ImpactAlpha LP / GP

ImpactAlpha LP/GP: Larry Fink’s plan to make asset management great again

ImpactAlpha · April 1, 2025

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. Symphonic Capital’s Sydney Thomas and Shruti Shah will join ImpactAlpha’s Sherrell Dorsey to discuss cleantech investment prospects amid shifting policy priorities in Washington, DC, and how Symphonic’s commitment to equity and overlooked communities drives impact, and returns. Join the call, today, April 1, at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Still time to RSVP.

In this week’s newsletter:

  • Larry Fink’s pitch to Making Asset Management Great Again 
  • TPG Rise’s Global South Initiative
  • Vistria’s $2.5 billion affordable housing fund
  • Private equity dominates impact fund universe 

Making Asset Management Great Again: Larry Fink’s private path to economic populism. Larry Fink knows which way the wind blows. The CEO of asset management giant BlackRock is again shape-shifting with the times. When it was trendy, he used his annual letter to champion environmental, social and governance, or ESG. In 2020, he declared “climate risk is investment risk.” Under withering Republican anti-ESG attacks in 2023, he dropped any mention of ESG and appointed the head of Saudi Aramco to BlackRock’s board. Instead of climate risk, he talked up “energy pragmatism.” With his 2025 missive, Fink has reinvented himself again as a full-throated advocate of economic populism and shared prosperity. Populists from Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon are making the case for lower prices, higher incomes and even increased ownership for average Americans and working families. Fink’s letter makes it official: the abundance agenda has arrived. Broad-based employee ownership is increasingly being adopted by the largest private equity firms. “This is a crucial opportunity for everyone to participate in meaningful wealth creation,” KKR’s Pete Stavros and the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker wrote in Fortune.

  • Retail investors. Fink has a different strategy for achieving this shared prosperity: making the private capital markets more accessible to smaller investors. “Today, many countries have twin, inverted economies: one where wealth builds on wealth; another where hardship builds on hardship,” he wrote. By opening up lucrative private-market opportunities to everyday Americans, he argues, they, too, can share in the gains. In the US, roughly $25 trillion is parked in banks and money market funds. “Abundant capital. Deployed too narrowly,” submitted Fink. The BlackRock chief sees a golden age for private market investing, as tapped out governments face huge needs for infrastructure spending and ever-larger private companies look beyond banks for growth capital. “Assets that will define the future – data centers, ports, power grids, the world’s fastest-growing private companies – aren’t available to most investors,” he wrote. “They’re in private markets, locked behind high walls, with gates that open only for the wealthiest or largest market participants.”
  • Public and private. A deregulatory Trump administration is expected to loosen investment rules, including those that bar 401(k) plan sponsors from putting alternative investments, such as private credit, infrastructure funds and crypto, on their menus. BlackRock has gobbled up Global Infrastructure Partners, private credit manager HPS Investment Partners, and private markets data provider Prequin. It’s not just Fink who sees gold in them thar retail hills. “The most important driver of our business is an entire rethink of public and private,” Apollo’s CEO Marc Rowan said on a recent earnings call. As a capital source, individual investors “have the potential to be as large as institutions in the same sorts of products, and they will not take anywhere near 40 years to get to that size,” Rowan said. Challenges to be ironed out include how to make traditionally illiquid investments suitable for retail investors and buffer them from undue risk. But the public-private mashup is setting up an epic scrum, pitting buyout firms against traditional asset managers – or sending them into each other’s arms. Apollo, for example, has teamed up with State Street on an ETF that combines public and private credit instruments.
  • Prosperity flywheel. Fink noted that, since 2015, BlackRock’s low-cost ETFs have saved clients $642 million in fees. Left unsaid: Private credit and infrastructure will help the firm pad its fee income once again, even as private equity firms eyeing the retail market take a haircut. He has assembled the pieces to make private market baskets as “easy to buy” and track as an S&P 500 index. For workers, consumers and society at large, increased privatization of the economy has hollowed out broad swaths of essential social infrastructure, including healthcare, media, housing and water. Fink wasn’t about to use this year’s letter to question the asset class or private capital in general. More investors and more investment “is the answer,” he argued. “The prosperity flywheel will spin faster, generating more growth – not just for the global economy or large institutional investors, but for investors of all sizes around the world.” At least until the wind changes direction.
  • Keep reading, “Making Asset Management Great Again: Larry Finks private path to economic populism,” by Amy Cortese and Imogen Rose-Smith on ImpactAlpha. 

