Fellowship Spotlight: Malaika Ventures
When Kerry Bowie, co-founder of Malaika Ventures, reflects on the source of his passion for climate justice, he brings up how climate injustices impacted his experience in his hometown of Anniston, Alabama. Early in his time at MIT — where he ended up in part due to the access that affirmative action created — he read a book for an environmental policy class that talked about toxic waste being sent to Alabama for dumping.
This new learning opened his eyes to the ways racism and classism informed decisions that impact the environment, and how those racist and classist decisions impacted the place he calls home. He makes important connections between environmental factors and the general safety and well-being of the population, pointing to disheartening health and crime statistics in Alabama. “I think all this stuff matters,” he says, and he’s dedicated his career to figuring some of it out.
Closing a Gap Between Founders and Capital
After launching and running a consulting company and an accelerator program, Bowie realized that, “We can give consulting, technical assistance, and connections, but if people don’t have money, it doesn’t work.” And he realized that people were often unable to access money. “I’d just keep hearing stories of founders not getting checks written,” he reflects, “so I figured I should be writing checks.”
With his partners Juliana Garaizar and Brahm Rhodes, Bowie founded Malaika Ventures to fill the gap between founders with transformative innovations and the capital they need to actualize their solutions. “You can’t wait for people to create the funds you want to see,” says Garaizar. “You need to take matters into your own hands.”
Translated into English, the Swahili word “malaika” means angel. “It’s a nod to the fact that we try to invest very early,” Rhodes explains. With Kijani Fund 1, Malaika Ventures plans to invest $80M across 40 to 50 climate tech companies throughout the life cycle of the fund, writing pre-seed and seed stage checks between $500k and $2M. Kijani is Swahili for green, underscoring the fund’s goal to provide catalytic capital for a more equitable and just transition to a greener economy.
A Broad and Holistic Understanding of Climate Justice
“We look at climate as cutting across all sectors of the economy,” Rhodes shares, spelling out the six sector categories the firm organizes its work into:
Build – decarbonizing the built environment
Move – clean transportation for people and things
Make – clean manufacturing, circular economy, waste management, recycling, etc.
Power – energy generation, distribution, and physical and financial access
Grow – food tech, farm tech, agriculture, etc.
Sustain – leveraging tech and data to build more sustainable and resilient systems and solutions
“We think about climate justice very broadly,” Rhodes emphasizes. “We want to make sure there are clear climate impact indicators, and we want the greener economy to be a lot more equitable than the current one.”
Focusing on Diversity and Climate Justice
In the fall of 2020, Bowie founded Browning the Green Space, a coalition committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in clean energy. The group found a home for their meetings at Greentown Labs in Somerville, MA, which Garaizar was connected to as she was working to launch the organization’s Houston incubator. Bowie and Garaizar crossed paths at Greentown and then again when they joined Include Ventures General Partner, Taj Ahmad Eldridge, on a panel hosted by the Angel Capital Association, where Garaizar is also on the board.
Garaizar brings a wealth of experience as a VC and angel investor, having run angel groups in Europe and Houston and funds such as the Texas Medical Center Venture Fund and Portfolia’s Rising Tide, Consumer and Rising America 1 and 2. As part of her extensive work to diversify the climate and VC space, she helped launch ACCEL, an accelerator for diverse founders in the climate space with Bowie, where, in Garaizar’s words, they’re, “really pushing to get companies investor-ready.”
But it was clear that they needed to take a strategic next step in order to effect change. “No matter how investor-ready they can be through our program,” Garaizar points out, “they still need to get the money, and there’s not enough funds out there focusing on Black and Brown founders.” She explains that she got to a point in her career where she was happy to be working on her two passions — diversity and climate justice — but wanted to do so in a more integrated manner. “Malaika presented the opportunity to bring them both together,” she says.
Launching the Fund
So they set out to launch Malaika Ventures. “We don’t have time to wait,” Bowie urges. “We’re in a climate crisis. Things are literally on fire. Maybe we show the way by going out and doing it.”
Bowie is the nexus for the team, knowing Garaizar from Greentown and Rhodes as a coach for Bowie's Majira Project, a nonprofit accelerator program, where Rhodes has been coaching for three years. During this time, Rhodes worked on launching a solo fund focused on Responsible AI while Bowie contemplated launching a climate fund. They talked about the climate fund over a few months, and eventually, Bowie asked Rhodes to help him launch Malaika alongside a third partner and an associate.
Once they started working on their new climate fund, Rhodes quickly folded his solo fund efforts into Malaika full-time. Having already made substantial progress getting clear on the operational and legal details of running a fund, Rhodes figured it made sense to bring that know-how to Malaika. “My Responsible AI fund had a climate sustainability vertical,” he shares, “which easily morphed into the climate justice thesis. We're all coming at it from our own experiences and our shared commitment to DEIJ. There's lots of good alignment." One of the first tasks they got to work on was their successful application for VC Include’s Climate Justice Initiative.
When their third partner stepped away for personal reasons, Bowie and Rhodes were in the position to find someone to join their team. Given their priorities around gender and ethnic diversity among those writing checks, finding an ethnically diverse woman for the open seat was a must. They reached out to their top choice, Juliana Garaizar, who had always been on their radar. She accepted their invitation and joined right away, completing the Malaika Ventures founding partners team, and bringing along her deep experience and demonstrated commitment to DEIJ.
