Better Money Better World

Wireframe Ventures backs early-stage founders focused on the health of people and the planet. Co-founders Harsh Patel and Paul Straub make initial investments of $500K to $2m at the seed or pre-seed stage, and then work closely with founders to turn their world changing ideas into scaled companies. For example, Wireframe led the seed round in Span.io, to reinvent the hundred year old electric pane...

Lumos Capital Group invests $10-30M into growing companies defining the future of learning and work. Founded by Victor Hu and James Tieng, Lumos looks to partner deeply with companies that are growing impactful tech-enabled products and services in the global education sector. With the digital transformation of education, traditional products and distribution channels are being disrupted by a new...

UBS, the world’s largest truly global wealth manager, has a long history in sustainability and is taking a lead in providing sustainable and impact investing advice and solutions to its clients. The firm has a view that wealth managers and advisors play a critical role in helping clients to deploy their philanthropic and investment capital for a better world. Andrew Lee, Managing Director and Glob...

Jennifer Kenning tells her inspiring story of founding Align Impact after struggling with severe depression which led her to volunteer with the homeless. These experiences led her to found Align Impact – a $2.3 Billion under advisement impact investing firm. Named 40 under 40 by Investment News and amongst the 50 most influential women in private wealth by Private Asset Management, Kenning believe...

Note: Better Money Better World host Daniel Pianko is co-Founder and Managing Director of Achieve Partners.  Information presented on this program is believed to be factual and up-to-date, but we do not guarantee its accuracy and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subjects discussed.  Discussions and answers to questions do not involve the rendering of personalized investment...

The Mosiac Fellowship brings a skilled and diverse pool of talented young professionals into the world of impact investing through a summer internship program – to help create the impact investing leaders of tomorrow. Meet four Mosaic fellows from top graduate programs who spent 10 week summers embedded with ICM members and are now bringing their diverse experiences to impact investing and entrepr...

Ballentine Partners is a multi-family office with $20 billion under advisement across 270 client families. Ballentine was one of the early pioneers in private impact investing given their long-term view on wealth management and their goal of helping clients to align their values and their practices through allocation of capital. While clients often start seeking alpha creation, Ballentine’s client...

Caprock has invested in over 100 private impact investments with 40 fund managers, including 20 Impact Capital Managers. Mark Berryman, leads Caprock’s Impact Investing and previously served as co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Social Investment Funds Group. Berryman is a recovering camel rider, which he learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali at the start of his career 25 years ago. Caprock ha...

Rural America is underserved by traditional investors. Blue Highway Capital is investing in cash flow positive business with strong management teams in niche markets where there is little (or frequently no) competition for deals. Karin Gregory has been investing in the rural economy for over 20 years. Gregory and her colleagues have backed companies like Aryv, the Uber for non-emergency medical ap...

Capricorn, originally formed to manage the assets of Jeff Skoll and his foundation, created the Sustainable Investment Fund to investing in impact native general partners to accelerate the growth of missioned aligned capital. By growing investment firms, Capricorn is catalyzing private sector capital to close the gap between the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals’ unmet needs. Bill Orum and Michae...

Third Sphere funds are top quartile or decile on a net TVPI basis backing pre-customer companies that are transforming global energy systems. Ranked by Techcrunch as one of the top 10 VCs founders love the most, co-founder Shaun Abrahamson describes how he backs Climatetech Superheroes and then leverages his vast network of advisors and angel investors to build a full stack early-stage climate inv...

Jeff Meyers is a lifelong Citi banker and founding member of Citi’s $200 million Citi Impact Fund, investing in for profit, for purpose venture scaleable businesses driving impact. Jeff’s volunteer role with StreetWise Partners, a NYC-based nonprofit – bringing job skills to the unemployed – served as the impetus to bring impact into his role at Citi. The Fund invests in four areas: Environment/Su...

ECMC Group (“ECMC”) is a non-profit that grew out of a Student Loan guarantor focused on empowering underserved communities to thrive through education with a mission to help students succeed. ECMC recently doubled its commitment to its Education Impact Fund to $250M, including a growing direct investment portfolio and commitments to a number of Impact Capital Managers, including Achieve Partners,...

