ImpactAlpha Open

PE giants raise big bucks for energy + Breaking into careers in impact investing

Dennis Price ¡ February 17, 2026

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

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☎️ Tomorrow’s Call: Shaping the algorithm for good AI. Capital is mobilizing behind the data, infrastructure, ownership models and ethos that reinforce human agency, social resilience and public good. Katy Knight of Siegel Family Endowment, Paul Fehlinger of Project Liberty Institute, Mohamed Nanabhay of Mozilla Ventures, Chris Jurgens of Omidyar Network and other (human) Agents of Impact will sketch an emerging investment thesis and suggest how institutional allocators can invest in “good AI.”  The call kicks off ImpactAlpha’s new “Shaping the Algorithm” beat, in partnership with Siegel Family Endowment. Answer the Call, Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.

In this week’s Open:

  • Mapping career pathways into impact investing
  • Apollo, TPG and KKR are raising big bucks for energy, infrastructure and impact
  • Podcast: Reports from Washington, DC, Philadelphia and Cape Town
  • Spotlight: Shaping food systems through school meals

Let’s dig in. â€“ Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Breaking into impact investing: Mapping student pathways and experiences. Harvard BusinessSchoolresearchers are back with a new qualitative study looking at how to land a plum impact investing role. Shawn Cole and Jonah Zahnd surveyed 20 participants in Impact Capital Managers’ Mosaic fellowship program, which places grad students as summer associates at impact funds. Learn more.
  • Asset management giants are raising record sums, including for impact and the energy transition. The biggest are getting bigger. Publicly traded private equity firms touted record funding raised on their year-end earnings calls last week. While they may have downplayed impact and energy transition themes for political reasons, the insatiable demand for electricity is continuing to fuel investments in renewable energy and resilient infrastructure, find Amy Cortese and Roodgally Senatus. Read on.
  • Demand for critical minerals creates new opportunities to put Africa first. Africa is at the center of a new geopolitical scramble for valuable mineral resources. The imperative at last week’s Investing in African Mining Indaba, or convention, in Cape Town: Seize the moment to turn the extraction of the continent’s mineral wealth into a driver for sustainable economic development and shared prosperity, reports Jessica Pothering. Check it out.

Agents of Impact

  • Lina Srivastava, founder of the Center for Transformational Change, joined Proximate as interim executive director. 
  • Impact Fund Denmark brought on JoĂŁo Pedro Aquino as an investment manager. 
  • JPMorgan Chase promoted Connor Bercik to senior associate of sustainable investing.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact

Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with Jessica Pothering, Dennis Price and Roodgally Senatus. Up this week: Jessica reports from Cape Town on how Africa’s mining industry is leveraging global demand for critical minerals; Dennis shares takeaways from the launch of Urban Institute’s Center for Local Finance and Growth; and Roody reports from Philadelphia on Kensington Corridor Trust’s neighborhood-led revival.

📯 Criterion Institute Podcast 

Host Joy Anderson is joined by Entrepreneurial Solutions Partners’ Eric Kacou and Charity Kabango to explore what it takes to build thriving businesses and markets in Africa, while centering entrepreneurs as human beings embedded in complex ecosystems. 

The Week’s Spotlight

🧑🏽‍🌾 Using school meals to change food systems and empower local farmers

School meal programs are one of the largest global safety nets. Rising food prices and declining aid are threatening them. The School Meals Accelerator aims to help governments, from the US to Africa, stretch school feeding budgets to reach an additional 100 million children by 2030. The new accelerator “is not an imposed, top down, donor-driven thing, especially in a world where donor funds are reducing,” Roy Steiner of the Rockefeller Foundation told ImpactAlpha. “This is a new model of development. It’s locally-owned, nationally-owned and paid for by the government.”

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • Montcalm TCR LLC is looking for a senior investment associate in San Francisco.
  • Up Energy is searching for a safe water projects fellow in Kenya.
  • Energy Impact Partners seeks an associate for their deep decarbonization frontier fund in New York. 

🤝 Meet up

  • Feb. 24 – 26: FLII (Merida)
  • Feb. 26 – 27:  Purpose Trust Ownership (Austin, Texas)
  • Mar. 16 – 18: MO Summit (Asheville)
  • June 1 – 5: Sustainable Finance Initiative’s Impact Week (Hong Kong)

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