SRI360 | Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Impact Investing, ESG, Socially Responsible Investing

Four investors. Four asset classes. One question: where does real money actually go to work on climate?
In this compilation episode, I revisit conversations with four investors who put real money to work in the physical economy, across greenhouses, Indian agrifood, forests, and the fossil fuel reserves sitting on public markets. They approach climate from very different asset classes, and the contrast is the point.
Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital treats farming as infrastructure — building and operating some of the largest high-tech greenhouses in North America, and buying technology only once it hits the cost curve. Mark Kahn of Omnivore, India’s pioneering agrifood VC, argues that mitigation is sexy and adaptation is gritty, and that a country about to become too hot to farm has no choice but to fund the gritty one. Radha Kuppalli Former MD, Impact & Advocacy at New Forests explains how a forest became two assets at once — timber and carbon — and how you underwrite a biological asset you cannot harvest for thirty years. And Mark Campanale, who coined the term “unburnable carbon,” lays out the thesis that halved the reserve life of the global oil and gas sector: the market is carrying far more fossil fuel than it can ever burn.
Together they map how capital is repricing land, forests, food, and fossil reserves — and where the returns are hiding in each.
In this episode we discuss:
Why one investor treats greenhouses like data centers — build, operate, and manage technology obsolescence
“Distributed abundance”: unhooking where food is grown from climate and geography
Why climate adaptation, not mitigation, is the urgent thesis for India’s smallholder economy
How a forest generates two revenue streams — timber and California carbon credits — at once
Underwriting a 30-year biological asset you can leave “on the shelf” to grow
The “unburnable carbon” thesis, and why $120 trillion of reserves back $7–8 trillion of market cap
Stranded assets: why building new fossil supply guarantees write-downs
Featured guests:
Dave Chen, CEO Equilibrium Capital
Mark Kahn, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Omnivore
Radha Kuppalli, Former Managing Director, Impact and Advocacy, at New Forests
Mark Campanale, Founder & CEO, Carbon Tracker Initiative
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Additional Resources

Dave Chen — Equilibrium Capital
Equilibrium Capital: https://eq-cap.com/
Dave Chen bio: https://eq-cap.com/about-us/dave-chen/
Dave Chen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dypchen1/
Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/dave-chen/
Mark Kahn — Omnivore
Omnivore: https://www.omnivore.vc/
Mark Kahn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-kahn-20490a/
Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/mark-kahn/
Radha Kuppalli — New Forests
New Forests: https://newforests.com.au/
Radha Kuppalli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radha-kuppalli/
Listen to the full episode here:https://sri360.com/podcast/radha-kuppalli/
Mark Campanale — Carbon Tracker Initiative
Carbon Tracker Initiative: https://carbontracker.org/
Mark Campanale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-campanale-1886203/
Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/mark-campanale/

