Beyond de-risking: our takeaways from Building Bridges 2026
What grants build, impact investing sustains
“De-risking” gets a lot of attention in discussions around catalytic capital. What about “enabling opportunities”?
At Building Bridges on October 8, elea Chief Investment Officer Adrian Ackeret made exactly this point in our session. Catalytic capital isn’t only about absorbing risk. It’s about backing the upside: the entrepreneurs, ideas, aspirations, and impact that wouldn’t get started otherwise. Impact entrepreneurship requires a leap of faith, and shared values play an important role in building trust and bringing partners together.
What does this look like in practice, and what does it take for grant makers and impact investors to work together and amplify impact? We explored these questions with our partners Stiftung Fourfold, Livelihood Impact Fund, and Impact Europe.
Grants that prepare ventures for investment
With Stiftung Fourfold, we are launching a catalytic grant facility for selected promising ventures that are not yet ready for an investment by elea. A small, focused grant helps them clear one or two key hurdles, with the entrepreneur driving the process and no obligation on either side afterwards. As Valerie Remoquillo-Jenni from Stiftung Fourfold put it: what grants build, impact investing sustains.
Each partner doing what it does best
With Livelihood Impact Fund, we combine its flexible, risk-tolerant grant funding for locally led businesses in Africa with elea’s investment and impact value creation expertise. Each partner contributes what it does best, instead of trying to do everything alone.
Investing in the infrastructure for collaboration
Angela Wiebeck from Impact Europe widened the lens: collaboration can’t depend on goodwill and bilateral relationships alone. To scale, the field needs to invest in the infrastructure behind it: shared playbooks, data, common language, and neutral platforms that bring different types of capital together.
Trust as the common thread
We then asked the room to share best-practice examples and the success factors that help partnerships thrive and create lasting impact. The word that came up at every table was trust. Building it takes:
- Transparency from day one, and shared values that hold a partnership together
- Shared definitions of success: milestones, KPIs, and time horizons
- Infrastructure to combine capital across the whole spectrum
- Real sharing of pipelines and resources, which is still far too rare
Thank you to our panelists and to everyone who joined and made the session so lively. Let’s continue the conversation and keep building bridges – together.
Photo: Building Bridges 2026 / Antoine Tardy
