SIMA Funds

Asad Mahmood, the founder and managing partner, chairs the investment committee and oversees portfolio strategy. Mahmood previously spent over two decades at Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation, where he led renewable energy and climate-finance initiatives in emerging markets. Michael Gera, managing partner, leads the equity practice and brings operational experience from his role as CEO of Energy Access Ventures.

SIMA sources through a network built across 20-plus countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, leveraging relationships with development finance institutions, local commercial banks, and impact-investor co-investment circles. The firm's technical-assistance facility, SIMA Angaza, acts as a pipeline feeder — identifying last-mile distributors with working-capital needs that may later require growth-equity or senior-debt financing. Because SIMA operates both debt and equity vehicles, management teams often enter the platform through the commercial-debt product before the equity team builds a position.

SIMA Funds is not a family office. It operates as a dedicated emerging-markets impact asset manager running commingled fund vehicles that raise capital from development finance institutions, foundations, and institutional investors. Its fund structures — a commercial senior debt fund, a social-impact equity fund, and a distributor-finance facility — function like sector-specialist private-capital funds rather than a single-family balance sheet.

SIMA makes direct investments, not fund-of-fund commitments. The Commercial Senior Debt Fund originates and underwrites hard-currency loans directly to social enterprises, typically in the $2 million to $10 million range. The equity fund takes direct minority stakes. The firm does not allocate to external private-equity or venture-capital funds.

SIMA's mandate restricts investment to enterprises that serve bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers or build supply chains reaching low-income populations. The firm avoids fossil-fuel generation, extractive industries, and enterprises whose primary customer base is middle-income or affluent. Within financial inclusion, SIMA stays away from consumer-lending models that charge above-market interest rates.

SIMA Angaza operates as a parallel vehicle under the same management company, created specifically to extend working-capital and inventory-financing loans to last-mile distributors of solar products and clean cookstoves. It launched with $25 million in equity commitments from development finance institutions and foundations. Unlike the commercial debt fund, SIMA Angaza targets smaller loan sizes and includes a grant-funded technical-assistance component for borrower capacity building.

SIMA will co-invest alongside other impact-oriented general partners, particularly in equity rounds where a syndicate forms around an energy-access or fintech company. The firm has co-invested alongside funds including Energy Access Ventures and SunFunder in companies like d.light and M-KOPA. However, SIMA typically leads or co-leads its own debt originations rather than participating as a passive club-deal lender.