Impact Supporters

Greetings to 3,000+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 Today, we’re talking about food, not as in sharing great recipes, but as in one of the biggest systemic problems (and opportunities) on the planet.Food touches climate, health, geopolitics, culture, and everything in between. And while energy has dominated the green transition conversation for years, food has been quietly underfunded by VCs. And that’s slowly starting to change 💡In this episode, I’m joined by Bodil Sidén, founding partner of Kost Capital, a Copenhagen-based €20M fund (and venture studio, and R&D platform) backing the next generation of food companies across Europe. Bodil brings sharp pragmatism to a space too often defined by wishful thinking, and she’s not afraid to say the quiet parts out loud.So, let’s dig in! 🍴📋 What’s Inside🌍 A System That Touches Everything – Why food is both the problem and the solution🐴 Never Bet on the Consumer – The Trojan horse strategy at the heart of Kost’s thesis🏭 Improving the Factory, Not the Oranges – Why the first two waves of food tech missed the mark💧What’s in the Swedish Water? – Lessons from Stockholm’s ecosystem boom🤖 AI Meets a 0.1x Industry – The most under-digitised vertical is also the most exciting🛒 Health as the Wallet Issue – Why health, not climate, gets food onto the shelf🌾 Food as a Strategic Asset – Resilience, regionalisation, and Europe’s opening👩‍💼 Meet Bodil SidénBodil’s path into food investing runs through politics, media, and the operator world before landing in VC. She built her early career across Swedish public life and communications, then spent years close to founders and capital before deciding the most important problem she could spend the next decade on was the food space.Bodil’s path into food investing is anything but linear. She began her career in Swedish politics, drawn early to questions about how societies make decisions and where real change actually happens. From there she moved into tech and scaling, taking leadership roles at Uber in the Nordics and later at Bellbird, before joining blq Invest VC as a Partner. She then spent years close to founders and capital before deciding the most important problem she could spend the next decade on was the one we all sit down to three times a day 💡What pulled her into food wasn’t an industry interest. It was a systems interest. The more she looked across climate, health, geopolitics, and culture, the more she saw the same answer staring back: food sits at the centre of nearly everything that matters, and almost nobody is building the venture infrastructure to actually fix it.Today, as General Partner of Kost Capital in Copenhagen, Bodil leads investments and operations across a fund designed to do exactly that. She’s also a vocal advocate for the broader Nordic ecosystem, a regular voice on what’s working (and what isn’t) between Stockholm and Copenhagen, and, in her own words, a picky eater with a lifelong loyalty to porridge 🥣Her work is animated by a simple conviction: the best impact investing doesn’t ask people to change. It quietly changes what’s already in front of them.Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.🌍 A System That Touches EverythingBodil doesn’t mince words about why food matters. It is, in her telling, the centre of everything the sun touches: climate, health, security, equality, culture, belonging. Every problem capitalism has with the planet shows up somewhere in the food system, and so does every potential solution.“It’s a tough competition between health and climate, and they often can be solved hand in hand. How you solve it is maybe not where it’s most broken, but maybe where the consumers are.”That instinct, to meet people where they are rather than where you wish they were, runs through everything Kost does. Climate is abstract. Health is immediate. Lead with what people feel in their bodies, and the climate wins follow 💚🐴 Never Bet on the ConsumerIf there’s one mantra Bodil returns to throughout the conversation, it’s that you should never bet on consumers changing. You should be obsessed with how they behave, but you should never try to change them.She uses herself as Exhibit A: She has eaten the same porridge for breakfast since she was six. No one, she says cheerfully, is touching her porridge. But the oats in the porridge? The spices? The protein blend? Those are fair game. That’s the Trojan horse, a B2B-first thesis hiding inside a consumer-facing problem. Change what’s already on the plate rather than asking anyone to eat insects for lunch 🐎🏭 Improving the Factory, Not the OrangesKost backs ingredients, enabling tech, and platforms that improve how food is made, not the finished product itself. Bodil draws a sharp analogy to early software: nobody invested in pencils and paper. They invested in ERP and CRM, the business-critical infrastructure that made companies run better. Food is overdue for the same shift.The first wave of food tech (roughly 2017 to 2020) gave us Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Oatly. Generalist VCs piled in with SaaS playbooks, then realised dairy margins of 5 to 7 percent don’t behave like software and quietly backed out. The second wave leaned on precision fermentation borrowed from pharma, promising technology but built for MedTech economics. Kost’s bet is on the third wave: inputs and ingredients with SaaS-like gross margins, quietly upgrading the entire supply chain from the inside.“The gross margin on a colorant is maybe 60 to 65 percent. That’s close to SaaS margins now.” 🔧💧What’s in the Swedish Water?Bodil joined us in Denmark from Stockholm, where the start-up energy right now is genuinely electric. So, we had to ask: what’s the secret?Some of it is structural. Sweden built a sophisticated capital market in the 90s, IPO’d unicorns early (Spotify, Skype), and has had decades of liquidity flywheels turning. Founders exit, become angels, start new companies, and the cycle compounds. Some of it is cultural: a dense, passionate, weekend-working founder community that treats start-up building as a craft, not a 9 to 5.Denmark, she argues, is on its way, but still needs a few things to fall into place: a healthier liquidity environment for mid-cap companies, more family offices willing to back venture funds instead of defaulting to real estate, and a builder mentality that’s a little less polite about working weekends. We’ll get there ❤️🤍🤖 AI Meets a 0.1x IndustryFood is among the most under-digitised verticals in the world. The average European farmer is 65. R&D still relies on physical bioreactors, sawdust, and weeks of waiting for results. Which is exactly why Bodil sees the AI upside as enormous.“We have an opportunity to go from like 0.1 to 10x that instantly. Any food company that’s starting now can be an AI-first company.”She imagines pre-testing new fats or proteins in silico before firing up a fermentation tank, recipe development cycles measured in hours rather than months, and data treated as a core strategic asset from day one. Her plea to the rest of the ecosystem: bring talent from other verticals into food. The fintech operators, the SaaS PMs, the infra engineers. Food needs the cross-pollination 🧬🛒 Health as the Wallet IssueThe fastest-growing pockets Bodil is watching aren’t where you’d expect. Forget Gen Z. Look at boomers: fat wallets, active lives, and a biological reality that nutrition science is only beginning to catch up with. A 70-year-old today, she points out, is the new 50. They’re finishing marathons and travelling the world, but they also need bioavailable nutrients designed for the bodies they actually have.And women’s health, where the surface has barely been scratched. Cycle-aligned nutrition, perimenopause, the link between what we eat and our mood and cognition. Both segments are wide open, both have real willingness to pay, and both have been chronically underserved by an in… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3,000+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 For this episode, I sit down with Jon Sigvert, co-founder and CEO of Reel, one of our very own portfolio companies at Footprint, to talk about how you build a fundraising machine, what it really means to buy green electricity, and how Reel is quietly solving one of the most complex optimization problems in the energy transition.Jon went straight from his master’s thesis at DTU into co-founding Reel and never looked back. Just a few days before we recorded this, he closed a very strong Series A. We talk about all of it 💡 📋 What’s Inside 💰 Fundraising as a Sales Funnel: Jon’s structured, auction style approach to raising capital at every stage 🌱 The Green Energy Paradox: Why green energy claims often don't add up, and what Reel is trying to do about it⚡How Reel Actually Works: The dual sided model connecting corporate buyers with renewable energy producers 🧠 Building a Company Straight Out of School: Leadership lessons from a first-time founder who never had a “real” job first 🔍 What This Means for You as an Impact VC: Three things every climate investor should take away from Reel’s journey 👋 Meet Jon Sivert Jon is one of the more unusual founders I have had the pleasure of working with. