system to enable different results in social and ecological systems.”
  
• Keep reading, “Trimtab’s unapologetic pitch to wealthy families seeking outperformance – on impact,” by David Bank. 

Dealflow: Energy Transition

Exclusive: Ultra Capital clinches $130 million for third energy transition fund. The Philadelphia-based firm invests in companies advancing the energy transition, including solar, battery storage, distributed generation, EV charging and fleet electrification. Its strategy “addresses a funding gap for companies seeking $5 million to $25 million in growth or asset capital that are not at the scale to attract larger private equity or infrastructure capital,” Ultra’s Tom Ferraro told ImpactAlpha. The fund was backed by an undisclosed group of family offices and institutional investors. It has made five investments, with a sixth in the pipeline. Peachtree Infrastructure develops renewable energy to power commercial buildings. L-Charge is a provider of fast, off-grid charging for electric fleets. On.Energy develops battery storage. “We still see a great deal of opportunity in the market,” said Ferraro. “From a risk standpoint, the risk is more defined.” 

• Track record. The latest fundraise follows on the track record of Ultra Capital’s second fund, raised in 2020, which has distributed 18% back to investors to date, said Ferraro. The fund had an early strategy of acquiring gas-fired power plants with existing grid interconnections, developing the adjacent land with renewable energy, and decommissioning the gas plants or shifting them to peak power generation. In June, Ultra and its partner Panamint refinanced a Minnesota gas plant by selling $165.9 million in notes to Global Infrastructure Partners and PGIM Private Capital. It plans to distribute those proceeds to investors this month, and then will sell its equity stake in the plant as well as an 80-megawatt battery system built on the land. Ferraro said that as of June, the second fund has logged a 41% IRR and 2.7x multiple on invested capital. “The strategy has really been a success.”
  
• Gift this article.

Climate Fund Managers closes $1 billion adaptation fund for emerging markets. Climate Fund Managers raised close to $1.1 billion for its second blended finance vehicle – potentially the largest climate adaptation infrastructure fund for emerging markets. Climate Investor Two will finance water, sanitation and marine infrastructure in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The fundraise comes as more frequent extreme weather events push adaptation up the investor agenda. The raise “is a major milestone that highlights investor appetite for adaptation and our ability to structure compelling opportunities in this space,” said CFM’s Andrew Johnstone. Since its first close in 2021, the fund has deployed $339 million in 25 projects, including a debt-for-nature swap that restructured Ecuador’s sovereign debt in exchange for conservation commitments in the Galápagos Islands.

• Public-private. Established in 2015 as a joint venture between Dutch development bank FMO and Sanlam InfraWorks, Climate Fund Managers draws on public and private capital for climate infrastructure. Investors in the fund include the Nordic pension fund KLP, IMAS Foundation, Dutch life insurance company Aegon, and BNG Bank. Public funders included the European Commission, the Dutch Fund for Climate and Development, the Green Climate Fund, the Nordic Development Fund and SwedFund. Sanlam Alternative Investments provided a bridge loan, backed by a guarantee from the EC, that will eventually be refinanced with a climate bond, allowing institutional fixed-income investors to access the fund’s portfolio.
  
• Lifecycle. Climate Investor Two uses a three-tier structure to derisk projects, from early planning through construction and operations. A donor-based development fund provides up to 50% of early-stage financing through flexible loans and technical assistance to help projects become investment ready. A construction equity fund, representing roughly $1 billion, supports up to 75% of construction costs via equity using donor, commercial and institutional capital. A refinancing fund is in the works to provide long-term debt to operational projects, allowing the fund to recycle capital into new investments.
  
• More. 

