Our thesis is simple. The most valuable companies of the coming century will be the ones that fix the world's hardest problems — because solving a real problem, at scale, is precisely how a company grows and compounds into a giant. And the world is not short of problems to fix. The Fortera Frontier Fund invests across public and private markets in the companies and infrastructure doing exactly that — underwritten for genuine risk-adjusted return, held to a real impact threshold, and consolidated under a single reporting standard.
We are not impact investors who accept a lower return for a clearer conscience. We are investors who believe the surest path to outsized, durable return runs directly through the world's unsolved problems — and that impact is simply what it looks like when that view is right.
The businesses that compounded into the most valuable in the world did not chase a share price — they removed a friction, a waste, a risk or a scarcity so large that value had nowhere to go but to them. Solve a real problem at scale and the return is the by-product, not the target.
Energy, food, water, materials, ageing infrastructure, health, resilience — each is a multi-decade market forming in real time. This is not a niche carved out of the economy; it is the century's growth agenda, and it is enormous.
As economies mature, spending moves from desperation buying to choice buying — and choice bends, reliably, toward the good: toward companies and products that help people and the planet rather than harm them. That shift is a structural tailwind beneath every business solving a real problem.
A company that genuinely fixes a problem does not just win a sale — it becomes infrastructure. That is where the deepest moats sit: pricing power and durable margins accrue not to whoever undercuts a rival, but to whoever becomes the answer the world can no longer do without.
Eight thematic sub-funds, each mapped to one of the largest problems the world is paying to solve — energy, food, mobility, materials, cities, water, and the technologies that measure and mend. Together they are a portfolio of the companies most likely to compound as they fix what is broken. Clients may hold the full Frontier Fund as a single blended mandate, or weight their allocation toward the sub-funds that match their conviction and time horizon, with rebalancing conducted quarterly alongside the Consortium's investment committee review. Each sub-fund is managed to its own benchmark and risk budget, yet reports through one unified statement — a single asset management relationship spanning eight distinct theses.
Breakthrough renewable energy technologies — R&D, generation, distribution and storage, including grid-scale storage, next-generation solar and long-duration battery chemistries approaching commercial maturity.
Companies enabling a truly renewable food system, from transition leaders to critical farming technology — precision agriculture, soil regeneration, alternative proteins and the supply-chain infrastructure that supports them at scale.
Alternatives to high-emission materials and the technology needed to improve housing and infrastructure, spanning low-carbon cement and steel substitutes, retrofit technology and next-generation building efficiency systems.
Technologies and brands reducing the environmental impact of transport and global mobility, from electrified fleets and charging infrastructure to sustainable aviation fuels and maritime decarbonisation.
Technologies helping consumer goods and services cut environmental impact, cradle-to-cradle — recycled and recyclable materials, reuse platforms, and the reverse-logistics infrastructure that makes circularity commercially viable.
Carbon management, direct air capture, eDNA monitoring, robotics and AI for a regenerative economy — the enabling layer of instrumentation and analytics that verifies impact across every other sub-fund.
Companies helping humanity adapt as climate risk and resource scarcity accelerate — flood defence, water security, climate-resilient infrastructure and parametric risk-transfer solutions.
Investments in water treatment, desalination, watershed restoration and the natural-capital markets emerging around biodiversity credits and ecosystem-service accounting.
Indicative terms: 2% annual management fee plus 20% performance fee over a fixed 5% hurdle, with a high-water mark, quarterly dealing (last business day) and a minimum holding period, subject to final fund documentation and regulatory approval. Allocations are accepted in sterling, dollars or euros, with sub-fund weightings adjustable at each liquidity window subject to committee notice periods.
A fund-of-sub-funds, not a single blended pool — each thematic mandate is its own segregated portfolio with its own NAV, its own risk budget and its own line of underlying holdings. The master vehicle exists to aggregate subscriptions, allocate them across the eight sub-funds per the client's instruction, and consolidate reporting — it does not itself take investment views.
Hover or focus a sub-fund below for its mandate
Each sub-fund is valued independently by the fund administrator, which strikes a Net Asset Value per unit at each quarterly dealing point using independent pricing sources for listed holdings and periodic third-party valuations for private positions. Assets are held by a depositary, separate from the manager, which is responsible for safekeeping of custody assets and cash-flow monitoring — the structural separation that means the manager can never simply move client assets. An independent custodian sits beneath the depositary for the physical or electronic safekeeping of securities. Rebalancing across the eight sub-funds happens at each liquidity window, when the investment committee reviews target weightings against actual weightings and instructs subscriptions or redemptions between sub-funds to bring the blended mandate back within its stated tolerance bands, rather than through continuous secondary-market trading.
Liquidity is managed through gating: because several sub-funds hold private placements and direct co-investments that cannot be sold at short notice, redemption requests in any single dealing period are capped as a percentage of sub-fund NAV. If redemption requests exceed that cap, they are met pro-rata and the balance is carried to the following window — a mechanism that protects remaining investors from a fire-sale of illiquid positions to meet a run of redemptions, and is disclosed in full in the fund's offering documentation before any subscription is accepted.
The performance fee is not simply 20% of profit — it is paid through a waterfall. Investors first receive their capital back, then a preferred return equal to the hurdle rate before any performance fee accrues. Only above that hurdle does a catch-up tranche allow the manager to close the gap to its full 20% carry; beyond the catch-up, profit splits 80/20 in the investors' favour. A high-water mark then ensures that if a sub-fund falls in value after a performance fee has been earned, no further fee is charged until the NAV per unit has recovered above its previous peak — the manager cannot earn a fee twice on the same gain.
