Candide closes $71.5 million Afterglow climate justice fund

Candide, a California-based impact investment advisory firm, closed its Afterglow Climate Justice Fund at $71.5 million in commitments, ESG Today reported.

The fund launched in 2023 to finance clean energy and climate resilience projects in historically underinvested U.S. communities.

More than $35 million, roughly half the committed capital, has been deployed across 12 U.S. borrowers in distributed solar, battery storage, clean transportation and climate infrastructure. Candide says the investments have supported hundreds of green jobs and lowered energy costs for communities, though the report does not quantify either figure.

Afterglow provides flexible debt financing across the project lifecycle, including pre-construction, construction and permanent financing, targeting projects that expand access to affordable clean energy and support economic resilience in underserved communities.

The investors include Builders Vision, Ceniarth, ImpactAssets, the Grove Action Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Sobrato Philanthropies, the McKnight Foundation and the Social Finance Impact First Fund—a mix of philanthropic and family capital anchoring impact vehicles.

Aner Ben-Ami, the fund's managing director, told ESG Today that conventional lenders "often apply strict credit boxes or do not have the interest or capacity to co-design solutions for communities that have been left out of the climate transition." He said Afterglow was built to fill that gap, prove the models and make them financeable by a broader universe of lenders.

Among the loans the report details is $3.2 million of debt financing to RE-volv, a nonprofit solar finance organization, to expand zero-down solar financing for community-serving nonprofits. Andreas Karelas, RE-volv's executive director, said Afterglow's capital helped the organization double and triple its project volume over the past three years and attract follow-on investors, and that the collaboration has financed 1.3 MW of clean energy and nearly $18 million in projected lifetime electricity savings for 30 community-serving nonprofits in four states.