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, where he took virtually every course available on life cycle assessment and environmental impact modelling. His master’s thesis, titled “Is It Really Green Though?”, examined the consequences of corporate green electricity procurement and became, more or less, the white paper for the company he went on to build 📚 Reel is, in many ways, Jon's first real job. He has never worked in a big corporate. He jumped straight from student life into co-founding a company that is now growing 8 to 9x year on year going into the Series A. What stands out about Jon is not just the numbers. It is the calm, the clarity and the stubborn conviction that commercial success and genuine climate impact have to coexist 🌍💰 Fundraising as a Sales Funnel Jon closed Reel’s Series A less than 24 hours before we sat down. His approach has been remarkably consistent across every round: treat it like a structured sales process, build a prioritized funnel, move fast, and never reveal a valuation expectation. “We never communicate actual numbers. We always ask to get the best offer possible.” He is firm on speed too. Dragging a process out kills urgency and burns momentum. His rule: weeks, not months. And the real prerequisite underneath all of it? Obsessive traction building between rounds, not investor relationship building. What is less often discussed is how much harder Series A preparation gets compared to earlier rounds. Jon’s pre-seed deck was built by an engineer with spinning wind turbine animations (he has since learned from Reel’s in-house designers to never use spinning elements in a PowerPoint). At seed, there were a handful of customers to point to. But at Series A, with hundreds of customers and terawatt hours of energy running through the business, there was suddenly a mountain of data and financials to structure and present in a way that was easily digestible for investors seeing Reel for the first time. Many founders underestimate that leap 💡 Jon has also been in the fortunate position of choosing among competing term sheets, and notably, he has not always gone with the highest valuation. Getting the right partner on board matters more than maximizing a standalone number. One honest reflection: as rounds get larger, the binary approach of only speaking to investors when actively raising starts to cost you. Investors putting in double digit million euro checks need more runway to build conviction than a compressed process allows. Jon himself sees this clearly now and is thinking about how to keep key investors in the loop between rounds going forward. 🌱 The Green Energy ParadoxReel was born from a frustration Jon developed writing his master’s thesis. Every few years, major corporations get caught claiming carbon neutrality from electricity they haven’t actually greened. The culprit? Green certificates. You pay for the right to say you consumed renewable power, but nothing really changes in the system. “You just bought the right to say you have consumed green electricity. In reality, you didn’t change a thing.” That insight became the foundation of Reel: build the alternative that actually makes a difference, not just on paper 🔍 ⚡ How Reel Actually Works Reel operates on both sides of the energy market. For large corporate electricity consumers, Reel acts as a licensed supplier delivering power that is genuinely greener and often cheaper, by sourcing directly from renewable energy producers through long term PPAs. To put the problem in perspective: electricity prices have become more than 20 times as volatile as the stock markets in recent years. That is an enormous headache for energy intensive businesses trying to plan their cost base. Reel gives them budget certainty and a genuinely green procurement story at the same time. On the producer side, Reel provides revenue certainty that unlocks project financing for new renewable energy assets. On top of that, Reel does fully automated, algo driven trading optimization across multiple power markets. As renewable energy grows, capture rates decline and forecasting gets harder. That is exactly where Reel’s proprietary tech, including in-house machine learning based forecasting for each individual asset, creates the most value. The next frontier? Battery energy storage systems. Batteries allow you to physically shape power profiles, storing energy when there is too much and releasing it when demand peaks. Reel is already working with BESS, and in several European markets the real glory days of that technology are still ahead 🔋 Germany is next on the map, the largest energy market in Europe and one facing the same cannibalization challenges Denmark worked through years ago 🇩🇪 🧠 Building a Company Straight Out of School Jon has never had a conventional job. His team describes him as unusually execution-focused. His own description is blunter: he is only now learning to step back from the product and optimize the organization itself. On culture, he keeps it simple. “We are tough on the issue, soft on the people.” No douchebag policy. Only hire kind people. Psychological safety, he argues, is not the opposite of high performance. It is what enables it. If you come to work and feel comfortable sharing your perspective without worrying you will sound stupid, that is what allows a small team to move fast. When I asked Jon where his energy comes from, given how calm he famously remains (someone once noted his pulse never seemed to go above 52 during the seed raise), his answer was disarmingly simple. He finds it deeply fulfilling to build something from scratch and to directly solve real challenges rather than being a small piece in a large corporate machine. That drive, paired with an engineer’s instinct for structured problem solving, is what makes him tick ⚡ A company Jon looks up to? Flatpay, also out of Copenhagen, for how effortlessly they have scaled across borders. Totally different product, but the playbook of well-orchestrated software solving a systemic problem, even with a hardware component, resonates deeply with what Reel is building 💡🔍 What This Means for You as an Impact VC Reel is a useful case study in what durable climate investing actually looks like. A few things worth sitting with: 💡Regulated markets are a feature, not a bug. The barriers to becoming a licensed electricity supplier and a balancing responsible party are high. Most investors shy away from that complexity. But once you are in, the incumbents are slow, legacy burdened and structurally unable to innovate at the speed Reel can. The moat is real, even if it takes longer to build. 💡The cannibalization effect is th… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3k+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 In this episode, I sit down with Arnau Tibau Puig, co-founder and CTO of TetraxAI, and one of my co-workers at Footprint, Will Nunn, to explore how AI is actually being deployed inside infrastructure and energy systems to accelerate the green transition, what defensibility really looks like when everyone has access to frontier models, and why reliability might end up mattering more than raw intelligence 🤔AI has moved from novelty to necessity in record time. Valuations are soaring. Data centers are multiplying. Every second pitch deck claims to be AI-enabled.But beneath the excitement sits a quieter and more important question: Where does intelligence actually create real economic value, and where does it quietly fail? And will AI ultimately benefit or harm the green transition?Our conversation felt less like debating the future of AI and more like stress-testing its current reality, especially in industries where mistakes are expensive and systems are a bit more complex.If you are building with AI, allocating capital into it, or simply trying to understand how it intersects with climate and infrastructure, I think you’ll find this one particularly interesting 💡📋What’s inside🤖 AI Beyond the Hype Cycle – Why model access is no longer a moat and where real defensibility now lives.🌍 Operational Intelligence in Infrastructure – How AI can accelerate permitting, financing, and project deployment in energy and climate systems. 