For millions of families, cooking still means smoke-filled kitchens and hours spent gathering fuel.
Acumen investee @BURNmfg is building a different future by scaling clean cooking across Africa.
🎥 - @leonmalu
There’s more impact capital than ever before. So why isn’t it reaching the people who need it most?
Our Founder and CEO, @jnovogratz , reflects on the recent surge of interest in impact investing and what it will take to deliver on its promise.
Tap the link in bio to read her letter.
Less than 10% of global climate finance goes toward helping communities adapt to climate change.
That funding helps farmers prepare for floods and droughts and supports innovators building solutions for a changing world.
We believe it’s time to change the game in climate finance.
Stay tuned to see how you can be part of the change.
Last week, we welcomed MBA students from @INSEAD to our New York office. We covered the realities of impact investing; what works, what’s hard, and where capital can go further.
We spoke about the trade-offs behind the work – how impact is measured in practice, what it takes to support founders over the long term, and how this approach differs from traditional charity.
Some questions stood out: how do we think about returns while staying focused on impact? Others pushed on how our investments build markets and catalyze additional capital over time.
Thank you to the students for the thoughtful engagement.
Acumen’s Coco Lim was on a mission at the Skoll World Forum, listening for the ideas and takeaways shaping this year’s global conversations.
Here’s what members of the Acumen community had to say.
@skoll.foundation | #SkollWF
Acumen founder and CEO @jnovogratz received a 2026 Lotus Leadership Award from @TheAsiaFoundation for her work in ensuring that investment opens doors for women.
At Acumen, we’re proud to invest in entrepreneurs who are proving that when you invest in women, you invest in everything they'll build around them. Economic opportunity for women changes the equation for their families and entire communities.
Congratulations to Jacqueline and all of this year's honorees.
Acumen’s @Oruade_Kome spoke to a few Fellows at the end of #TED2026 to hear what stayed with them, what challenged their thinking, and what they’re taking back into their work in underserved communities.
The astronauts from Artemis II are back on Earth with a powerful message about teams.
"A crew is a group that is in it all the time...and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked," said Christina Koch.
It took a whole lot of people to get four people the farthest distance from Earth that humans have ever travelled.
And it has taken many people for Acumen to reach more than 700 million people living in poverty.
Our entrepreneurs, fellows, peer investors, and philanthropists have never had a clear path to progress, but have continued to build systems that actually work for people too often overlooked.
Because of 25 years of teamwork, 359 million more people have access to clean energy, 964,000 jobs have been created or improved, and 38 million farmers have better livelihoods.
That's what real moonshots look like.
Thank you to our global crew.
Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls/Joel Kowsky. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acumen Fellows are at @TED in Vancouver this week, joining global conversations under the theme “All of Us”.
They are here as leaders working across different sectors in underserved communities.
They will connect lived experience with global ideas and take what they learn back into their work at home.
What does innovation mean to you? To us, it means different things, but with the same goal: to build a world based on dignity.
#FCmostinnovative #Innovation