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

• Milan-based Maia Ventures secured backing from the European Investment Fund, CDP Venture Capital and other investors for an impact-focused seed fund for food and agriculture startups strengthening Italy’s food value chain. (EU-Startups)
  
• Dutch pension fund manager APG invested in 173,000 acres of timberland in the southern US. The deal was intermediated by Molpus Woodlands Group, a Jackson, Miss.-based timberland investment manager. (Global AgInvesting)
  
• Huurav Energy, a new Native-owned investment manager based on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona, is rolling out a bridge financing fund for clean energy projects on tribal lands that have stalled due to federal funding cuts. (Tribal Business News)
  
• Sustainability data company Novata will acquire Atlas Metrics, a European sustainability performance and reporting platform. (Novata)

Signals: Institutional Impact

At GIIN Impact Forum, institutional investors chart a path forward. Elections around the world over the last year show that most people want a lower cost of living, clean air, clean water, decent jobs, a safe place to live – and confidence that things will get better, not worse, said the Global Impact Investing Network’s Amit Bouri at the GIIN Impact Forum in Berlin last week. “There is uncertainty in the world, there is volatility, but there’s also clarity,” he told more than 1,200 attendees. “The demands of people everywhere align directly with what impact investing can deliver.” Impact investors, he added, “have the tools, the track record and the collective power to answer.”

• Long-term alignment. Being a responsible investor “is part of our DNA,” said Shahzad Memon of APG, which manages the assets of Dutch pension fund APB. APB has set a goal of deploying €30 billion ($35 billion) in impact investments by 2030. “We take our marching orders from [APB], and they want us to actively go and invest in impact,” said Memon. The strategy includes targets for biodiversity and nature-based solutions (see Overflow, above). “Climate-related risks are long-term risks that will affect your financial value in the future,” he said. “If you’re a long-term investor trying to create better pensions for your participants, this has to be taken into account.”
  
• Cultural capital. Impact investments in creative economies were on the agenda in Berlin, Upstart CoLab’s Laura Callanan wrote in a dispatch . French sovereign wealth fund BPIFrance has invested €8 billion in 16,000 French creative-industry companies. The International Finance Corp. launched its creative economy strategy in 2022 with $400 million to support creative infrastructure like film and TV soundstages, intended to help bring production to the emerging markets. Nigeria’s Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy recently stood up a $300 million Creative Economy Development Fund to create jobs and diversify its economy beyond oil. 

• Hedging and betting. Insurance companies, including Zurich Insurance Group, Nippon Life in Japan and Allianz, are responding to climate risk exposure in their products and services with investments from their balance sheets in sustainable infrastructure and resilience solutions. Zurich Insurance Group is focused on proactive climate solutions, such as certified-green buildings, said the Swiss-headquartered insurer’s Danielle Brassel. Nippon Life is making investments in steel, power and transportation in Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe to drive change in these economies from “brown” to “green”. “It’s important to institutionalize our aim and then our process, internally and externally,” said Nippon Life’s Ayako Kageyama. 

• Keep reading, “At GIIN Impact Forum, institutional investors seek to chart a path forward,” by Dennis Price and Lucy Ngige. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

SVX welcomes Mizan Hemani, former investment analyst at Boann Social Impact, as an advisory services analyst; Salina Tellis, previously with National Bank Financial, as an advisory analyst intern; and Sophia White as a funds and communications intern… Enterprise Community Partners taps Janis Bowdler, former counselor for racial equity at the US Department of the Treasury, as president of solutions.

Liberty Mutual Investments seeks an energy and infrastructure associate in Boston, and a vice president of impact investing and impact investing senior analyst in New York… CapShift has several new openings: a portfolio associate, an impact investing business development manager, an operational due diligence consultant and a client experience manager. 

Transform Finance is hosting a webinar on social entrepreneurship through acquisition today at 12pm ET / 9am PT (see, “Expanding ‘entrepreneurship through acquisition’ for inclusive wealth creation in the US and Canada”)… 100 Women in Finance will host its Impact Investing Symposium on Thursday, Oct. 23… Impact Capital Managers is accepting applications for its 2026 Mosaic Fellowship until Sunday, Nov. 16.

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

Thank you for your impact!

– Oct. 15, 2025