🛡️The Reliability Problem – Why verification and safety standards matter more than AGI timelines in critical industries.⚡ The AI and Energy Paradox – Data centers, electricity demand, and whether AI becomes a burden or an accelerator for the energy transition. 🧠 The Future of Knowledge Work and Human Potential – What changes for legal teams, junior roles, and decision making when intelligence becomes abundant.👋 Meet Arnau Arnau is a data scientist with over 13 years of experience in tech by training, with a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. He spent years in big tech in California before moving into the start-up world. But what stood out to me most was not his technical background. It was the clarity behind his shift in focus. At some point, he realized he was solving interesting technical problems but not necessarily meaningful ones. Climate change and the energy transition felt different. He described it as a “big, beautiful problem.” Complex, systemic, imperfect. Worth committing to. That perspective led him to co-found TetraxAI alongside Marta Vizcaíno Martín and Ekaterina Filina 🚀 TetraxAI focuses on operational intelligence for infrastructure investors and developers. In practice, this means processing enormous volumes of regulatory, legal, technical, and financial documentation so projects can move faster and with greater clarity. It overlaps with legal tech, but it is far more vertical and infrastructure specific. This is not about generic document summarization. It is about embedding intelligence directly into the workflow of energy and infrastructure deployment. 🤖 AI Beyond the Hype Cycle One of the most practical parts of our discussion centered on defensibility 🔐 Frontier models are increasingly accessible. The intelligence layer itself is becoming quite commoditized. But Arnau framed it quite clearly: “Defensibility used to be about how hard it was to build what you built. Now it is about how hard it is for your customers to leave.” The moat is no longer the model. It is the integration, the embedded workflow and the absolute necessary layer of trust. He also offered an analogy that I have not been able to shake: “The strongest CPU or the smartest human is not very intelligent in the middle of the ocean. Whereas a shark; with much more limited cognitive capacity to humans, is extremely intelligent in that context.” Raw intelligence without context is essentially useless. The shark understands its environment. It processes signals in ways shaped by evolution and adaptation. Its intelligence is inseparable from its domain🦈 AI, Arnau suggests, is quite similar in that regard. Intelligence becomes valuable only when it is deeply embedded into a specific context. So, when founders talk about building intelligence, the real question becomes: Are we selling general intelligence, or are we carefully shaping it into something operationally useful inside a system? That is a very different ambition. Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.🏗️ Operational Intelligence in Infrastructure With the increasing complexity of infrastructure projects, the need for operational intelligence has never been greater. Infrastructure is rarely elegant. It involves long permitting cycles, public authorities, layered regulations, engineering constraints, financial models, and political dynamics. A single renewable energy project can involve thousands of pages of documentation and years of back and forth. This is where TetraxAI comes in 🤖 Arnau described how project teams often spend disproportionate amounts of time navigating a plethora of documentation rather than making actual decisions. AI can help structure, interpret, and cross-reference this information far faster than manual processes. But he was careful not to frame AI as a magic solution. AI does not automatically eliminate regulatory complexity. It does not remove risk. It does not replace accountability. It augments decision-making. And that distinction is critical. If you are building in climate or energy infrastructure, AI may not necessarily be the product. It may just be the accelerant that makes the product viable at scale. This is a more humble framing of AI. But perhaps a more durable one 💡 🛡️ The Reliability Problem This part of our conversation felt especially important with how fast AI is being deployed across organisations. We briefly touched on AGI and autonomous systems, but Arnau quickly redirected the focus toward reliability standards in critical industries. He referenced sectors like aviation and nuclear energy, where systems are engineered to meet extremely low failure tolerances. In those environments, probabilistic errors are simply unacceptable ⛔When you compare current large language models (LLMs) against those standards, the gap is substantial. The limitation is not intelligence in the abstract, but rather reproducibility, verification and failure tolerance. LLMs are probabilistic by design. They generate outputs based on likelihood distributions, not deterministic reasoning chains. That makes them powerful for many tasks. But it also makes them quite unpredictable in edge cases. In consumer applications, a hallucination might be inconvenient. But in infrastructure finance or grid management, it could be critical and costly 🚨This is why Arnau emphasized that deployment standards matter much more than AGI speculation. Before asking when machines will surpass human intelligence, we should ask: Can they meet the safety thresholds required for the systems we are embedding them into? In many critical industries, the answer today is no. That does not diminish AI’s usefulness… It just reframes it. Instead of full autonomy, we see augmentation. Instead of replacing experts, we see systems that compress information and support judgment and better decision-making. Reliability is not a sexy topic. But in regulated and high stakes industries, it may just be the defining one 💡 ⚡ The AI and Energy Paradox There is an obvious tension at the heart of the AI boom 💥 AI systems require vast amounts of compute. Data centers are expanding rapidly. Electricity demand projections in multiple regions are being revised upward. At the same time, we are trying to decarbonize the grid and accelerate the energy transition. So, is AI actually helping or hurting? 🤔Arnau approached this question with a sense of clarity rather than defensi… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3k+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 For our first episode of the year, I sit down with Johannes Weber, co-founder of Ananda Impact Ventures, one of the earliest impact venture firms in Europe.If you look around today, it almost feels like impact has always been here. Every second deck says climate. Every LP has a sustainability bucket. There are conferences, frameworks, and a whole vocabulary around it.But it really was not that long ago that none of this existed.Johannes started Ananda when impact VC was not even considered a category at all. There were no benchmarks, no success stories, and very few investors who believed you could do good and make money at the same time.In other words, they had to build the playbook themselves 📕So, we went deep, into the practical decisions, the early mistakes, and the bigger patterns that shaped not just Ananda, but the impact VC space more broadly.📋What’s inside🧭 Starting When Nobody Believed – The early days of impact VC and the first proof points that changed minds 🌍 Beyond Labels – Why climate, social, and education categories can hide system-level connections 🔬 Brave Tech Over Easy Tech – Funding frontier technologies instead of incremental software 🧠 Research First, Deals Second – How Ananda sources and backs founders with conviction 🌓 Staying Steady Through Cycles – Avoiding hype, focusing on long-term partnerships and systemic change👋 Meet Johannes WeberJohannes’ entry into impact came from experience and a very human curiosity.Early in his career, he helped build and take a fintech company through a small IPO. Suddenly, he had what many founders chase: liquidity, freedom, and the option to do whatever he wanted.But his original motivation wasn’t abstract ambition. “I wanted to be able to go to Disney World like the other kids,” he says, reflecting on growing up at a private school where his dad taught. That simple desire for independence set him on a path to entrepreneurship.After the IPO, Johannes experimented with ways to make a difference. He bought an asset manager focused on sustainable public equities and partnered with WWF. The idea was straightforward: screen out harmful companies, invest responsibly, and donate a portion of fees.On paper, it looked good. In practice, it didn’t feel like they were moving the needle.