At Blue Haven, we’re energized by new models that help investors deploy impact capital more meaningfully. That’s why the critique of the market-rate investing benchmark by Brian and Katie Boland, co-founders of The Delta Fund, caught our attention. They argue that “market rate” has become an extractive benchmark, one that pushes capital to maximize financial return, often by transferring value out of the communities that impact investors aim to support. As an alternative, they propose a promising approach grounded in People, Planet, and Prosperity.

 

We share their view that impact investors must experiment beyond the current financial systems’ risk-reward paradigms and embrace a “different way of thinking that ensures each dollar has the highest return on impact,” as Liesel puts it.

 

This idea is at the heart of Trimtab, an impact-first investing institution. While there are many organizations we admire in the catalytic space, the Trimtab model aims to address a core challenge: The catalytic capital market remains hard to assess and access. Among the hurdles: the absence of shared KPIs and impact-first frameworks, combined with high operational demands and limited market infrastructure, which make it difficult for promising entrepreneurs to raise funds. As a result, there’s a significant amount of family office capital sitting on the sidelines, not for lack of interest, but for lack of a well-structured impact-first marketplace.

 

Trimtab was established by a group of family offices, including Blue Haven, from The ImPact to fill this gap. It was created as a purpose-built institution with a fiduciary duty to impact. Led by co-founders Trace Welch and Caleb Ballou, Trimtab spent its first year creating an investment decision-making framework to assess innovative funds and intermediaries for their potential to generate outcomes and systemic transformation.

 

With $60 million raised and 10 active investments, Trimtab focuses on three areas of investment where it believes catalytic capital is best placed:

 

• Activating difficult-to-reach markets

• Accelerating innovation in neglected markets

• Annihilating extractive systems that harm communities and groups

   

In evaluating investment opportunities, Trimtab seeks out teams with deep domain expertise. Its investments have a range of return profiles: Some focus on asset preservation while others have the potential to outperform market expectations. And the last ingredient in Trimtab’s assessment is analyzing where its $1- to $4-million checks can be the most effective. You can see the diversity of communities, geographies, and themes from just three of its investments:

 

• Siraj Financial Services, a financing program in Northern Syria, has provided loans to 750+ small businesses. Trimtab invested because Siraj was playing a key role providing loans in a conflict-zone with a collapsed financial sector. Now its parent company is driving systems impact by helping shape inclusive financial policies with a new government.

• Acre Impact Capital, a first-time fund manager focused on advancing previously unbankable climate-aligned infrastructure projects in Africa, provides access to essential services. Its projects have electrified two off-grid villages, built facilities with 400 hospital beds, and removed hundreds of landmines in Angola.

• Seven Generations Capital, a private real estate and investment firm in Canada, is focused on supporting the Indigenous economy and communities. It will pilot a new model for First Nations communities to build wealth via real estate development equity partnerships.

 

Our Blue Haven Initiatives team partnered with Trimtab while it was in the idea stage and helped incubate it by providing flexible, non-dilutive design grants. Blue Haven warehoused Trimtab’s first four investments, using patient capital to temporarily hold the deals and allow Trimtab to commit and deploy capital into catalytic investments before the company was launched. Once Trimtab raised outside capital, it repaid Blue Haven as the owner of the assets. Our teams learned and grew together, bringing this new model to life through patient and committed collaboration.

 

Though Trimtab’s initial backers and advisors are seasoned impact investors, Ballou says the company was developed around market needs, not investors’ individual passions. In times that call for courageous capital, that’s an important distinction and commitment to keeping impact front and center.

 

 

Read more about Trimtab in Impact Alpha or reach out to Trace at trace@trimtabimpact.com.

 

 

 

“The only way we learn is by planting flags in the ground and trying things. It’s important to step beyond your zone of confidence, however you define it, and take that first step.” – Trace Welch

 

CRANKING UP THE IMPACT DIAL

 

Blue Haven is committed to continuous learning, celebrating our wins, and trying to own our mistakes. In that spirit, here are ten lessons from our team and partners:

1 EMPOWER LOCAL INSIGHT

Early on in our fifteen years of investing in emerging markets, we designed strategies from afar that were well-intentioned but not always grounded in local realities. One of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned is the importance of local partnership. Lasting impact requires proximity: listening first, sharing power, and enabling local managers to lead.

