Blue Like an Orange Sustainable Capital

CEO and Founding Partner Bertrand Badré sets firm strategy and chairs the investment committee. CIO and Partner Rashad Kaldany leads deal origination and credit underwriting, drawing on his two decades at the IFC. Vinicius Barcelos, Partner and Head of Brazil, runs Latin America's largest local office and leads on-the-ground sourcing across the southern cone.

The name comes from a line in Paul Éluard's surrealist poem 'La Terre est bleue comme une orange' — 'The earth is blue like an orange.' Bertrand Badré has cited the phrase as capturing the firm's goal of making the impossible ordinary: generating market-rate financial returns while producing measurable, independently verified social and environmental outcomes in historically underserved markets.

The firm sources through its local offices in São Paulo, Lima, and Bogotá, leveraging the in-country networks of its investment partners. Importantly, Badré and Kaldany's relationships at the World Bank, IFC, and regional development banks open pipeline from multilaterals and local financial institutions that typically do not compete for private-equity-style capital. The firm also co-invests alongside DFIs on select transactions.

Blue Like an Orange targets market-rate, risk-adjusted returns — not concessionary finance. While the firm does not publicly disclose its net IRR target, it structures mezzanine and structured equity with coupon and equity-kicker profiles consistent with emerging-market private credit, aiming for returns competitive with lower-mid-market Latin American debt funds.

Yes. Every investment requires upfront selection of relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals, with ongoing impact metrics tracked and reported to LPs. The firm has positioned this as a binding investment discipline, not a marketing overlay — its sustainability partner sits on the investment committee and has authority to reject deals on impact grounds.

Blue Like an Orange is a third-party fund manager, not a family office. It raises capital from development-finance institutions, European pension funds, family offices, and institutional investors. Its founding partners are former multilateral development bank executives, not wealth principals.

The firm has publicly stated it does not invest in countries under active multilateral sanctions or where governance failures make SDG-compliant lending structurally impossible. Specifically, it has avoided Venezuela throughout its fund life, and certain smaller Caribbean nations fall outside its investable universe due to limited deal flow and structural currency risk.