Conviction should never cost you the choice. Every client is underwritten with the same institutional discipline — the same research, the same committee, the same risk budgeting. What differs is only whether the impact threshold is applied.
Every position held to a genuine, verified impact threshold — the companies solving the problems we believe will define the century's winners. This is where we invest our own conviction, and the mandate most of our clients choose, because they share our read on where durable value will compound.
For clients who would rather invest without the impact constraint — pursuing the highest headline return wherever it sits — Fortera runs an unconstrained conventional mandate. The same research, underwriting and risk discipline, simply without the impact screen. No thesis is forced on you; the choice, and the reporting, are always yours.
Most clients blend the two — a conviction core in the Frontier Fund, an unconstrained sleeve alongside it. Our house view is plain: we expect the companies fixing the world's problems to be among its most valuable, which is why the Frontier Fund is where our own conviction sits. Capital at risk; the value of investments can fall as well as rise.
Fortera Nova — original photography
A disciplined, repeatable process — every candidate assessed on both financial merit and verified impact before a single pound is committed. The same seven stages apply whether the opportunity is a listed equity, a private placement or an infrastructure co-investment, so the standard of scrutiny never bends to the size or speed of the deal.
Screen public and private markets for companies and instruments aligned with the Frontier's transition themes, drawing on proprietary sector mapping and the Consortium's own network of operators and founders.
Assess impact-object compliance and score every candidate against our minimum Real ESG threshold, verified against third-party data rather than issuer self-disclosure wherever an independent source exists.
Qualitative and quantitative analysis feeding a risk-adjusted returns model specific to each thematic strategy, stress-tested against downside scenarios before any position is sized.
Independent sign-off before any capital is committed or strategy deployed, with a standing right of challenge on any position that concentrates risk beyond mandate limits.
Execution via listed strategy for public markets, and direct allocation for private opportunities, with position sizing calibrated to the liquidity profile of the underlying sub-fund.
Financial performance, impact metrics and the underlying company narratives, delivered together, every quarter — the same cadence and format across every sub-fund, so performance is always legible.
Positions are re-scored against the Real ESG threshold on a rolling basis; any holding that drifts below the minimum is flagged to committee for divestment review.
Photography — King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The principles below are not marketing language — they are the operating constraints written into the fund's own governance documents, binding on the investment committee regardless of market conditions.
No self-certification. Every holding is scored against our Real ESG threshold by process, not by press release, using independent data providers wherever an issuer's own disclosures cannot be corroborated.
Independent committee sign-off before a pound moves — the same rigour a pension fund would demand of its managers, with a documented dissent process should any member object to a proposed allocation.
Return and consequence, side by side, every quarter. If a number cannot be shown, it is not claimed — the same standard of evidence applies to a headline return figure as to an impact metric.
No single position may exceed a defined share of any sub-fund's net asset value, regardless of conviction — a structural limit on the damage any one thesis can do if it proves wrong.
Clients define the scope of their portfolio and the level of impact they wish to achieve — and can recalibrate their position on the spectrum as conviction, or liquidity needs, evolve. The classification below follows the same SFDR framework used by European regulators, giving clients a common, auditable language for how much of their capital is doing more than simply avoiding harm.
Any asset above our Real ESG minimum score — screened out only for what it fails to avoid, not for what it actively contributes.
SFDR — Article 6Assets that support the wider Frontier, promoting environmental or social characteristics alongside a genuine financial return.
SFDR — Article 8Assets with a direct, measurable impact on the Frontier, where impact is a stated objective of the investment and reported as rigorously as its return.
SFDR — Article 9Most client portfolios sit across all three tiers rather than in a single one — a core of Article 6 holdings for stability and liquidity, a majority weighting in Article 8 strategies, and a deliberate, sized allocation to Article 9 assets for clients seeking maximum measurable impact.
Under the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, Article 6, 8 and 9 are not marketing labels a manager chooses freely — each carries binding pre-contractual disclosure obligations. An Article 6 product simply discloses how sustainability risks are integrated into the investment decision, without promoting any environmental or social characteristic. An Article 8 product must promote such characteristics and disclose, holding by holding, the proportion of the portfolio meeting them. An Article 9 product must have sustainable investment as its objective — a materially higher bar, requiring every holding to qualify as a "sustainable investment" under the regulation's own three-part test: it contributes to an environmental or social objective, it does no significant harm to any other objective, and the investee company follows good governance practice.
The test that separates genuine Article 9 conviction from adjacent Article 8 exposure is additionality — whether the investment causes an outcome that would not otherwise have occurred, whether by financing a company or project that could not otherwise access capital on the same terms, or by exercising active ownership to change behaviour that would not have changed regardless. A profitable, already-well-capitalised renewables developer earning revenue from assets built a decade ago demonstrates alignment with the transition, but not necessarily additionality; a growth-stage direct air capture business unable to reach commercial scale without this capital demonstrates both. Sub-funds weighted toward private placements and early-stage co-investment — Impact Technologies and Mitigation & Adaptation among them — are structurally better placed to evidence additionality than listed-equity strategies, which is reflected in how each sub-fund is mapped onto the spectrum rather than assumed uniformly across the whole Frontier.
Reporting against Principal Adverse Impact indicators — the mandatory SFDR metrics covering carbon footprint, biodiversity, water, waste and social factors — is produced for every sub-fund regardless of its Article classification, so a client can see not only what a holding aims to achieve but what it costs across the indicators it does not target.