“Buying shares on secondary markets and writing checks to charity just didn’t feel like we were changing anything. Ownership without influence doesn’t move systems,” he explains.He even tried activism for a while. Showing up at shareholder meetings in a panda suit to pressure companies to behave better 🐼That frustration was the moment the thesis crystallized: if you want to shape outcomes, you have to build companies from the ground up.And so, Ananda was born, one of Europe’s first dedicated impact VC funds. Today, they’re investing from their Fund V.🧭 Starting when nobody believedIt’s easy to forget how contrarian impact investing once sounded.When Johannes went out to raise their first fund, the pitch was simple. Back entrepreneurs solving real problems and aim for venture-style returns.Some thought it was naïve. Others thought it was charity dressed up as investing.They aimed for €100 million.They closed at €7 million.“People either thought it was cute or strange. There wasn’t a single example we could point to and say, look, this works.”So instead of referencing proof points, they decided to create one 💡One of their early investments was Auticon, now one of the world’s largest employers of people with autism, placing neurodiverse talent into high-quality tech consulting roles.When Sir Richard Branson later invested and publicly endorsed Auticon, something shifted. It became harder to argue that impact businesses could not be serious businesses. That early success helped open doors not just for Ananda, but arguably for the broader VC ecosystem 🌀Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.🌍 Beyond labels...A theme that kept coming back into our conversation was Johannes’ discomfort with how neatly we tent to categorize impact today.Climate funds. Health funds. Education funds.It makes sense from a fundraising perspective. LPs like clear labels.But the world does not work in labels.“Mental health affects climate outcomes. Education affects biodiversity. These systems are connected.”Climate often feels ‘easier’ because emissions can be measured and reduced to a single number. CO₂ becomes a universal currency.But something Johannes cautions is that measurement can sometimes give a false sense of precision.Just because something is quantifiable does not mean it captures the full picture.That’s one reason Ananda has chosen to stay generalist by design.They go deep on sectors through research, but they avoid locking themselves into one narrow theme. Some of their most interesting investments would have never fit neatly into a single box.For them, flexibility is not a lack of focus. It’s a way to avoid blind spots.🔬 Brave tech over easy techThis part of our conversation really stuck with me.Johannes argued that venture capital, at its best, was originally meant to fund frontier technologies. Hard science. Infrastructure. Big leaps 🚀Yet over the past decade, much of VC has drifted toward incremental software.“If we only fund easier SaaS companies, we’re not really solving the big problems. Venture was invented for the hard stuff.”So, Ananda actively looks for heavier, more complex bets.Satellites that detect forest fires globally Biodiversity measurement infrastructure 🐜 Biosecurity and pathogen detection 🧬 Science-driven platforms that governments and critical systems rely on 🧪These companies are slower to build, more capital intensive, and don’t always fit the neat venture playbook. But if they succeed, the upside is systemic 👏“If this doesn’t fundamentally change something, we’re probably not the right investor,” he told me.🧠 Research first, deals secondAnother thing that differentiates Ananda is how intentional they are about sourcing.Rather than waiting for hundreds of inbound decks, they often start with a few questions:* Where might new technologies emerge in five years?* Which risks are underappreciated today?* What capabilities will societies need that don’t yet exist?Then they run structured deep dives. Talking to scientists, operators, and domain experts. Mapping the landscape long before companies are fundraising.Only after building conviction do they actively look for founders.The result surprised me: 15 of their last 18 investments originated from internal research.“By the time we meet a founder, we already understand the problem. We don’t need the education slide. We can go straight into building together.”It creates a very different dynamic. Less pitching, more partnership 🤝🌓 Staying steady through cyclesWe also talked about the past few years: the boom, the flood of climate capital. And now, the cooling off.Johannes has seen this movie before.Capital always moves in waves 🌊 Some investors show up because a theme is fashionable, then disappear when returns take longer than expected.He calls it ‘tourist capital’.“When the water goes away, you see who was swimming without pants.”His approach is simpler. Stay consistent. Don’t chase labels. Build funds sized for reality, not hype. Because the underlying problems do not disappear just because markets change.And the founders building in these spaces need long term partners, not fair-weather investors.📬 What this means for you as an impact VCJohannes’ experience shows that impact investing isn’t about chasing trends or checking boxes. It’s about influence, insight, and patience. You’re backing companies early, before their business models, incentive structures, and impact ambitions are fully set. That means you can help shape what “value” really means both financially and socially 🌱So, start small:✅ Pick one frontier technology … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3,000+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 Today, we’re talking about private equity in a way you might not expect: as a force for impact.Private equity usually gets a bad rap for being all about profits, but what if it could be a driver of change? That’s exactly what Summa Equity are doing in Europe. In this episode, we talk to Emelie Norling to explore how impact can move from an afterthought to becoming the core of investing.From theory of change to hands-on ownership, we cover it all. Let’s dive into impact PE with Summa Equity.📋 What’s Inside💡 From Law to Impact – Emelie’s path from academia to Summa Equity🦁 Taming the Lion – How private equity can meet purpose 📈 Beyond the Hype – The evolution of impact PE returns ⚙️ Inside the Machine – How Summa builds their theory of change 🌍 A Broader Lens – Why climate is just one piece of the puzzle 🔌 Bridging the Gap – What start-ups can learn from buyout impact thinking👩‍💼 Meet Emelie NorlingEmelie’s journey into impact is anything but linear. She began in academia, studying how global institutions interpreted the early idea of sustainable development. Her world at that time revolved around legal arguments, institutional frameworks, and dense academic debates 📚“It was fascinating,” she recalls, “but it felt distant from the places where decisions were actually made.”That desire to get closer to the action brought her into asset management, where she led responsible investment for a Swedish insurer. Eventually she found her way to Summa Equity, where she now plays a central role in shaping one of Europe’s most thesis-driven impact platforms 🌱At Summa, Emelie helps define impact investment themes, guide due diligence, connect leadership teams around impact roadmaps, and ensure that the fund’s commitments to its investors translate into measurable, transparent outcomes. Her work is defined by a belief that finance, and societal progress can be aligned without compromise, as long as investors are willing to commit to real depth and discipline.💡 From Law to ImpactWhen Emelie first heard of Summa, she nearly dismissed it. Private equity seemed far removed from the values she had spent her career exploring.Yet her perception shifted dramatically during a single Investment Committee meeting. A partner began by describing the societal problem, the system it belonged to, and the levers for changing that system 🌍 For the first twenty-five minutes, the discussion was solely about impact. Only after that did they open the financial model.“It wasn’t impact as an afterthought,” she says. “It was the reason the company deserved to exist.”This moment revealed a surprising overlap between her academic past and the world of private equity. Unlike public markets, private equity owns companies outright. It can reshape governance, guide strategy, and invest in long-term transformation. Suddenly the leap made sense, and the unlikely path became her calling.