Nino Tronchetti Provera, founder and managing partner of environment-focused investment firm Ambienta, gives his reflections on 2025 and looks ahead to the next 12 months.

Looking back at 2025, what was your top priority for the year – and how do you assess your success against it?

In 2025, our top priority was having a laser focus on performance, delivering top quartile returns and continuing to demonstrate that sustainability is a genuine driver of value. We also invested heavily in deepening our thematic research to support our portfolio companies navigating a challenging macroeconomic backdrop.

In addition, it was a year when we expanded our reach across Europe, growing our team with 30 new hires, completing deals in Spain and Sweden, and opening our first Nordics office in Stockholm. I’m very pleased with our progress. We raised €1.3 billion across our three strategies: private equity, private credit and public markets, bringing us towards €5 billion in AUM. We deployed over €600 million in capital and executed more than 20 transactions, while distributing over €800 million back to investors, demonstrating both growth and disciplined performance.

We delivered solid operational improvements across the portfolio, maintained discipline on underwriting and continued to attract high-quality talent. Our exit from digital transaction firm Namirial in March also marked a significant milestone and demonstrated the soundness and rigour of our investment thesis. We proved, yet again, that even in the toughest of market conditions, a focus on environmental sustainability offers durable, non-cyclical opportunities for success.

How would you characterise the fundraising environment in 2025, and how do you expect this to change 2026?

Fundraising in 2025 was challenging for our industry. LPs were highly selective, pacing was slower and allocations were constrained by denominator effects and long decision cycles.

That said, managers with differentiated strategies and real long-term track records, particularly those offering focused and authentic exposure to structural themes like environmental sustainability, continued to find support. That played to Ambienta’s strengths. In 2026, the bar will remain high: clarity and authenticity of strategy, demonstrable and material impact and disciplined deployment will matter more than ever. Firms with real sector expertise and the ability to execute globally while sourcing locally will outperform in a more rational, quality-driven market.

Which investment themes or strategies do you believe will gain momentum in 2026? 

Capital will continue to flow to quality managers in Europe, especially when it comes to sustainable investing. We know from our conversations in the market and with our LPs that interest remains high for GPs who have differentiated strategies with demonstrable success.

There are three themes in particular that we believe may accelerate meaningfully in 2026:

1. Water sector, including filtration, treatment, monitoring, and efficiency solutions that address rising scarcity, quality regulation and industrial demand for reliable water systems.

2. Industrial decarbonisation and electrification, driven by cost competitiveness.

3. Circular economy solutions, particularly technologies and business models that reduce material intensity or extend asset lifespans.

Across all of these, we continue to focus on profitable, proven solutions rather than speculative technologies.

One year into the new US administration, have you noted any particular effects on the markets in which you operate?

We identify sustainable trends that serve the long term and then we invest with conviction, with the strong belief that no particular political environment should negatively impact our investment thesis. Despite shifting political currents, the fundamentals behind our business remain unchanged and we continue to see what we always have: sustainability drives value.

Businesses that reduce resource intensity, waste and environmental risk gain resilience and competitive advantage. In practice, we have seen some generalist mangers who engaged in sustainable investing in a superficial and inauthentic way over recent years withdrawing from this space. But we also see increasing investor interest as capital moves toward quality and authenticity such as the opportunities presented by our investment objectives.

What are LPs asking for in the current market? Have their expectations of sustainability-themed managers changed over the past year?

What’s become clear since I first founded the firm in 2007 is that LPs are more educated and savvier when it comes to sustainable investing. For me it’s a really welcomed development. In the current market, LPs are asking for greater clarity, more evidence and less noise. They want transparency in how sustainability is integrated into investment decisions, how value is created and how outcomes are measured. It’s no longer sufficient to have a thematic label or high-level commitments. LPs want to see direct links between environmental drivers and top quartile financial performance.

For Ambienta, this is a clear sign that we are still on the right path. Our entire philosophy is based on the rigour of scientific data to demonstrate this connection between sustainability and performance for now nearly two decades. This can often be done using very straightforward metrics that have been around for years: m3 to measure water saved, MWh to measure energy saved, etc. And financial returns don’t work in parallel to this positive environmental impact; they are the result of it.

We often describe our financial performance as top quartile and it is critical to distinguish paper gains (NAV) from cash returned to LPs (DPI), which is what we focus on. While new solutions may show results on paper, true value is measured by actual distributions, not just potential.

Are there themes, sectors, or strategies you now see as crowded or over-capitalised going into 2026? How does that affect your decision-making?

Some emerging climate technologies are attracting significant speculative capital despite limited commercial traction, such as early-stage hydrogen production concepts, next-generation battery chemistries, carbon removal platforms. In several of these segments, valuations have run ahead of current fundamentals, with business models still years away from profitability or industrial scalability.

For us, this means we always avoid hype-driven areas that depend on untested science or long-dated subsidies. Instead, we remain focused on proven, ready-to-scale industrial solutions where there are real customers, solid economics and measurable environmental benefits.

If anything, the crowding of speculative capital into frontier technologies sharpens our competitive advantage. As generalist investors chase headlines, we stay committed to the parts of the sustainability landscape where Ambienta has years of experience, operational insight and scientific depth, allowing us to identify value long before it becomes crowded, and long after hype cycles fade.

Has the investment industry made meaningful progress in impact measurement and management in 2025? What do you expect to see on this front over the next year?

Standardisation has somewhat improved, but more importantly there is a clearer distinction between genuine impact integration and box-ticking. More managers now understand that impact measurement must be embedded into the investment process, not appended to it. It’s worth saying that this is how we’ve operated since we were founded, and why the first person I hired was an engineer who could introduce a scientific mindset into our approach.

In 2026, I expect further convergence on metrics and methodologies, and greater emphasis on outcomes over outputs. Investors will increasingly expect quantitative demonstrations of how material environmental value and financial value reinforce each other. This is the message Ambienta has been pushing for two decades, and I welcome the momentum.

What is top of your priority list going into 2026?

My priority is execution. Deploying capital with discipline, supporting our companies in scaling proven environmental solutions, and continuing to deliver top-tier performance. One area where this is of particular focus is our small cap strategy, which we launched in 2025, where we will look to deploy capital to support European SMEs.

I also want to continue to deliver returns to LPs, paying back the trust that they’ve placed in us across our strategies over the years. More broadly, I’m excited by our continued reach across Europe, having entered the Spanish market and opened our first Nordics office over the past year.