In July of this year, the trio of founders brought on a fourth partner, Julianne Zimmerman, who Bowie knew from the MIT Venture Mentoring Society (VMS) and work they did together years earlier. Zimmerman brings the most direct experience in venture to the team, having held many qualifying roles, including managing director at Reinventure Capital, a firm investing exclusively in companies led and controlled by diverse founders and/or female founders of all identities.
Operator-Investors
“We lean into our experience and backgrounds,” Rhodes shares. Garaizar elevates that the team’s touch on many different phases and spaces of the startup and VC ecosystem, their due diligence process is long and thorough. “We’ve seen some companies grow from idea to huge success over several years,” she says. “We know the entrepreneurs really well, and we know how to make them grow once they’re a part of our portfolio.”
Rhodes adds another benefit of this approach. “It keeps us from falling into the typical VC trap,” he offers, “of chasing the hot deals, and allows us to remain disciplined in how we pick and choose companies.”
“We think of ourselves as operators first,” Bowie adds, given that Garaizar only recently delegated someone to take over running the Greentown Houston incubator; Zimmerman is currently managing director at DEIJ-focused Adasina Social Capital; Bowie still currently runs Browning the Greenspace; and Rhodes founded two startups.
Bowie’s experience as Associate Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection lends policy and regulatory insights that further fortify the team’s capacity. And with Bowie holding a masters degree in environmental engineering; Zimmerman being an aerospace engineer at MIT; and Rhodes holding mechanical (Ph.D.), aerospace (MS), and electrical (BS) degrees, they have an edge when it comes to the technical components of the work as well. “They’re not astronauts,” Bowie jokes, “but we literally have two rocket scientists on our team. We don’t get frazzled by the tech.”
Rhodes holds the throughline, working full-time on Malaika, as the other three partners find ways to leverage the relationships they nurture in their other roles in service of the fund’s success. “Kerry’s relationship with Browning the Greenspace and Juliana’s relationship with Greentown provide us a good vehicle to both find and attract founders and support them,” Rhodes says. “And with our strong coaching and mentoring background, we know how to work with founders, build rapport, and help them answer their questions without providing them the answers.”
Diverse Life Experiences
In addition to their impressively far-reaching career experiences and diverse skill sets, the Malaika team also possesses a great deal of geographic and cultural diversity. Garaizar, who hails from Spain and married a man from Mexico, brings a woman’s perspective, along with Zimmerman, who balanced the firm’s gender demographics when she joined more recently.
Rhodes grew up in upstate New York, where he was able to roam around the great outdoors as a child and developed a strong affinity for being kind to the planet. Bowie, on the other hand, was born and raised in Annison, Alabama, situated right between Atlanta and Birmingham. To bring the context to life, Bowie offers, “In the movie, Hidden Figures, when they turn over the bus, that was my hometown. That tells a lot about a young Black boy growing up in the South,” he adds.
This diversity is important and impactful beyond bragging rights; it also informs the ways that the team approaches their work and the types of solutions they invest in. As Rhodes points out, “One of the things that just kept leaping out at me is the bias in data science. These data science and AI solutions that we’re putting out there are just learning the biases that are already in society. Deploying these solutions,” he goes on, “will either exacerbate disparities or help reduce them, but the reduction doesn’t happen unless you’re deliberate about it.”
And while Rhodes’ parents were raising a child in a world that was better than the one they came up in, Rhodes himself feels he’s raising his daughters in a world that’s more unhealthy and unsafe than the one he inherited. “If I can do something about it, I should. And I can have a bigger impact helping many companies build and grow and solve problems than I can just running one company.”
Participating in the VC Include Fellowship
While Bowie, Garaizar, and Rhodes were first-time fellowship participants, they’re not new to VC Include. We were excited to award $100K to Malaika Ventures last year as part of our Climate Justice Initiative, which gave us the chance to begin to get to know the firm and the people behind it. Their participation in the Fellowship for Impact Fund I Managers brought them closer into the VC Include community.
“With programs like this, oftentimes the most value comes from the connections you make with other participants,” Rhodes offers. And while the Malaika team clearly values the content they’ve been exposed to through the fellowship curriculum and has been able to make use of teachings of the experts we’ve brought in, they can’t say enough about the power of being a part of the VC Include community. “We’re all doing different things; we’re all leaning in in different ways; but we’re all also working toward similar goals of creating impact,” Rhodes says, lifting up the ways that diversity within an intentional network can serve to further everyone’s individual goals as well as the larger shared goal.
Bowie brings to life the power of the network by sharing an anecdote. “One of my classmates in Miami has a healthcare company looking at curing diabetes, so I’m going to connect him to Roberto Rodriguez of Sequential Ventures,” who’s investing in solutions to improve healthcare systems. “If we didn’t have this cohort,” Bowie adds, “I wouldn’t be able to make that connection.”
We look forward to continuing to spotlight and support Malaika Ventures as they deploy capital to infuse the climate movement with resources and justice alike.
