NIO and Collective Action announce their strategic collaboration launching Planet&People One


ACCELERATING IMPACT INVESTING TOGETHER 

January 20th, Amsterdam, Copenhagen 

NIO and Collective Action announce their strategic collaboration launching Planet&People One, a joint Thematic Impact Private Equity Multi-Manager Strategy that will allocate to 8-12 leading thematic impact funds investing in solutions addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges in water, circularity, food & agriculture, climate solutions, healthcare, and education. 

The Time is Now 

Investors realise that the time to accelerate and scale investments that tackle our global environmental and social challenges is now. Climate change and inequality threaten our planet and our societies and, inevitably, the long-term performance of our investment portfolios. They also present tremendous opportunities by investing in solutions to those challenges. Private markets are key to unlocking sustainable growth, as private companies offering solutions are poised for significant growth. Private markets impact investing is a critical tool for investors to contribute to and benefit from this growth. It is a paradigm shift. 

What Planet&People is Solving for Investors 

Partnerships are critical to support this shift as the impact investment market is still emerging, and investors are looking for support. Today, we see approximately 500 thematic specialist GPs addressing environmental and social issues with a financial and impact objective. As the market is evolving rapidly, this poses challenges for investors. 

With Planet&People One, we aim to support investors in building a high-quality, diversified portfolio that best captures the opportunities of today. We believe in investing through specialist managers with deep industry expertise. Most specialist impact funds focus on a single theme, with the largest being climate, healthcare, and food & agriculture. We built our approach based on deep research on each theme, mapping the universe and meeting GPs, resulting in a robust pipeline and portfolio construction for Planet&People. In addition, the ecosystem is dominated by a younger generation of managers. Therefore, diversification and verification of team, strategy, impact, and operations become even more critical. Funds are generally sized smaller than conventional private market funds, making it more challenging to allocate sufficient capital to justify the resource requirement for an investor. 

On top of that, many investors struggle with impact measurement and are concerned about “rainbow” washing. Despite several leading industry standards and frameworks developed, issues remain. Here, we add value with over six years of in-house Impact Measurement & Management experience and expect to classify as an article 9 fund. 

Impact Partnership by Investors for Investors 

Our partnership is the meeting of minds, values, expertise, and networks. Between our two firms, we combine significant private markets, impact investing, and manager selection expertise resulting in one of the most experienced teams for impact in the market. 

It is also a partnership where we invite like-minded Investors (Institutions, Family Offices, Foundations and Corporate Investors) that seek returns and impact to invest together in Planet&People One. We provide an opportunity for investors to partner and actively collaborate with like-minded peers. Our objective is to provide a transparent platform where we share our knowledge through active dialogue and insights based on research. Our quarterly Impact Investor Lab facilitates this. Here we encourage dialogue between investors to transfer knowledge, share with peers and support individual pipeline development. 

On February 23rd, 2023, we host our first Impact Lab providing potential investors in Planet&People One an overview of the ecosystem and some of the investment opportunities we are seeing. 

About Planet&People One 

  • Planet & People One is a EUR 150m impact-focused Private Equity strategy, investing in six impact themes with a finance-first investment thesis: water, circularity, food & agriculture, climate solutions, education, and healthcare 
  • Focus on social or environmental needs that create growth opportunities for attractive returns 
  • A global approach to opportunities, investing in global and regional strategies 
  • Fund investments across VC, Growth and Buyout in 8-12 specialist thematic impact funds, building a portfolio of 100+ underlying companies 
  • Investors in Planet & People One benefit beyond the investment itself: they will build knowledge on the impact space through facilitated Impact Labs and, in addition, consider co-investment opportunities 
  • We expect to classify Planet & People One as an Article 9 fund under the SFDR 
  • We will be tracking several relevant Planet & People (fund-level) KPIs 

About Collective Action 

Collective Action is a Private Markets Impact Investment Platform supporting institutional investors in building their impact portfolios by providing qualitative insight through a digital research platform, MyCelium, by forming impact investment partnerships, executing impact mandates, and facilitating collaboration among peers. Collective Action was founded in 2020 by a diverse team of 11 investment professionals from the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. We launched Collective Action to help investors overcome the hurdles they face in realising their impact ambitions and, in doing so, catalyse institutional capital at scale into impact investing. 

About NIO 

NIO Partners was founded in Copenhagen in 2018 by pioneers in the private markets industry and offers institutional and private investors a fully digitalised platform with investment solutions within infrastructure, real estate, private equity, and private debt. NIO Partners’ investors have access to exclusive private market funds selected for their long-term stable performance and sustainability aspects. The business model is based on a high “alignment of interests”, according to which, in addition to investors, the employees, managers and owners of NIO Partners also invest in the funds – typically around ten percent.