 

When we began empowering fund managers with deep market insight, everything changed. Capital turned into collaboration, and collaboration turned into shared purpose. We’ve made mistakes—underestimating the time it takes to build trust, over-relying on familiar partners, or focusing too narrowly on outcomes instead of systems. But every misstep became an opportunity to grow wiser and more intentional. The process of learning, unlearning, and improving has become central to our DNA and values.

 

— Patrick Hergt, Partner, Sarona Asset Management

2 UNDERSTAND MARKET INFRASTRUCTURE

Scaling any project requires a clear view of market conditions. We learned this firsthand when an affordable housing project outside Nairobi took longer than expected and failed to scale as planned. Our mistake was assuming that once the homes were built and occupied, the traditional banking system would seamlessly step in to finance mortgages. While the economic benefits of homeownership are well understood, they can only be realized if local financial institutions are prepared, willing, and able to support demand. We learned you can’t introduce housing stock without ensuring the infrastructure, especially the financial system, is ready to sustain it.

 

 

— Blue Haven team

3 ENSURE RESPONSIBLE EXITS

As earlier portfolios mature, we’re navigating how to sustain impact through exits. Effective exit planning starts early—built into pre-investment due diligence and portfolio management—and continues through exit execution. So how to prioritize impact exits? Throughout the investment lifecycle, we engage in active portfolio oversight (regular KPI tracking, impact performance assessment, and board engagement), help identify exit options and acquirers, and collaborate with values-aligned stakeholders to support enduring impact.

 

A recent example is Fund I’s full exit from Fisdom, a leading digital wealth management platform in India that has expanded savings and investment access through a bank-led distribution model. Through our full-lifecycle engagement, which includes board participation, strategic guidance, and long-term support, the company scaled to more than $1 billion in AUM and over one million customers across 17,000 branches while achieving profitability and impact. Its recent acquisition by Groww will preserve Fisdom’s mission and position it for scale. And Groww’s recent public listing should provide Fisdom employees with a clearer liquidity path for their equity and support their career development within a larger platform. More details on our approach is here.

 

— Kristin Sadler, Head of Impact & Platform, Quona Capital

4 SEEK LIQUIDITY WITH AN IMPACT MINDSET

Our Blue Haven investments team is also focused on liquidity, and we’ve learned that liquidity in impact portfolios rarely follows a predictable path. This year, several long-duration investments progressed after sustained engagement with management teams, rigorous scenario modeling, and creative capital structuring that aligned incentives across stakeholders.

 

We realized distributions through tailored approaches, including secondary share sales, management buyouts, and asset or company sales. Operating in uncertain markets taught us that successful exits depend less on market timing and more on trusted relationships, creativity, and collaboration. Liquidity in impact investing isn’t transactional; it’s built on trust and a commitment to long-term value.

 

Like Quona, we’ve thought about the importance of sustained impact through exit. Philosophically, a strategic exit should reinforce, not dilute, the impact thesis, with new ownership deepening the social or environmental outcomes. We work proactively with management teams to anticipate exit pathways and help identify aligned partners who will carry the mission forward, whether through direct introductions, references, or lessons from past transactions.

 

— Blue Haven team

5 HARNESS AI TO SUPPORT THE INVESTMENT PROCESS

We’ve found AI is most helpful as a productivity tool within our investment process. After a year of experimentation and dedicating resources, we’ve found ways to use it to supplement research, sourcing, diligence, monitoring, and portfolio management. We’re finding efficiencies by applying AI tools to:

 

• Perform market research and inform the themes in our investment roadmap

• Automate elements of sourcing to support outreach and identify trends

• Run surveys, collect deeper research, and build conviction

• Enhance financial diligence

 

We’re also excited about the creative ways we’re using custom-built tools to support decision-making within the Growth team. These include tools to challenge our thinking at IC meetings; evaluate different company scenarios; and estimate a company’s impact potential. While many of these opportunities are new and exciting, as sustainable investors, we’re not ignoring the risks that come with AI, like job displacement, increased emissions, and the impact on social and mental health.

 

Across our strategies, we’re aware of our responsibility in shaping how this new technology gets built and used. We’re mitigating these risks in three ways. First, we seek to back “system positive” uses of AI—companies using AI to unlock positive climate, healthcare, and financial inclusion impacts in ways that couldn’t be done before. Secondly, we’re determining what “good AI governance & practices” really means and sharing these insights with our portfolio companies’ teams. Lastly, we’re launching engagement strategies to help our companies identify and reduce negative, systemic externalities of AI use. For example, our Global Equity strategy recently engaged the “hyperscalers” among technology companies on high-integrity carbon-free energy procurement and emissions transparency. Our report on “Viewing AI Through a Sustainability Lens” is here.