🦁 Taming the LionImpact and private equity once felt like natural opposites, like a lion ordering a salad for lunch. But over the last decade, firms such as Summa, TPG Rise, and Trill Impact have rewritten that narrative. In 2016 the question was whether returns were even possible with impact. In 2021, anything that looked sustainable was overhyped and overvalued. Today, she says, the industry has entered a more grounded period.“The hype is over, and that is healthy,” she explains. “It reveals which strategies were built around real impact and which ones were simply wrapped in the language of it.”The lesson is clear. A strong impact story does not automatically make a strong business. It still requires discipline, thoughtful diligence, and the courage to face difficult trade-offs when they arise 🔍📈 Beyond the HypeA recent study from Schroders in collaboration with Oxford University’s Business School showed that impact PE funds averaged 21 % IRR, outpacing the wider industry.Source: Schroders Capital“If you invest in companies solving society’s biggest challenges, it makes sense that they perform well. These are the businesses the world needs.”Ignoring impact is becoming the real risk. Climate shocks and geopolitical uncertainty make this lens essential.⚙️ Inside the Machine: Theory of Change in ActionSumma’s approach to impact begins with a simple question. What societal problems are most in need of solutions, and which business models can help solve them?Each of Summa’s themes starts with a detailed theory of change. The team maps the system, identifies leverage points, and explores which types of companies possess the most transformative potential 📈“We bring together academics, industry experts, investors, and impact professionals,” Emelie explains. “That mix creates roadmaps that are directionally correct — and commercially grounded.”Once an investment is made, the collaboration deepens. The deal team and impact team run workshops with company leadership to align on the theory of change and build a sustainability roadmap.“It’s powerful,” Emelie says. “Founders see how their company fits into a bigger picture. That connection motivates teams far beyond compliance.”🌍 A Broader LensI asked Emelie to share her thoughts on Bill Gates’s recent essay on “Three tough truths about climate,” and she agrees that climate must be viewed through a wider systems lens 🔍“If we only focus on carbon, we won’t solve climate change. It’s about biodiversity, equity, and human well-being — because the planet will survive. The question is whether it will remain habitable for us.”Her view reflects Summa’s investment philosophy: climate challenges sit inside a wider web of ecological and social issues, and any attempt to solve them must reflect that interconnected reality 🕸️🔌 Bridging the GapScaling innovation is always challenging. Venture-backed companies often generate the innovations needed for transformation, and buyout-stage firms have the scale to bring those innovations to the world 🌉 Yet the bridge between these two worlds is fragile.FoodTech is a powerful example. Emelie describes how often she sees brilliant ideas in alternative proteins or food waste reduction that struggle to cross into the buyout universe.“We need to support these companies so they can scale into our world,” she says. “Food is one of the biggest systems we can transform.”She shares the story of a Croatian fava-bean protein company that doubled farmer yields by simply improving their seeds 🌱 A small intervention produced enormous positive consequences, illustrating how outsized impact can emerge from innovations that seem simple at first glance.Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.✨ Closing ThoughtsEmelie leaves us with a reflection that feels timely for the entire field of impact investing. Measurement is essential, she says, but imagination matters just as much. It is not enough to calculate what exists today. We must have the courage to picture what could exist tomorrow 🌏Her own path, from legal theory to investment committees, shows how change often comes from people who can see across disciplines and aim to bridge worlds. The future of impact investing will belong to those who combine rigor with creativity, who can build systems where energy is clean and affordable, food is sustainable and secure, and economic growth no longer requires ecological decline 🌿Private equity has the potential to become one of the great engines of the green transition. Emelie’s work reminds us that transformation does not come from grand gestures alone. It comes from the steady, thoughtful decisions that shape companies’ day by day, and from the people willing to steward that change from the inside out.As we close out the year, this feels like the right message to carry with us🌟Imagination, patience and steady progress are the work ahead. Before we wrap, this conversation with Emelie is also our last one of the year and wha… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3k+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 It’s Jonas Ahm-Lundgren 👋 This week’s episode is a little different. Instead of hosting, I join Jerome Gilleron as a co-host/guest on the Reactor Podcast, and it turned into one of the most thoughtful conversations I have had in a long time about early-stage climate tech, founders, and the communities that support them.Jerome has built Reactor as a space where deep tech and climate converge, away from the hype cycles, clickbait, and AI-driven noise. We talk about ambition, feedback, storytelling, and the subtle art of moving fast without losing direction.Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.📋 What’s Inside🌱 Anchoring Purpose - Why climate communities can give founders clarity and momentum 🚀 From Pre-seed to Series A - Understanding the leap and why so many misjudge it 🧪 Proof of Customer - Why early demand beats technical proof 🎯 Pitching to Strangers - The underrated superpower for early founders 🧭 Feedback That Helps - Learning who to listen to and when 🌋 Ambition with Grounding - Thinking big while staying disciplined 🗣️ Human Storytelling - Why authenticity will always matter more than AI 👋 Meet Jerome GilleronWith a background in technology and entrepreneurship, Jerome Gilleron has spent years building and advising early-stage start-ups. He is the founder of Reactor, a climate-tech and deep-tech community connecting founders, investors, and experts to tackle the challenges of scaling impactful companies 🌍 Jerome is passionate about creating spaces that prioritize clarity, collaboration, and long-term impact in the fast-moving world of climate innovation.🌱 Why the climate community can give founders clarity and momentumJerome explained that Reactor became focused on climate and deep tech partly because the broader tech discourse kept drifting into hype cycles. Climate, by contrast, demands patience, precision and storytelling that respects complexity.He put it well:“You can’t cover climate like a trending topic. You need to treat it like a long-term craft.”For him, Reactor is more than a network. It is an anchor in a world where attention is scattered, and hype can drown out substance. Climate solutions need patience and nuance, and communities help create the conditions where both can thrive 🌿I have seen the same dynamic in Impact Supporters. People come here because they want to engage with ideas that matter. They bring curiosity, humility, and a desire to learn. That kind of shared intention creates clarity. It helps founders filter noise from signal and make decisions with more confidence.Jerome calls this “staying close to what matters.” For me, it captures the heart of what these communities do. They create a place where founders can think deliberately, ask better questions, and move forward with a steadier hand 🛠️🚀 Understanding the leap and why so many misjudge itA theme that comes up again and again is how often founders misjudge the leap between funding stages. At pre-seed, a working prototype feels like momentum. By seed, investors want early commercial traction. At Series A, they expect evidence of real market pull.Both Jerome and I have seen the same pattern. Founders sometimes get lost in technical validation without asking the harder question: does anyone actually want this? 🤔The teams that tend to scale understand something crucial. They think about demand from day one. They talk to potential customers. They test assumptions. They move quickly from theory to interaction. That shift in mindset often determines whether a company grows or stalls. 