Altum

Altum

Altum was created in 2015 through the merger of Latvia's state development agency, guarantee agency, and environmental investment fund — a consolidation engineered to centralize public development finance under one balance sheet. Reinis Bērziņš leads the management board, overseeing an institution backed by Latvian state treasury allocations and European Union structural funds. The firm absorbed the functions of the Latvian Guarantee Agency and parts of the former Mortgage and Land Bank, inheriting a legacy portfolio of agricultural and SME loans. The institution operates across credit guarantees, direct lending, venture capital fund-of-funds, and export credit insurance. Its venture activities run through a series of accelerator programs and fund commitments, with confirmed vehicles including the BaltCap-managed Latvia Venture Capital Fund and the Commercialization Reactor pre-seed platform. Altum also administers state-aid schemes for energy efficiency in multi-apartment buildings — one of the largest deployment channels — and runs the national export guarantee program. Geographic focus is overwhelmingly domestic, with Baltic-region co-financing arrangements. Scale evidence is limited by Altum's status as a non-commercial state entity, but an Altss estimate places total assets under management at approximately $1.2 billion. The firm maintains a lean central office in Riga and does not operate foreign branches. No disclosed philanthropic vehicles sit alongside the core development mandate, though the institution's energy-efficiency lending effectively functions as a social-infrastructure program. Altum's structural differentiator is its blended-capital architecture: the institution uses EU grant money, national budget appropriations, and EIB counter-guarantees in a single deployment engine, enabling it to absorb first-loss positions that private banks in a small Baltic economy cannot carry. This public-risk-absorption model gives it a de facto monopoly on state-backed venture and guarantee instruments in Latvia.