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Investor demand for private capital funds that explicitly seek positive environmental or social outcomes has held steady in recent years despite the political backlash against climate and diversity agendas.
Private equity, infrastructure, real estate and private debt funds that aim to generate measurable environmental or social good alongside financial returns raised $31bn last year, in line with the previous year, according to Preqin data shared with the FT.
Impact-focused infrastructure funds — many of which focus on renewable energy — had a particularly strong 2025, accounting for $24bn of capital raised.
The data suggests that investors have not abandoned so-called impact investing, as many predicted they would after the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and shows that certain sectors under the label continue to attract strong investor interest.
Last year Brookfield Asset Management raised a $20bn fund that it described as the biggest-ever vehicle dedicated to clean energy. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners raised a €12bn vehicle focused on large greenfield renewables projects.
The bumper fundraisings were achieved despite Trump’s campaign against renewable energy. His administration has brought much US onshore development to a halt and repeatedly tried to shut down several offshore wind projects.
“Some investors, particularly in the US, have switched away from investments that are badged as ‘impact’ or ‘ESG’,” said Ian Simm, founder of Impax Asset Management, but other investors in such vehicles were motivated by factors beyond ethical ones anyway. He added that the case for energy resilience from renewables had been boosted this year by the Middle East war.
Industry experts said, however, that the notion once held by some that investors could sacrifice returns in favour of positive outcomes had completely fallen out of favour.
Last year was “a bit of a transition year” for investor sentiment “because of what’s been going on in the US”, said Hilary Wiek, who researches impact-driven private capital vehicles at data provider PitchBook. “You can’t just say you want a social good, you need a good return.”
Others said that funds that loosely pulled together multiple sectors under the umbrella of impact were also less popular now.
“We have seen a softening of investor demand into funds encompassing both social and environmental impact, or funds that lump together, say, a school and an energy transition business,” said Ali Floyd, partner at fundraising advisory firm Campbell Lutyens. Meanwhile, specific themes such as renewable energy have become more popular, he added.
So far this year, impact-focused funds have raised $13bn, according to Preqin, which suggests a slight fall in 2026 when multiplied to project a yearly total. Preqin said, however, that fundraising figures tended to rise at the end of the year due to reporting lags.
Andreas Aschenbrenner, who heads EQT’s €3bn impact-focused private equity fund, said some people had thought it would be easy to “ride that wave” of earlier interest in sustainability, but that many smaller vehicles “lacked the institutional muscle” to drive performance.
Aschenbrenner said the fundamentals were as strong as ever. “When you didn’t think in 2016 about digitisation of a business, you would be in 2026 . . . considered a fool,” he said. “Sustainability is the new digital.”