Sponsored by SOCAP

Elevating LP-GP connections at SOCAP25. The San Francisco-based Social Capital Markets conference, born in the financial crisis of 2008, is stepping up again to meet new social and political realities. A redesign of this October’s conference includes a day-one focus on creating capital connections. Through reverse pitch sessions and investor roundtables, limited and general partners, corporations, institutional investors will come together with entrepreneurs and impact-driven organizations to design the future economy together. “Now, more than ever, there is a critical need for inclusive spaces where conversation, thought leadership and constructive debate can thrive,” writes SOCAP’s Sarah Sterling in a guest post previewing the conference. This year’s theme “The future Is collaborative: Taking impact mainstream,” she says, reflects SOCAP25’s goal to move beyond identifying problems and towards “future-oriented thinking and active, collaborative problem-solving.”

Dealflow: Affordable Housing

Vistria Group secures $2.5 billion for its first affordable housing fund. You wouldn’t know that it’s a tough market for fundraising based on Vistria Group’s recent track record. On the heels of closing a $3 billion buyout fund for healthcare, financial services and education companies, the Chicago-based private equity firm has notched $2.5 billion for its first workforce and affordable housing fund. Vistria launched the real estate strategy two years ago to preserve, improve and build affordable and workforce housing. “The capital need is in the trillions, not billions,” Vistria’s Margaret Anadu told The New York Times. The firm has amassed a portfolio of 7,000 housing units in six states and Washington, DC; about 80% are considered affordable housing. Vistria converted 2,000 of the units it acquired from market-rate to affordable, including 700 units in California.

  • Institutional LPs. Vistria, with $16 billion in assets under management, counts public pension funds, investment banks, insurance companies, asset managers, foundations and family offices in the US and Europe among the housing fund’s LPs. “Institutional investors are recognizing what we’ve long known – high-quality affordable and workforce housing isn’t just essential, it’s one of the most durable and scalable asset classes in real estate,” said Anadu. Like infrastructure, investors see real estate and other alternative assets as an inflation hedge. Vistria’s fifth flagship buyout fund secured investments from the New York State Common Retirement Fund and the California State Teachers Retirement System, among other institutional investors. Vistria is a new addition to the ImpactAssets50 list of impact fund managers this year.
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TPG Rise invests in Siemens’s wind unit via its climate and emerging market strategies. The private equity firm is acquiring a majority stake in the onshore wind turbine manufacturing business of Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Siemens Energy that works in India and Sri Lanka. India aims to boost wind power from about 4% of its electricity mix to about 10% by 2032 and reach 122 gigawatts of wind capacity over the same period, up from about 47 gigawatts today. TPG Rise invested via its $5 billion Climate Fund II. Other investors in the deal include private equity firm MAVCO Investments, and Prashant Jain, former CEO of renewable power company JSW Energy. Siemens Gamesa also contributed capital. Vinod Philip of Siemens Energy noted the growth potential for onshore wind in India and said, “Our new partners led by TPG are the optimal owners to harness this potential.”

  • Catalytic capital. The investment is the first from TPG Rise’s Global South Initiative, an emerging markets investment partnership with Alterra, a climate investment group seeded with $30 billion from the United Arab Emirates at COP28 in Dubai. TPG Rise and Alterra launched the Global South Initiative in 2023 to mobilize more institutional capital for climate-aligned private equity investments in emerging markets (see, “TPG’s Jim Coulter is still bullish on climate and impact“). Alterra committed $500 million to the fund as a catalytic tranche that offers return enhancements to GSI’s other investors. TPG Rise has invested in the initiative and pledged to co-invest $1 billion from its Climate Fund II. As of October, the partners said they had secured nearly $1.3 billion in commitments to the fund against a $2.5 billion fundraising goal.
  • Check it out. 

