Zebra Impact Ventures

Co-founders Fabio Sofia and Lionel Artusio-Payot lead the investment team. Both sit on the firm's core team alongside three other investment professionals. Board members Dominique Goy and Benoit Dumont — both ex-JPMorgan and Lombard Odier — provide governance oversight. Senior Advisor Karen E. Wilson, an associate fellow at Oxford's Saïd Business School, contributes to impact measurement and investment strategy.

The zebra model refers to companies that pursue a double bottom line — profitability and social improvement — rather than chasing the purely disruptive unicorn model. The firm claims this philosophy as its investment thesis, requiring portfolio companies to implement impact action plans with measurable strategies. An activist shareholder approach enforces these standards at the board level.

Zebra Impact Ventures uses a hybrid model. It has launched the Regenerative Growth I fund for pooled commitments and also executes deal-by-deal investment strategies. This structure allows the firm to syndicate specific opportunities with co-investors outside the fund vehicle.

The firm invests from early-stage to growth-stage companies in the nature-tech space. Recent deployments include leading a $37M Series B in AgroSpheres and participating as a growth investor in Micropep's €27M round, demonstrating capacity to lead later-stage agritech rounds.

The firm concentrates on five nature-tech verticals: agri-food systems transformation, decarbonization, water and ocean technologies, transport and mobility, and energy and grid modernization. Its portfolio to date shows heavy weighting toward agritech, including AgroSpheres and Micropep, with broader climate-tech ambitions across these sectors.

Co-founder Lionel Artusio-Payot leverages deep farming heritage and a large existing agritech portfolio to access European agri founders. The firm also publishes joint research on agritech with Mirabaud, a Swiss banking group, and draws on advisor Jérôme Penot's 20-year network in the global food and beverage industry to identify emerging food-tech startups.

Zebra Impact Ventures is an independent asset manager structured as a Swiss-based private equity boutique. It is not a family office, though one board member — Lionel Artusio-Payot — serves as Investment Committee Chair for a top-three European agricultural family office, creating an institutional co-investment bridge.