 

— Lila Preston, Partner, Generation Investment Management

6 BUILD POLICY EXPERTISE

More funds and family offices are asking how to engage on policy, not whether they should. That shift signals growing recognition that policy is a powerful lever for shaping systems and an essential part of the impact investing toolkit.

 

At Blue Haven, working in partnership with LAVA Strategies, we’ve learned that building policy capacity takes time, and assessing opportunities requires a different lens than evaluating investments or grants. Instead of focusing on direct additionality, like how much capital our funding unlocks, we realize it’s important to weigh political viability, time sensitivity, and the type of influence we aim to build to advance social and environmental priorities. For beginners, it’s helpful to commit to policy as a tool, clarify thematic priorities, cultivate relationships with advocates and policymakers, and deploy test capital to learn.

 

There are policy-enhanced impact investing resources here. And we’re excited to share two new case studies from our policy work. Learn how the Sorenson and Resilience VC teams are leading the way by leveraging policy and relationships to drive impact.

 

— Blue Haven team

7 PRIORITIZE GENUINE PEER-TO-PEER CONNECTIONS

While we enjoy attending conferences and participating in field-building groups, the information presented and the conversations are often too polished. One-on-one discussions in an intimate setting can be more beneficial, offering opportunities to share priorities, challenges, and lessons learned. Some of our most productive relationship-building happens when small groups of peers can candidly talk about what’s working, what isn’t, and openly share resources.

 

As a remote team, we also focus on building trust, connection, and learning. We test new experiences at in-person staff retreats that push us to step outside our comfort zone together and have vulnerable conversations. During our fall retreat, we volunteered with a nonprofit refugee resettlement agency and took on wilderness challenges in El Dorado Canyon State Park in Colorado. These shared experiences, among others, helped us build trust as a team, strengthen communication and leadership skills, and practice problem-solving as a collective. We also made space to reflect on our remote work styles, share our individual workspaces, and exchange strategies for staying engaged virtually.

 

— Blue Haven team

8 BRIDGE INTEREST AND ACTION IN CATALYTIC CAPITAL

We’re excited to see momentum building among catalytic or “impact-first” investors who want to use flexible, risk-tolerant capital to address investment gaps and build markets. Networks and membership groups, including CREO, are launching working groups and a wave of purely catalytic-capital funds is emerging, including Trimtab, Social Finance, and Impact Asset’s Energy Catalyst Fund. At SOCAP in October, the catalytic capital track was among its most popular. We celebrate the growing interest, but recognize it will take time for the amount of capital deployed to catch up to the scale of social and environmental needs. For asset owners who are exploring this type of impact, a new strategic guide from the Catalytic Capital Consortium can help accelerate the journey from education to action.

 

— Blue Haven team

9 USE AI TO ENHANCE FINANCIAL INCLUSION

Generative AI is poised to reshape every layer of a financial service provider’s operating stack. The companies in our portfolio are looking at how they can either build more sophisticated financial solutions for their customers or use AI to improve their internal operations in support of those solutions. We’ve noted several emerging uses for AI-enabled financial inclusion:

 

• Lower-cost customer verification for hard-to-reach segments, supporting mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) processes

• More cost-effective customer engagement, including customer support and collections

• Greater efficiency with internal workflows, such as coding and data cleaning

• Faster and more accurate underwriting for borrowers with limited or no credit history

 

Based on conversations with our portfolio companies, we’ve been surprised by how often their first AI initiatives are customer-facing. Kenya’s Flowcart (formerly Sukhiba), for example, uses WhatsApp to deliver AI-powered “conversational commerce” and to support customers who face digital-literacy barriers. Our Founders are actively advancing AI adoption and expanding as systems prove reliable at scale. In underwriting, where explainability and compliance are critical, we see companies taking a rigorous approach to ensure AI improves, rather than compromises, decision quality.

 

 

— Matthew Schaar, Operating Partner, Accion Ventures

10 PRIORITIZE VALUES COHESION IN COLLABORATION

We’ve realized that it’s far more important to partner with organizations that are aligned with our strategy and values rather than in agreement about every on-the-ground tactic. That alignment helps everyone move more quickly. Across several policy and advocacy efforts, we’re embracing coalitions that bring together advocates from diverse backgrounds, each with their own approach to driving change. We know that winning key fights in the Trump era will require a “big tent” mindset that welcomes everyone who shares core values.

 

— Blue Haven team