🧪 The underrated superpower for early foundersFor Jerome, proof of customer is far more powerful than proof of concept. Real engagement, interest, or willingness to pay tells a clearer story than any lab result or performance spec.I have watched this play out many times. Teams that embrace customer conversations early move faster. They make sharper decisions. They communicate their vision with confidence because they have felt the pull from the real world.Proof of concept is a promising beginning. Proof of customer is the momentum that carries a company forward 🚀🎯 The underrated superpower for early foundersJerome has a deceptively simple exercise he recommends to early founders: take your idea to strangers. Not to sell, but to listen.It is humbling. It is messy. And it tends to reveal things that nothing else will. People who owe you nothing give you pure, honest feedback. They surface confusion you didn’t see, highlight what resonates, and expose assumptions you didn’t realize you were making 📝Founders who lean into this discomfort learn faster. Their messaging sharpens. Their conviction grows. Most importantly: they discover the language that connects their product to the real world.🧭 Learning who to listen to and whenFeedback is everywhere. Investors, mentors, advisors, and even customers have opinions, and a founder trying to take every voice seriously quickly gets lost in noise.Jerome stresses the value of curating a small circle of trusted voices. A handful of people whose experience, honesty, and alignment matter. Once that circle is in place, the next step is action. Even with incomplete information, decisive execution aligned with your mission beats hesitation every time⚡It is the discipline of staying flexible while keeping your center of gravity.🌋 Thinking big while staying disciplinedAmbition alone is not enough. The founders who tend to succeed combine sharp vision with careful pacing. They hire thoughtfully. They scale deliberately. They stay focused on the handful of priorities that matter most 🎯This grounded ambition becomes a stabilizing force. It allows teams to adapt to uncertainty without losing momentum. It creates a culture where progress feels both steady and meaningful.Real impact is rarely explosive. More often, it is built through consistency, clarity, and disciplined execution.🗣️ Why authenticity will always matter more than AIEven in an era flooded with AI-generated content, storytelling remains profoundly human. Empathy, curiosity, lived experience — these are the qualities that shape narratives people care about 🤝In climate tech, storytelling becomes a bridge between complex problems and the people working to solve them. It helps teams communicate not only what they are building but why it matters.Communities like Reactor and Impact Supporters preserve that human layer. They create spaces where authenticity can flourish and where founders can speak with clarity rather than choreography.Thanks for reading Impact Supporters! This post is public so feel free to share it.✨ Closing ThoughtsOur conversation reminded me that building impact is rarely a straight line. It requires the discipline to stay close to what matters, the courage to ask difficult questions, and the humility to keep learning. It also demands ambition that is grounded in reality rather than hype 💡Clarity, curiosity, and human connection — these are the tools that help founders navigate uncertainty and move with intention.Thank you for being part of this community! Impact Supporters exists because of your engagement, your questions, and your willingness to think deeply about the future we are building together Who should we talk to next? What are the big, messy questions you are wrestling with? Hit reply or send us a note — I always love hearing from you.👋Thanks for listening and reading, Jonas This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to 3,000+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 In today’s episode, we sit down with Randi Wahlsten, CEO and co-founder of Matr, a Danish FoodTech startup rethinking how we eat. Matr blends taste, sustainability, and scalable impact — turning humble legumes and root vegetables into craveable, low-footprint meals without additives or over-processing.We dive into how Randi and her team are building a company where mission meets business, navigating the challenges of funding, scaling, and team-building with vision, intuition, and a touch of naïve optimism.📋 What’s Inside🧬 From Microbes to Meals – Crafting craveable, plant-based food 💡 Taste First, Tech Second – Why simplicity wins with consumers 💶 A €40 Million Leap – Scaling production and earning trust 🚀 Building a Team That Can Fly – Lessons in leadership and hiring 🌍 Why It Matters – Making impact through taste and accessibility👩‍💼 Meet Randi WahlstenRandi brings decades of experience in strategy, consumer goods, and food innovation. After time at McKinsey, Dalberg, and Arla, she found in Matr a way to unite her business expertise with her values. For Randi, Matr isn’t just a food company. It’s a mission. Every decision, from ingredients to hiring, is weighed against one question: does this create positive impact for people and the planet? 🌱🧬 From Microbes to MealsMatr began in an old fish factory kitchen in Denmark, a space that smelled faintly of brine and wood, where the hum of refrigerators was punctuated by clinks of metal as the small founding team experimented late into the night. Their vision was bold yet simple: turn natural ingredients into plant-based foods that taste incredible through fermentation; no shortcuts, no additives. The first prototypes were, in Randi’s words, “half-decent,” but they persisted, blending science and intuition, and inviting chefs to taste, critique, and refine.Over months of trial and error, a sensory transformation took place. Legumes that had once seemed mundane became rich, umami-packed flavours. Root vegetables that no one noticed turned into subtly sweet, savoury highlights. What emerged was more than food. It was an experience👩‍🍳💡 Taste First, Tech SecondEven though Matr’s process relies on cutting-edge fermentation science, their success has always started with flavour.Randi and her team discovered that no consumer would fall in love with a product simply because it’s sustainable. Taste had to lead. Early collaborations with restaurants became the proving ground. Chefs tasted, tweaked, and applauded, turning the lab experiments into dishes diners raved about. Only once the flavours won hearts did Matr bring the products to retail 🛒The lesson is simple but powerful: for sustainable food to scale, it must win over hearts (and palates) before principles.💶 A €40 Million LeapScaling food production is very different from scaling software. It’s slower, harder, and more tangible. Yet Matr’s momentum is undeniable. After consistently selling out small-batch runs and achieving chef repurchase rates above 80%, the company secured a €40 million Series A to build its first industrial-scale facility and expand internationally.It’s proof that disciplined growth, a clear vision, and a deep understanding of both product and process can win investor confidence, even in a challenging market 💪🚀 Building a Team That Can FlyRandi seeks team members who blend experience with curiosity. She hires senior professionals willing to dive into hands-on problem solving, alongside young talent eager to learn at warp speed ⚡The culture at Matr isn’t dictated from the top. It emerges organically. People don’t need to be pushed; they pull themselves forward because they believe in what they’re creating. Randi explains:“We’ve learned that you can’t outsource conviction. Everyone at Matr needs to believe in why we’re doing this; from the chefs to the engineers. That’s what keeps the mission alive when things get hard.”Conviction keeps the team motivated during long nights in the lab or when scaling challenges feel insurmountable. It’s the invisible ingredient that flavours everything they do.🌍 Why this matters for you as an impact VCMatr shows that meaningful impact doesn’t require grand gestures. It can be embedded in products people genuinely love.By combining taste, quality, and purpose, Matr demonstrates that the plant-based revolution doesn’t need to preach. It can simply taste good, feel natural, and scale organically.Behind the success is a mindset that carries the company through uncertainty. Randi reflects on how optimism can be a powerful driver:“I’ve learned that optimism isn’t about ignoring the challenges; it’s about trusting that if you bring the right people together around a real purpose, you’ll find a way through.”It’s a philosophy woven into every recipe, every hiring decision, and every scaling milestone, proving that impact and enjoyment can coexist in every bite 🍽️✨ Closing ThoughtsRandi’s journey with Matr reminds us that building a business that truly makes a difference is never easy. It takes vision, persistence, and the courage to make hard choices. She reminds us of the value of patience and careful decision-making, like when she turned down one of the world’s largest retail chains to stay focused on the company’s strategy. Every decision is measured not just for growth or profit, but for the positive impact it can create for people, communities, and the planet.Matr shows that impact is woven into the everyday decisions of a company. It is about creating food people genuinely love, nurturing a team that believes in the mission, and scaling thoughtfully so that every product sold leaves the world a little better than it found it. In doing so, Matr proves that business and impact are not opposing forces. When guided by conviction and care, a company can transform the way we eat and, in the process, shift the future of food for the better. ✨Tell us what you think: Are plant-based startups like Matr the future of sustainable food? You can leave a comment below or simply drop us a note at [email protected].