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A local-currency bond fund put roughly $600 million to work across some of the credit markets the world rates as riskiest — and lost about 1% of it, over 11 years.
That record belongs to Clemens Calice, who walked out of Goldman Sachs in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, with two colleagues and no business plan. What he built became Cygnum Capital — today a $1.5 billion platform across seven funds spanning local-currency debt, renewable energy, agriculture, and early-stage venture.
Clemens makes the case that the barrier to institutional capital in Africa was never risk-return — it's deal size, compliance burden across 54 fragmented jurisdictions, and the absence of intermediary infrastructure. He explains why local-currency lending, co-investment with domestic pension funds and insurers, and patient first-mover capital are the mechanisms that actually move a market from unbankable to bankable. Today that platform runs around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent.
If you work in frontier market investing, climate finance, or blended finance structuring, this is a practitioner's case for what “honest,” evidence-led impact investing looks like on the ground — including where Clemens thinks the industry still overstates its own case.
Featured Guest:
Clemens Calice, CEO | Cygnum Capital Group Ltd
Listen Next:
Conversation with Nick O’Donohoe - Accidental Father of Impact: Nick O’Donohoe on Leading BSC, BII & Building Investability in the Emerging Markets (106)
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Key Takeaways:
•  A platform running around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent — a scale most institutional investors don't associate with Africa-focused funds.
•  A local-currency bond fund with $600M deployed over 11 years and a ~1% cumulative loss rate — in markets rated extremely weak from a credit perspective.
•  Why the real barrier to African institutional capital is deal size and compliance burden across 54 jurisdictions, not risk-return.
•  How the 20/20/60 blended-finance capital stack actually works, deal by deal.
•  Why Clemens rejects the term “impact investor” in favor of “responsible investor,” and what “honest impact investing” means in practice.
•  The Copperbelt Energy bond: from 178% oversubscribed on its first tranche to 238% on its second.
•  Why gas is, in his view, sometimes a necessity for grid stability — and where he draws the line.
Here's what you're in for:
00:00 – Cold Open — Leaving Goldman in 2009: Starting a Firm with No Business Plan
02:56 – Lion's Head: Origins, Name & the South African Connection
06:23 – Emerging Markets as the Only Skill & the Tanzania Farm Detour
10:54 – 200 Chickens in Nairobi: Understanding the Smallholder Farmer
16:03 – Growing Up in Vienna, ETH Zurich & Into Banking by Accident
19:12 – Asian Crisis, INSEAD, New York & Goldman Sachs
22:03 – Cygnum Today: $1.5B AUM, Seven Funds & Four Continents
24:23 – Asset Management & Investment Banking: How the Two Sides Feed Each Other
25:45 – Investor Base & Crowding In Private Capital
28:09 – Rejecting "Theory of Change" for "Responsible Investor"
31:13 – The African Local Currency Bond Fund & KfW Partnership
29:07 – Why Local Currency: Eliminating Systemic Risk & a 1% Loss Rate Over 11 Years
42:58 – Blended Finance Demystified: The 20/20/60 Capital Stack
48:42 – African Risk Premiums & Why Private Capital Hasn't Arbitraged the Gap
52:36 – Cygnum as Intermediary: Removing Non-Financial Barriers to Scale
54:16 – Africa Go Green Fund: Energy Efficiency as the Underfunded Opportunity
57:24 – Clean Cooking, E-Mobility & Green Buildings: What's Scaling & What's Not
01:00:19 – Going First: Telecom Towers, CrossBoundary Energy & the Copperbelt Bond
01:05:51 – African Infrastructure Risk: Perception vs. Data Reality
01:07:52 – Honest Impact Investing & the "Responsible Investor" Label
01:11:12 – Gas, Baseload & the Case for African Economic Sovereignty
01:16:05 – The Lion's Head Split & the Rebrand to Cygnum
01:18:56 – Platform Growth: 20–25% Annually & What Has to Change
01:21:28 – Pre-Roll Clips & Rapid Fire
01:26:09 – Closing & How to Connect with Cygnum Capital 

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Matilda Ho was banned from the kitchen for the first 25 years of her life. Her mother’s rule was simple: cooking is what you do when you fail at school. She now runs China’s first food tech venture fund.
I’m joined by Matilda Ho, Founder and Managing Director of Bits x Bites — a $100 million fund vintaged in October 2020, 15 companies backed, Series A and B, and a board seat as a condition of every check. Her LPs are sovereign funds from Singapore, the Middle East and China, agrifood strategics, and family offices.
Her argument is that the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout. She spent five years at BCG and IDEO advising food companies, and one project — working out how likely a Chinese meat processor was to have another scandal — turned up roughly half a million food safety incidents a year. She built an online grocery to fix it one shopper at a time, then concluded that would take longer than her lifetime. The leverage was upstream.
What she found upstream is a manufacturing advantage most investors outside China have not priced. Seventy percent of the world’s vitamins, two-thirds of its amino acids and more than 80% of its stevia are already made there — much of it in brownfield plants with fermentation tanks sitting idle. Where European biotech founders cannot fund scale-up, she can buy it cheap.
She is equally blunt about what does not work. Beyond Burger’s peas travel from Canada to Suzhou to California, and the margin never survives the trip. China already has tofu — clean, plant-based and 2,000 years old. So she funds certainty over moonshots: functional ingredients, animal health, matcha. And in a market where government money is now the largest source of innovation capital, her first exit was a stake sold to a provincial government vehicle.
In this episode we discuss:
Why the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout, and what changes upstream
Half a million food safety incidents a year — the consulting project that exposed them
Biomanufacturing as China’s unpriced edge: overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanks
Why alternative meat fails on unit economics in a country that already has tofu
China’s “visible hand” — how government money became the largest source of innovation capital
Selling a portfolio company to a provincial government vehicle, and why DPI beats IRR in China
Why she will not write a check without a board seat
Backing wartime CEOs, and what a decade of bad hires taught her about founder diligence
Featured guest:
Matilda Ho, Founder and Managing Director at Bits x Bites
Listen Next:
AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align
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Key Takeaways:
Fixing food at the checkout does not scale. Matilda built an online farmers market and learned that people only change how they eat after a life event — a birth, a diagnosis. A movement, she says, but not a viable business model. The leverage sits upstream in the supply chain.
The supply chain is the problem. In China a vegetable passes through roughly seven hands before it reaches a table. A third of food rots on the farm, another third in transit, and the rest is wasted in fridges and warehouses.
China’s arithmetic is brutal. Around 20% of the world’s population and under 7% of its arable land, feeding 1.4 billion people. More than 85% of soybeans are imported, mostly to feed chickens and pigs.
Biomanufacturing is China’s quiet edge. Europe’s biotech founders struggle to fund scale-up. China has the opposite problem — overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanks, plus the plant managers who know how to run them. 70% of global vitamins, two-thirds of amino acids and over 80% of stevia are already produced there.
Cost is king and taste is king. Beyond Burger’s peas grow in Canada, get processed in Suzhou, then travel to California for final formulation. The gross margin never works. And as she puts it, China already has tofu — clean, plant-based, cheap, and 2,000 years old.
Government money is now the largest source of innovation capital in China. Local governments run fund-of-fund structures and back specialized GPs rather than investing directly. Her own first exit was selling a stake to a provincial government vehicle at Series B, in year five of the fund.
In China, DPI matters more than IRR. IRR can be manipulated; cash returned to LPs cannot. Most domestic funds have only a five-year life, which forces short-term decisions. Her USD fund has ten to twelve years.
Back wartime CEOs, not peacetime ones. Growing revenue tenfold when money was free is not a replicable track record. She looks for humility, grit, and founders who keep going when 99% of the signals say stop.
Software alone does not work in agriculture. Farmers will not pay for something invisible. Her Beijing crop-model company had to bundle seeds and inputs with the software; two-thirds of its revenue now comes from selling the inputs.
Drones changed the economics for smallholders. A tenth of the chemical input, up to half the water saved, and profits up around 30% on cash crops — plus a whole new job class of drone operators. Most growth is now outside China, in North America, Brazil and Argentina.
Agrifood is under-invested. It accounts for less than 5% of total venture funding. Her ambition is that generalist fund managers eventually treat it as a sector worth a seat.

