Greetings Agents of Impact! Welcome to ImpactAlpha Open, a free weekly sampling of the top news and views from ImpactAlpha.
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In this week’s Open:
- Private equity energy power players
- Beanstalk AgTech’s venture studio for agricultural innovation in Asia
- Podcasts: Todd Khozein, Joanna Levitt Cea and This Week in Impact
- Pop Impact: Can finance reclaim the narrative?
Let’s dig in. – Dennis Price
Must-Reads on ImpactAlpha
- Power for AI, mostly renewable, tops the shopping list for big asset managers. There’s a reason they’re called power players. With electricity ranking as one of the biggest constraints on AI growth, asset-management firms like Brookfield, Blackstone, KKR and Apollo are raising billions of dollars to buy, build, finance and operate the infrastructure that provides that juice. “In the AI value chain today, energy is the largest bottleneck,” Sikander Rashid, Brookfield’s head of global AI infrastructure, said on the firm’s quarterly earnings call. Learn more.
- Public data reveals tension between nature investments and Indigenous rights in Brazil. The need for nature protection and restoration in the Amazon coincides with tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being mobilized for nature-based investments in Brazil. But discrepancies in how rural land and Indigenous territory are recognized can give investors and lenders a false sense of security about the financial, social and environmental aspects of these investments, ImpactAlpha contributor Gilberto Lima reports from Rio de Janeiro. Check it out.
- Beanstalk AgTech launches Monsoon Ventures to build Southeast Asia’s agtech pipeline. India and Australia have become successful tech hubs for food and agriculture. Can the strategy be replicated across Southeast Asia? Melbourne-based Beanstalk AgTech is counting on it. Its new agtech venture building studio, Monsoon Ventures, is building on the trials, errors and, crucially, wins of its Australia-focused counterpart Drought Venture Studio, to develop deep tech and science-based innovations aimed at improving the climate resilience of Southeast Asia’s smallholder farmers, reports Jessica Pothering. See what they’re building.
Agents of Impacts
🏃 On the move
- DBL Partners’ Jake Harris was promoted to partner.
- Social Finance welcomed former Credit Suisse associate Grace Sheridan as senior associate of impact investments.
- African American Leadership Forum recruited Marcus Mills, previously with the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority, as senior policy impact associate.
The Week’s Podcasts
This Week in Impact
Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: How the AI boom is supercharging the already attractive economics of renewable energy and battery storage; why, as more authority is delegated to AI, demand will only grow for companies that preserve control over data, infrastructure, models and applications; and how WovenEarth is using a $155 million fund of funds to give its LPs exposure to innovative cleantech startups.
Agents of Impact: An ecosystem builder looks homeward to imagine the reconstruction of Iran
SecondMuse’s Todd Khozein has helped reimagine green manufacturing in New York, plastic recycling in Southeast Asia, and youth mental health services. Now, he’s turning his system-level thinking on the country of his birth, Iran. Rebuilding the country of 93 million people will be among the most consequential reconstruction efforts of the 21st century, he says on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. “You can’t build a rich economy on a bankrupt society.”
Criterion Institute Podcast: The stories that shape finance
Host Joy Anderson speaks with Valiente Capital Design’s Joanna Levitt Cea to explore the role of narratives in creating economic and systems change. Narrative change is not simply about finding the right message, they discuss, but about collective action, organizing and reshaping the stories that define what people believe is possible. Learn more.
- Changing your frame, not your mind. A colleague recently asked Anderson where she’d changed her mind – the kind of question you ask to find out whether someone is actually learning, or just defending old positions with better language. Her answer probably won’t be the one you’re expecting. Listen.
The Week’s Spotlight
Pop Impact: Finance is being defined by the wrong stories; it’s time for impact investors to reclaim the narrative. From memorable films like “Margin Call” and “Wall Street” to more recent prestige TV shows like “Billions” and “Industry”, financial narratives stick to a narrow band of tropes. White. Male. Greedy. Corrupt. Nihilist. Back in the real world, Agents of Impact have been building a different narrative about the potential of finance as a force for good. These narratives rarely, if ever, reach general audiences. In his latest Pop Impact column, contributing editor Dmitriy Ioselevich explores what it would take to present a more positive and hopeful lens on the people and institutions making finance work better for people and the planet.
Get in the game
💼 Step up
- GSG Impactseeks a policy officer for a remote role in the UK.
- Boannis hiring an investment analyst in Toronto.
- Acumenis looking for a senior associate for Acumen Academy’s alumni community in East Africa, the Foundry.
🤝 Meet up