👋Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter, Jonas Ahm-Lundgren This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to the 3k+ of you following along here at Impact Supporters! 🌍 It’s Jonas Ahm-Lundgren writing 👋This week, I sit down with my colleagues Christian Sparrevohn and Phil Doolan from The Footprint Firm to understand what leadership of large corporates are thinking today in terms of sustainability, climate strategies, and operational resilience. From political headwinds to climate adaptation, their insights reveal both the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead.The Footprint Firm is an advisory and investment company with a sole focus on sustainability. We work together with clients on climate-positive innovations and sustainable solutions, making connections between companies, science, academia, government institutions, start-ups, and capital.We spoke about how corporates are moving from idealism to realism, what this means for strategy and operations, and how investors and VCs can understand the shifting landscape.🗓️ Agenda* From Moral Pledges to CEO Reality ⚙️* Europe’s Regulatory Dilemma 🏛️* Climate Overshoot 🌍* Adaptation as the New Frontier 💧* Mitigation and Adaptation 🔄* Realism, Not Cynicism 💬* Key Takeaways 🔍Meet Christian and Phil 👥Christian Sparrevohn Christian brings significant advisory and management experience across corporate strategy, sustainability strategy and implementation, large-scale organizational optimization, digitalization, corporate governance, and public–private collaboration. He has served as a trusted advisor to executives in private and public companies across consumer goods, transportation, and the public sector. In addition to his role at The Footprint Firm, Christian serves as the Chairperson of the Green Transition Council.He holds a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University and a Master of Science in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen. His former roles include Senior Partner at QVARTZ, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at GN Netcom A/S, and Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co..Phil Doolan Phil has over 10 years of management consulting experience and leads The Footprint Firm’s climate advisory practice, as well as its circular economy investments. His advisory work has covered climate strategy, the circular economy, and broader sustainability strategy, and he has supported investors to understand sustainability risks and opportunities in due diligence, especially for impact investments. Prior to joining The Footprint Firm, Phil spent 8 years with Bain & Company (formerly QVARTZ) as an Associate Partner in the global Sustainability & Responsibility practice.Together, Christian and Phil bring a grounded and forward-looking perspective on Europe’s green transition, bridging the gap between ambition and practical action.From Moral Pledges to CEO Reality ⚙️Sustainability is shifting from purpose slides to CEO priorities. Five years ago, ESG was largely about vision statements. Today, it is about risk management, cost structures, and measurable outcomes within the CEO’s tenure.“These targets land within the current CEO’s lifetime — it’s becoming real,” Christian said. Phil agreed, adding that what used to be symbolic goals are now driving real investments in resilience and how companies run their businesses.Europe’s Regulatory Dilemma 🏛️Europe has rolled out ambitious reporting and compliance rules — CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR — yet implementation continues to lag. Early movers feel penalized, while slower adopters gain breathing space.Christian sees potential in the EU framework: bureaucracy can create a level playing field and foster long-term planning. What’s missing, he says, is decisive action.Climate Overshoot 🌍Both guests are candid about the warming trajectory. Phil expects more than 2°C, while Christian anticipates closer to 3°C before politics catch up. Public pressure, however, can accelerate policy change when it becomes undeniable.“Think of COVID,” Christian reflected. “Once it’s undeniable, politics can move like a whip.”Adaptation as the New Frontier 💧Adaptation is emerging as a critical focus alongside mitigation. Companies are asking how to protect assets, supply chains, and operations in a world already in flux. Real-estate firms, insurers, and food companies are early movers. Phil calls it “local by necessity”— each site needs a tailored resilience plan.Christian sees water management as a defining challenge of the decade: scarcity, flooding, and efficient food production are central. “If I were a VC,” he said, “that’s where I’d look first.”Mitigation and Adaptation 🔄We discussed whether adaptation could distract from mitigation. Christian was clear: both are essential. Failing on adaptation risks public backlash. Failing on mitigation increases the long-term bill through taxes, trade barriers, and lost trust. This dual approach represents the new corporate realism: pragmatic and grounded.Realism, Not Cynicism 💬Christian also emphasizes that the shift from optimism to realism is not cynicism. Companies still engaged are focused for the long term. As Christian puts it:“We’re not getting more cynical, we’re getting wiser.” The green transition may be quieter than headlines suggest, but it’s moving — driven by those who can’t afford to wait. Staying clear-eyed and steady is the best way to turn realism into action.Advice from Christian and Phil 💡🎯 Focus on what’s material: Target the issues that truly affect your business and climate impact.⚙️ Integrate climate into operations: Sustainability must shape strategy, risk management, and investment decisions.💧 Balance mitigation and adaptation: Protect assets while reducing emissions — both are essential.🚀 Act decisively: Waiting for perfect clarity or regulatory certainty can be costly; first movers shape the market.Closing Thoughts 💭Christian and Phil argue that sustainability is no longer just a moral choice — it’s business survival and strategy. The shift from idealism to realism may be uncomfortable, but it creates opportunities for companies and investors who act decisively.The lesson is clear: realism drives action. Those who integrate climate strategy into day-to-day operations, balance mitigation with adaptation, and navigate uncertainty will define the next decade of impact.Let us know what you think: Are corporates ready to lead the next phase of the green transition? Simply reply to this newsletter or drop us a note at [email protected] for reading this week’s newsletter,Jonas This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to almost 4k Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas Ahm-Lundgren writing 👋 In today’s episode, we sit down with Sonam Velani, co-founder of Streetlife Ventures, a New York–based VC firm backing bold solutions where climate, cities, and infrastructure collide.From her early years in a flood-prone Chicago basement to helping shape New York City’s climate plan at City Hall, working at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, and now investing in the urban green transition, Sonam brings an extraordinary 360° perspective.We spoke about her journey, the realities of fundraising as an emerging manager, the underfunded but urgent case for adaptation, and what the sustainable city of the future should really look like.