Additional Resources

Matilda Ho LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matildaho/
Bits x Bites LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bits-x-bites
Matilda Ho on X: @matildajyho
Bits x Bites: https://bitsxbites.com/
Matilda Ho’s TED profile: https://www.ted.com/speakers/matilda_ho
Related SRI360° Episodes:
Beyond the 2/20 Model: Disrupting VC & 25% IRR from Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia

Sanjeev Krishnan spent thirty years arriving at one conclusion: the clean economy's binding constraint isn't technology, it's capital structure. He watched brilliant technologies, brilliant people and brilliant visions get broken on the wheel of misaligned capital — not because the science failed, but because the financing never fit what they were trying to build.
That gap is the heart of this episode of SRI360. His core belief is simple: the thing holding back the clean economy is not technology. It is capital structure. Get the financing right, and the building can follow.
I’m joined by Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of S2G Investments, a nearly $3 billion platform across eight funds, investing at the seams of food, energy, and ocean systems. S2G has backed more than 120 companies. Sanjeev has spent his whole career on one question: how do you change an economic system using markets?
Sanjeev was born in Bangalore in pre-liberalization India and moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, at age nine — his first time ever on a plane. He studied development economics, transferred to the London School of Economics, and joined JPMorgan just in time to watch the dot-com boom collapse from the inside. His team in Europe went from 120 people to 15. He was one of the 15 who kept their job.
What came next taught him how capital really works in the physical world: building mobile networks across Africa, cutting the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% at the World Bank’s IFC, and five hard years inside “clean tech 1.0,” watching good companies fail for reasons that had nothing to do with their technology. In 2014, he co-founded S2G with Lukas Walton.
Today Sanjeev invests at the seams — the gaps between asset classes and between sectors that most investors overlook. In this conversation we cover why capital structure is the real constraint, how he thinks about the wave of AI and energy demand, and why he is betting on the oceans, the part of the planet we have barely measured.
In this episode we discuss:
Why capital structure, not technology, is what really holds back the clean economy
The “missing middle” — too big for venture, too small for private equity, and where good companies get stranded
What “investing at the seams” of food, energy, and ocean systems actually means
Fit-for-purpose capital, and why biotech figured it out but climate has not
The five forces behind his “Age of Adaptation” thesis
Why he reframes climate as a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade
His bet on the oceans, and the company measuring water almost no one else can
Featured guest:
Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at S2G Investments
Listen Next:
AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align
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Key Takeaways:
Capital structure is the constraint, not technology. Across thirty years, Sanjeev watched good companies with real products fail because the money backing them was shaped wrong for what they were building.
The missing middle is where good companies get stranded. A business with real revenue and real profits can still be too capital-intensive for venture and too small for private equity control. Venture wants a power law. These companies just grow steadily. So nobody funds them. In May, S2G closed a billion-dollar fund built for exactly this gap.
Fit-for-purpose capital means matching the money to the reality. US biotech built a system that can take an unproven, clinical-stage company public and attract hundreds of millions. Climate has never built its equivalent. That, Sanjeev argues, is the real gap.
Every great transition needed a financial invention first. The joint stock company made oceanic trade possible. Bond syndicates built the railroads. The venture partnership funded the microchip. In each case someone built the financial container before the future arrived.
Impact does not have to be concessionary. At the IFC, his team helped cut the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% — from $2.50 a vial — while margins stayed above 60–70%. Cheaper, faster, better, and profitable at the same time.
Invest at the seams. The best opportunities sit between asset classes and between sectors, where a typical energy investor would dismiss it and a food investor would call it something else — so nobody underwrites it.
Climate is a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade. Humans take useful energy and turn it into useful materials — fire, agriculture, fossil fuels. And the next chapter will still be extractive: it needs copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium.
Busts are where the returns are made. You learn more in the bust cycles than the boom cycles. Markets overshoot both ways, and the companies that survive get forced into product-market fit and a real P&L.
The oceans are the least measured part of the planet. We know more about space. Sanjeev co-founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 to close a data gap between 6 and 200 meters — data that matters for weather, offshore wind, insurance, and defense.