Laird Norton Wealth Management (“LNWM”) serves as long-term partners for families wanting to achieve their greatest impact through their investments, legacy planning and philanthropy. Ron Albahary is the Chief Investment officer of LNWM. He started his career at Merrill Lynch when stockbrokers called clients around dinner time to sell a specific stock or financial product. Today, Ron and his team...

This week is unique as veteran Wall Street Journal writer David Bank starts by asking your normal Better Money Better World podcast host Daniel Pianko some questions about Achieve Partners and the founding of Impact Capital Managers. Then your host gets to turn the tables and ask some tough questions of David’s role moderating the impact conversation on the pages of ImpactAlpha, the water cooler o...

Community Investment Manager (“CIM”) provides credit facilities to help solve structural challenges that women and people from disadvantaged communities often face when accessing capital. According to co-founder Jacob Haar, CIM thinks about how small, incremental changes to the 1970s banking model of lending based on assets and inventory can be evolved for the modern age by bringing a technology a...

The Social Entrepreneurship Fund (“TSEF”) invests in business that that tap into previously underserved markets to generate returns while improving quality of life for everyday Americans in the process. For example, Cushion uses AI to negotiate down bank overdraft fees. Alice helps hourly workers get access to thousands of dollars of federal benefits like flexible spending accounts and Transitchec...

American Student Assistance (ASA) is a 65-year-old student loan guarantor run by CEO Jean Eddy and board Chair Larry Gennari. Jean and her team are reconstituting ASA’s billion-dollar asset base towards impact investing in support of ASA’s mission: to provide tools and resources so students can have a plan for their future as they leave high school. While historically ASA has focused on grant maki...

The Covid pandemic has accelerated education delivery model trends – effectively collapsing 15 years of growth into 15 months – creating a global market for the future of learning. Susan Cates and Elizabeth Chou co-founded Leeds Illuminate to partner with entrepreneurs passionate about scaling positive outcomes for learners, workers and investors. The all-female investment team is backing growth-o...

Impact Engine backs transformative companies across the investment life cycle – from early-stage VC style investing to a PE/funds strategy. With the flexibility up and down the capital stack, Impact Engine is able to back companies like Workit Health, an online addiction resource center which has 84% of its clients in treatment 30 for over 30 days, from its earliest stages up through a growth inve...

Peter Bruce-Clark describes backing transformative companies that some traditional venture capital firms pass on because at first glance the startup appears to be a charity rather than an industry changing unicorn. Social Impact Capital dives deep through its network of advisors to identify contrarian breakthrough technologies that have the chance to transform the world – from covalent drug therap...

Arborview co-founder Karl Khoury realized that investing in niche services and consumer businesses at the lower end of the middle market can often drive more impact and alpha than a cool app. Karl left a successful venture career to start an impact fund after realizing how wasteful consumer products were after the birth of his first child. There had to be a better way. Since then, Karl has been ba...

Arif Naqvi used the language of impact investing to attract luminary limited partners like the Gates Foundation, CDC Group, and Bank of America to invest in his multi-billion dollar private equity firm Abraaj partners that turned out to be a fraud. Naqvi was stealing hundreds of millions of dollars to support his lavish personal spending. Simon Clark broke the story for the Wall Street Journal wro...

Claudine Emeott leads Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund – a $100M vehicle targeting venture capital returns in impactful companies that partner within the Salesforce ecosystem. With over 30 companies, Salesforce Ventures Impact is part of a growing number of corporate venture arms that are embracing impact to drive their balance sheet investing. A unique investor, Salesforce employees advise and men...

Nasir Qadree raised an oversubscribed first fund through Covid from large institutional capital sources like PayPal, Bank of America and Truist Bank to rethink the building blocks of wealth in our society. Nasir’s pathway into venture was not a straight line. After starting his career at Goldman Sachs, Nasir found his way to the private markets after opening a coffee shop in the West Village and d...