📋 Agenda* Sonam’s journey: from Mumbai to Harvard to VC 🎓🌍* Why cities are ground zero for the climate crisis 🏙️* Streetlife’s thesis: five verticals reshaping urban life ⚡* The tough fundraising climate (and how to survive it) 💼* Adaptation vs. mitigation: why we need both 🌡️* Portfolio highlights: Daisy Chain, Harvest, Estia 🚀* A vision of the sustainable city of the future 🌍Meet Sonam Velani 👩‍💼Born in Mumbai and raised in Chicago, Sonam’s early years were shaped by infrastructure — or rather the lack of it. Her family lived in a flood-prone basement apartment, a lived experience that sparked a lifelong obsessionA full scholarship to Harvard allowed her to study government, economics, and urban planning. Unlike many peers, Sonam now jokes she’s “one of the few people who actually uses what I learned in college every single day.”Her path has taken her through:* Goldman Sachs, financing large-scale infrastructure during the financial crisis.* World Bank, developing resilient infrastructure frameworks.* New York City Hall, drafting the city’s ambitious climate plan toward net zero by 2050.* Zipline, helping scale drone-delivered medicine.These experiences, combined with co-founder Laura Fox’s operator background (Sidewalk Labs, Citi Bike), inspired them to launch Streetlife Ventures, a fund uniquely focused on urban climate solutions.Why Cities Are The Climate Frontline 🌆“Half of humanity lives in cities. 70% of emissions come from cities. And 75% of the 2050 urban infrastructure hasn’t been built yet.”For Sonam, that makes cities ground zero for the climate crisis. Streetlife Ventures invests across five verticals: 🏢 Buildings ⚡ Energy 🚚 Mobility & logistics 💧 Waste & water 🌡️ AdaptationTheir strategy pairs startups with real estate firms, infrastructure partners, and city governments, ensuring that innovation gets deployed where it’s needed most.They also run Climate Tech Cities, a global community of 25,000+ people with local chapters, events, and talent matchmaking, a grassroots network accelerating the climate transition from the ground up.Fundraising in a Tough Climate 💼Raising a first-time climate fund in 2025 is not for the faint of heart. Interest rates are high, LPs are cautious, and geopolitics are volatile.But Sonam argues the case for urban climate investment is undeniable:* $5 trillion in capital needed over the coming decades.* 75% of 2050 infrastructure is yet to be built.* Climate risk is economic risk.Streetlife has found traction with family offices (especially next-gens), corporates seeking early deal flow, and individuals from tech looking to apply their skills and wealth to climate.Adaptation vs. Mitigation ⚖️One of Sonam’s strongest messages: adaptation is vastly underfunded.* 93% of climate finance goes to mitigation; only 7% to adaptation.* Yet 90% of climate risk impacts cities.* Every $1 invested in adaptation saves $6 in avoided disaster costs.Streetlife backs startups delivering co-benefits, solutions that mitigate emissions and build resilience:* DaisyChain Energy → Arbitraging utility rates to fund rooftop solar, EV chargers, and heat pumps.* Harvest → Smart thermal pods that shift energy use, cut emissions, and provide backup during blackouts.* Estia → Cooling wearables that protect workers from extreme heat, the deadliest climate risk.The Sustainable City of the Future 🌍For inspiration, Sonam points to Copenhagen: waste-to-energy plants like CopenHill, efficient district heating, bike-first design.But the broader vision is distributed, resilient, and liveable:* Buildings powered by efficient district systems.* Water captured and reused onsite.* Streets designed for biking and walking, not futuristic air taxis.“The sustainable city shouldn’t feel futuristic. It should just feel comfortable, affordable, and resilient.”Sonam’s Advice 🌱* For careers: Any skill, finance, ops, marketing, can apply to climate. Think of your career as a portfolio, not a ladder.* For investing: Climate businesses must still be good businesses. “Faster, better, cheaper” always wins.* For impact: It’s financial and social. Many portfolio companies deploy in affordable housing, cutting both emissions and renters’ bills.* For mindset: Optimism is non-negotiable. “Agency and optimism inspire action—doom and gloom does not.”Closing ✨Sonam Velani embodies what makes climate investing so powerful: a blend of lived experience, global perspective, and hard-nosed pragmatism. Her optimism is contagious, and her work at Streetlife Ventures shows that cities, our most complex systems, can also be our most powerful levers for change.Tell us what you think: Are cities the key to unlocking the climate transition? Reply to this newsletter or drop us a note at [email protected] for reading, Jonas Ahm-Lundgren This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Greetings to nearly 4k Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 In today’s episode, we sit down with Praveen Sahay, co-founder of Wave Equity Partners in Boston. WAVE sits at the unique intersection of venture capital and private equity backing tech and manufacturing-driven companies that scale profitably without the need for subsidies.From his beginnings as a nuclear physicist in India to serving in UN peacekeeping missions and now three decades as an investor, Praveen brings a rare combination of science, leadership, and global perspective. We spoke about what went wrong in Cleantech 1.0, how to build lasting companies that avoid past mistakes, and why optimism is warranted, even as geopolitics get more complex.Agenda* Praveen’s extraordinary journey: from physics to peacekeeping to VC 🎓🌍* Lessons from Cleantech 1.0: why government subsidies distort markets ⚡* WAVE’s philosophy: “If it’s not profitable, it’s not sustainable” 💡* Why focusing on hardware matters for climate solutions 🔧* Navigating US–EU ecosystems under geopolitical tension 🌐* Closing reflections: optimism through Hindu philosophy ✨Meet Praveen Sahay 👨‍🔬Praveen’s journey is anything but ordinary. Born in India, he studied nuclear physics, worked in oil & gas, served as a captain and later lieutenant colonel in India’s Central Industrial Security Force, and even coordinated Mozambique’s first democratic elections as a UN peacekeeperAfter an MBA at the University of Chicago, he was drawn into venture investing, attracted by its entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to connect science, people, and impact. With co-founders Mark Robinson and Haskell Crocker, he launched Wave Equity Partners in 2013 to back companies others ignored after the collapse of Cleantech 1.0.Cleantech 1.0: What Went Wrong? 🚨Praveen is candid: the first cleantech wave collapsed because governments distorted the market. Subsidies for biofuels, solar, and batteries encouraged investors and entrepreneurs to chase unsustainable economics.“If it’s not profitable, it’s not sustainable. Subsidies may help in the short term, but they create false markets and kill innovation”His antidote: invest only in companies with proven products and strong gross margins (40%+). WAVE focus is on those already in the market, demonstrating superior economics and carbon impact.WAVE’s Playbook 🌊Key principles of WAVE’s investment model:* No subsidy dependence: Core business must stand on its own.* Capital efficiency: Avoiding capital-intensive models with long adoption cycles.* Hardware focus: Real climate solutions need physical products, not just software.* Deep diligence: WAVE has never invested in a company in less than 6 months, often with no other financial investors at the table.* Strategic partnerships: Success depends on linking startups with industrial leaders (e.g., OEMs, global manufacturers).The result: WAVE sees about three dozen companies per year that truly meet their criteriaUS vs. Europe: Two Ecosystems 🌍Praveen has grown WAVE’s presence in Europe, noting cultural differences. In Germany, employees once feared he was a “capitalist coming to fire them.” But his approach is hands-on partnership, not restructuring.Despite bureaucratic hurdles (yes, still wet signatures at notaries in Germany!), Praveen sees Europe’s entrepreneurial spirit awakening. Yet, he also points out a vacuum: too few growth-stage investors willing to back hardware-heavy, industrial solutions.Optimism Through Hindu Philosophy ✨Despite tough fundraising markets and geopolitical turbulence, Praveen remains optimistic:“Civilization moves in cycles, from golden eras to dark eras and back. We are now entering a new up-cycle. Human creativity is immense, and I believe we are on the path toward a better future”His reminder: while climate investing is hard, the rewards, societal and financial, are transformative.Closing 🌟Praveen’s perspective is a refreshing antidote to hype cycles. His hard-nosed discipline on profitability, combined with long-term optimism, is exactly what the impact ecosystem needs.Tell us what you think: Are we entering a new “golden era” for climate investing? Reply to this newsletter or drop us a note at [email protected] for reading,Jonas Ahm-Lundgren This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com