By Betsy Vereckey

Whether it’s carbon capture or green hydrogen, there are plenty of new investment opportunities in sustainability. But often, there is a mismatch between the risk/return profile of many of the most impactful investments and traditional sources of private capital.

Pooja Yadav T’18 is confident that family offices can help change that. 

“Private wealth is a relatively untapped and growing pool of capital that is particularly well-suited to support climate and other impact priorities because it tends to be more flexible, patient, and risk-tolerant,” says Yadav, a principal at investment advisory firm Azarine. “Often, families allocate a portion of their capital where they’d like to be more catalytic in terms of their dollar’s impact. This risk-seeking capital is often incredibly meaningful in accelerating innovative technologies or business models before they’re ready for private equity.” 

Yadav says that in the private wealth space when dealing with sustainability investments, there’s a need for a “higher-touch approach,” one that goes beyond the generalist climate funds recommended by large financial institutions. 

“Climate is such a fast-growing and hard-to-navigate investment landscape—you need to have experience doing the legwork so that you can understand the difference between a good opportunity versus good marketing,” she says. 

Working in the climate space is a natural fit for Yadav. Throughout her career, she’s sought out experiences where she could make a difference. 

“I grew up outside of Philly and went to a Quaker school that had a huge impact on my life. There was a lot of emphasis on service, humility, and equality,” she says. 

Yadav earned a degree in political science from Emory University. After strategy consulting at Accenture for a few years, she decided to earn her MBA. She picked Tuck because she wanted a supportive environment in a tight-knit community where she could take more professional and intellectual risks. 

“If I were to tell anyone why you go to Tuck, it would be because of the community and how that feeling of support allows you to pursue experiences out of your comfort zone,” she says. 

After graduating, Yadav sought out “on-the-ground” experience in Nairobi working with CrossBoundary, an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. While there, she provided commercial due diligence and transaction advisory support to US/European private equity firms investing in Africa and gained first-hand experience in bringing traditional forms of capital to underserved sectors and geographies. 

In 2021, she joined the Biden administration to help set up the U.S. government’s first equity investing program in emerging markets at the US Development Finance Corporation. “Government is inherently designed to avoid risk, so part of our work in developing an equity strategy was to build comfort with taking smart risk to invest in highly impactful and foreign policy-aligned deals that couldn’t be achieved with our traditional project finance or debt transactions.” 

Now, at Azarine, Yadav is putting her passion for impact investing to work by advising families on building commercial portfolios with climate and other impact outcomes. 

“Private wealth is adding to my experience of seeing how various capital providers—from private equity to the U.S. government—play a role in building new sectors and economies,” she says. “It’s a little less clearcut at times, but I’m a firm believer that you can earn a good return and have an impact by investing in nascent sectors and geographies.”

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2024 issue of Tuck Today magazine.