NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) Makes Its First Investment

The student-led NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) has successfully completed its first investment with a $30,000 investment in Sapient Industries,  whose mission is to eliminate waste from our electrical grid using machine learning. Sapient Industries have built the world's first Plug Load Management System, monitoring and controlling the power supplied to each and every device in a building. This ensemble of installed smart outlets and smart power strips is run by a cloud-based dashboard and data collected at each socket, and is used to generate behavioral models that automate efficient delivery of power to devices.  The investment was made in the form of a convertible note and on NIIF’s behalf by ImpactAssets, a Donor Advised Fund. 

NIIF Students at Washington Square

This NIIF milestone was the culmination of a year-long experiential learning  course in which graduate students of NYU Wagner and NYU Stern were placed in five deal teams to source, screen, conduct financial and impact due diligence, develop investment memorandums, and make competitive presentations to the Fund’s Investment Committee composed of three Stern and Wagner alumni practitioners:  Graham Macmillan of the Visa Foundation, Monique Aiken of Mission Investors Exchange, and Casey Clark of Rockefeller Capital Management. The legal due diligence for these investment prospects was conducted by students in NYU Law School’s legal clinic, making this a unique experiential learning curricular collaboration among three NYU schools. In early June, the NIIF fund was highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article (“Sustainable Finance Goes to Business School,” June 10).

 

About the NYU Impact Investment Fund:

Developed as a joint venture between the faculty advisors and students of New York University's Stern, Wagner, and Law schools, NIIF leverages the diverse expertise of business, public service, and law faculty to support student investors targeting social enterprises in the sectors of financial inclusion, environment, healthcare, aging, education, and food systems. NIIF continues next academic year with a diverse group of 24 student participants,12 from each school, competitively selected from more than 50 applicants. The experiential  course includes processes to train the students on impact investing, provides practitioner guest lecturers, and creates an interdisciplinary learning laboratory.  NYU schools' development staff are also pursuing additional donations and grants for NIIF to enable this experiential platform to continue well into the future. Learn more on the NIIF website.