This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

----------------------------------------

Most impact funds operate at the margins of traditional finance. The Citi Impact Fund operates from inside one of the largest banks in the world. That's a different kind of leverage.

Meredith Shields manages a $500 million carve-out from Citi's balance sheet, deployed exclusively into double bottom line companies.

In this episode, she covers how the fund defines impact, why it moved to Series B investing, and what she's watching in sectors like care, education, and financial resilience. She also names names, rolling through more portfolio companies than most guests manage in an hour.

----------------------------------------

Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.

This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

----------------------------------------

For decades, lupus has remained one of the most complex challenges in modern medicine. Its extreme heterogeneity, where symptoms and triggers can vary widely from one patient to the next, has made the disease difficult to study, diagnose, and treat.

As a result, lupus has often been passed over by traditional venture capital in favor of conditions with more predictable development paths.

That dynamic is now beginning to change.

A growing wave of scientific advances, regulatory progress, and an increasingly active clinical pipeline is signaling a turning point for millions of patients worldwide.

At the center of this shift is Lupus Ventures, a mission driven investment fund launched by the Lupus Research Alliance.

The fund combines the discipline of life sciences venture capital with a clear focus on return on mission, aiming to close the funding gap that has long stalled promising breakthroughs in autoimmune disease research.

In this spotlight, we speak with Nishant Rastogi, Managing Director of Lupus Ventures.

Drawing on more than a decade of experience in biotech private equity and venture capital, Nishant explains why he chose to lead a mission driven fund, why early diagnostics are critical to improving patient outcomes, and how Lupus Ventures is helping reshape how cures are funded for historically underserved diseases.

Full interview

----------------------------------------

Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.

This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

----------------------------------------

In episode 93 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I sit down with Nick Dilks, Co Founder and Managing Partner of Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), a firm that has quietly become one of the most important players in large scale ecological restoration in the United States.

Nick grew up splitting time between Philadelphia and a family farm on the Chesapeake Bay. That early exposure to land and water shaped a life long focus on conservation. After a decade at The Conservation Fund structuring complex land deals, he co founded EIP in 2006 to answer a simple but difficult question.

Can you use private capital, at scale, to restore degraded ecosystems while still meeting the financial expectations of institutional investors

Over almost twenty years, EIP has shown that the answer is yes.

The firm acquires degraded land, restores wetlands, streams, and habitats, then sells mitigation credits to public and private developers that are required by law to offset their environmental impacts. It is a space where environmental protection, infrastructure, housing, and finance all intersect.

In this conversation, Nick explains how mitigation banking actually works, why these markets are fully regulated and compulsory, how a new 400 million dollar fund will expand EIP’s work, and why he believes more young people should bring serious financial skills into the environmental sector.

----------------------------------------

Investing in Impact is powered by Causeartist, a nonprofit media company dedicated to bridging the gap between capital and culture by spotlighting founders, investors, and organizations reimagining how business can serve people and the planet.

Through storytelling, events, and open-access education, Causeartist helps create a shared language of impact, inspiring more founders to build with purpose and more funders to invest with intention.

By amplifying ideas and innovations across industries, Causeartist transforms awareness into action and cultivates a community where paying it forward is part of the foundation for growth.