Mission Driven Finance and Known Holdings are combining their offerings for impact-oriented fund managers, a prelude to a larger collaboration intended to provide the scope and scale needed to attract larger pools of capital.
The partnership brings together San Diego-based MDF’s fund administration, structuring and support services with Built, Fund as a Service, the fund infrastructure platform developed by New York-based Known.
The collaboration is part of a larger trend toward consolidation in the impact investing marketplace. A number of investment advisory firms have combined in recent years, and industry experts expect more asset and fund managers to similarly join forces to be able to attract larger institutional investors.
“The challenge is ensuring the opportunities that are ready to scale have access to the support required to do it,” MDF’s David Lynn said in a statement. Impact-oriented fund managers, along with real estate projects and other businesses are demonstrating performance and gaining traction, but lack the infrastructure required for growth, he said
MDF, with $159 million in assets under management and approximately $200 million more in assets under administration, is itself seeking additional scale. The statement teased additional details about “future initiatives, partnerships, and market collaborations” in coming months.
Expanded collaboration
Built is Known’s main operating business. Known co-founders Nathalie Molina Niño and Ushir Shah will work with MDF to grow the business. Since the beginning of the year, MDF and Known say they have worked with multiple clients, from early-stage fund design to helping investment strategies get ready to scale.
“We started collaborating, clients responded, and it became clear that some opportunities benefit from the best that both MDF and Known bring to the table,” Molina Niño said.
Known was founded in 2021 to “shift capital through all of the ways of wealth creation” to eliminate racial wealth gaps, co-founder Valerie Red-Horse Mohl said on ImpactAlpha’s podcast in 2023 (see, “Moving capital at scale to elevate communities of color”). Last month, California Endowment announced that Red-Horse Mohl had joined as managing director of investments for its roughly $4 billion endowment. Red-Horse Mohl had previously served as deputy chief investment officer for responsible investing in New York City’s comptroller’s office, which manages the city’s pension funds.
Jim Casselberry, another co-founder of Known, now serves as chief investment officer at Kansas City-based Health Forward Foundation and remains chair of Known’s board.
In the statement, MDF and Known said they share “a long-term view to expand collaboration across client engagements, capabilities, resource sharing, and new opportunities that strengthen the broader investment ecosystem.”
Source: impactalpha.com