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • UK-based Joseph Rowntree Foundation said it will deploy its £400 million ($517 million) endowment to mission-related investments. (Alliance Magazine)
  • Sweden’s EQT secured €21.5 billion ($23.2 billion) for its sixth infrastructure fund, which will focus on energy generation, storage and distribution. Some 70% of the capital came from existing investors, who increased their commitments. (Bloomberg)
  • The Nigerian government secured 250 billion naira ($165.5 million) for a new fund to provide affordable mortgages. The raise included an anchor, 40-year concessional loan from the International Development Association and commitments from local pension funds, banks and insurance companies. (Bloomberg)
  • US biotech company GreenLight Biosciences secured $25 million from Just Climate to launch its bio-based crop treatments in Brazil. (Forbes)
  • Geothermal power developer XGS Energy raised $13 million from Aligned Climate Capital, ClearSky, WovenEarth Ventures and ClimateIC in an extension of a funding round led by Constellation Technology Ventures last year. (GRN)

Signals: Impact Fundraising

LPs favor private equity in allocations to more than 120 impact funds. Private equity strategies are the favored impact vehicle for global institutional investors, especially corporates. Of the 122 new impact funds that launched last year, more than half were from private equity managers, according to a new report from Phenix Capital. Some 67 new PE impact funds debuted, compared to 24 private debt launches. Funds of funds, and public equities and debt rounded out the total. Real assets, with an emphasis on infrastructure, make up the second largest strategy, representing 22% of the impact fund universe. Foundations, corporations and pension funds are the largest investors in private impact funds. The “Impact fund universe“ report suggests that LPs with an impact mandate appreciate the longer timelines of private equity funds that give managers a chance to improve and scale up portfolio companies. Phenix Capital’s database features nearly 3,000 global impact funds that have raised a combined €701 billion ($758.4 billion) since 2015. Managers in the database are actively raising roughly 1,330 funds.

  • Fund launches. Phenix Capital spotlights some private equity managers in active fundraising mode, including Dutch impact investor Gilde Healthcare, which is building out a climate lens with a new €250 million ($270 million) private equity fund. More than half of the 122 impact funds launched last year had a climate focus, according to Phenix. ​Privium Fund Management, based in Amsterdam, is looking to raise €500 million for its Biodiversity Impact Fund, launched this year in partnership with Impact Orange Partners. The fund, which has already secured commitments from Dutch family offices, will invest in regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry, ocean preservation and sustainable fisheries.
  • That’s a wrap. Munich-based Golding Capital Partners last week closed its first private equity impact fund of funds – after 4.5 years of fundraising – with €115.5 million from pension funds, insurance companies and foundations from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal. A fifth of the capital committed came from new LPs, according to Golding. Golding is planning to launch a Europe and North America-focused climate tech fund in the fourth quarter of this year. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Mark Wiedman will leave BlackRock “to return to my entrepreneurial roots for the next phase of my career,” he shared on LinkedIn. Wiedman, a board member of Decarbonization Partners, led the formation of the BlackRock and Temasek partnership… Lane Genatowski, formerly director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, is appointed director of the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy, overseeing its $400 billion in lending authority.

LeapFrog Investments promotes Tapiwa Muranda to director of financial services for Africa, Johan Vivier to head of finance, Rebeca Kwee to associate director of impact measurement and management, Melissa Yeo to external affairs senior manager, Betty Weng to strategy senior manager, Akshi Sharma to climate investment officer, Toba Fatimilehin to financial services investment officer for Africa, Niyati Dangi to healthcare impact and measurement officer, and Nabisha Syed to executive assistant and office manager… Mission Driven Finance promotes Lauren Mathis to fund services senior manager.

Illumen Capital promotes Leila Mengesha to vice president of product development and impact… Apollo Global Management is hiring an associate of sustainability and infrastructure product management … Neuberger Berman seeks a stewardship and sustainable investing associate in New York… Also in New York, Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management is looking for an associate for its sustainable investing group, and Galvanize Climate Solutions is recruiting an investment associate… Norfund has an opening for a green infrastructure investment manager in Cape Town… AXA Investment Management is on the hunt for a global health investing analyst.

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

Thank you for your impact!

– April 1, 2025