Additional Resources
Sanjeev Krishnan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjeev-krishnan-0b1148/
Sanjeev Krishnan at S2G: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/team/sanjeev-krishnan
S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/
S2G “Financing Reality” report: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-financing-reality
Builders Vision: https://www.buildersvision.com/

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What does it take to move impact investing from individual transactions to a system?  And what does that mean for the field when the global development finance landscape shifts so dramatically in such a short period of time? 
In this episode, Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen traces a career that begins in the corridors of Washington political power and ends up in Khartoum during a military coup, and later in refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — before running through twenty years at the Inter-American Development Bank, the UNDP's SDG Impact Standards, and the US Development Finance Corporation under the Biden administration.
She breaks down what everyone gets wrong about impact investing — that it's about a transaction, a fund, a project, when it's really about building a system — and makes the case for why GSG Impact's model of locally-rooted national partners, domestic capital mobilisation, and the forthcoming Impact Economy Index represents a fundamentally different approach to the problem.
If you work in impact investing, blended finance, or development policy — or if you want to understand how a $5 trillion SME finance gap in emerging markets actually gets closed — don't miss Elizabeth's practitioner case for why good deals do not automatically create good markets.
Featured Guest: 
Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, CEO and Executive Director, GSG Impact
Listen Next:
Conversation with Leslie Maasdorp: From Apartheid to the BRICS Bank to BII — Leslie Maasdorp's Journey Through Development Finance
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Here’s what you’re in for:

00:00 – Intro & Trailer
01:02 – Scott's Introduction & Guest Framing
03:22 – Welcome & Introduction
03:30 – Three Generations: The Boggs Family & Early Lessons in Catalytic Capital
06:53 – Women Who Built Careers & Choosing International Development
08:01 – Georgetown, Madeleine Albright & Joining the UN
10:10 – First Posting: Khartoum, Sudan & the Power of Local
14:05 – Joining the IDB: Microfinance, OMJ & 20 Years of Lessons
21:20 – The Parachute Problem: What Development Finance Gets Wrong
23:25 – UNDP: Building the SDG Impact Standards
27:15 – The DFC: Policy Team Under Biden
28:25 – Joining GSG Impact: Field Builders for the Impact Economy
32:10 – Impact Economies vs. Impact Investments: The Core Thesis
34:15 – Priority 1: National Partnerships & the Ghana Case Study
36:20 – Priority 2: Impact Transparency & Frameworks Proliferation
41:20 – Does Impact Investing Outperform? The Growth Data
42:35 – Priority 3: $800M SME Finance Target & the Impact Economy Index
47:30 – Index Launch, Guardrails & the Race to the Top
49:15 – Geopolitical Reset: ODA Down 25%, USAID Gone, UK Aid Cut
53:05 – China: Avoided or Engaged?
55:25 – Rapid Fire
59:30 – Closing & How to Connect with GSG Impact

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