Q&A With Aakash Kotak, Summer Associate at The Builders Fund

Builders Fund is participating in the ICM Institute’s Mosaic Fellowship program, which provides high-performing first-year graduate students with the opportunity to spend a summer at an ICM member fund and gain hands-on experience in impact investing. This summer, we are thrilled to welcome Aakash Kotak to the team.

We sat down with Aakash to discuss his thoughts on impact investing and emerging growth-stage business models.

What drew you to the Mosaic Fellowship and Builders Fund?

Before starting at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I worked for a private capital advisor in London. My day-to-day role involved sourcing and running secondary sale processes — but alongside this, I helped to establish a new team focused specifically on advising impact funds. Over time, as I reflected on my work on both teams, something became clear: only on the impact side did my personal and professional goals feel perfectly aligned. I resolved to apply for impact-focused MBA programs specifically with a view to developing my skillset and launching a career as an impact investor. The Mosaic Fellowship, which helps first-year MBA students do exactly that, was therefore a perfect fit for me and was my top priority when I started considering my summer plans.

While I came to Stanford with the clear intention of going into impact investing, I did not yet have full clarity on what kind of investing most appealed to me. I spent my first quarter learning about different sectors and investment stages, and eventually arrived at conclusions that pointed me straight towards Builders Fund! I like the focus on growth-stage investment, which sits in an under-appreciated sweet spot where meaningful impact can be made most efficiently. I’m also keen on Builders’ multi-sector approach; diversification makes sense from a risk perspective, allows for a broader scope of impact, and maximizes learning opportunities for the team. I feel a strong alignment between my values and the Builders approach and I really can’t wait to get started.

Which industries do you believe have the greatest potential for growth and significant impact?

While I like the idea of maintaining a multi-sector approach, two areas strike me as current highlights for growth-stage impact investors: the apparel and food industries. Both are unsustainable: upstream processes are land, energy, and water-intensive, while overconsumption, waste, and reckless disposal are endemic in downstream industry and consumer behavior. Both urgently require impact-driven disruption and, I believe, present some promising opportunities to investors like Builders.

For example, in the apparel industry, textile recycling looks set to receive a huge boost over the coming years as governments worldwide introduce legislation to keep clothing out of landfills. I expect this to create significant growth-stage investment opportunities not only in chemical recycling for textiles, but also in associated areas such as garment collection and sorting, and data-driven solutions focused on supply chain optimization, traceability and regulatory compliance.

In the food industry, I’m excited to explore opportunities in regenerative agriculture as the push to rebuild soil organic matter, restore natural water cycles, increase carbon sequestration, enhance biodiversity, and improve agricultural yields intensifies in the US and around the world. Heightened geopolitical instability, protectionism, climatic volatility, and health consciousness in recent years should also favor business models emphasizing smart local production and distribution of organic produce.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I love to travel and, when I can, I enjoy trying my hand at wildlife photography. I’ve had amazing experiences photographing animals across Asia and Africa, and now that I’ve got my Advanced Open Water Diver certification, I’m keen to learn underwater photography too. Earlier this year I got to spend an afternoon filming copper sharks just off the coast of Cape Town, and this December I hope to make it to the Galapagos for my first liveaboard experience.