During my summer at EQX Biome, I primarily supported due diligence efforts for EQX Biome's ESPA Park investments. EQX Biome is a mission-driven financial firm focused on protecting the world's remaining biodiversity by leveraging financial markets and investors into planetary-scale conservation efforts, which are monetized through carbon and biodiversity credits. Their solutions are focused on funding large-scale, high-stakes conservation efforts around the world, creating a trusted market for carbon and biodiversity credits. My diligence efforts included interviewing and evaluating partner organizations, primarily conservation NGOs, regarding their capacity to promote the decline of deforestation resulting from human threats. I also collected and analyzed data regarding the carbon value, forest cover, deforestation rates, forest loss drivers using public GIS tools like Global Forest Watch. In support of this work, I conducted research to better understand carbon rights paradigms in countries under consideration for park investment to inform our partnership and investment strategy, and interviewed experts to affirm our cash-conservation conversion mechanism. My work to support the development of EQX Biome's first park investment is highly relevant to their mission as their entire business model is centered around identifying and investing in high-value biodiversity hotspots.

The skillsets applied from my MBA program that were most relevant to my internship included those from Strategy and Impact Investing coursework. Knowledge gained from my courses in Foundations of Valuation and Capital Markets were also helpful. Regarding the latter, the CEO has been leading the workstream of fundraising for investment in parks, while I made progress on the park/partner diligence workstream. My learning from Capital Markets coursework and Foundations of Valuation, helped me to contextualize the company's fundraising options, given their stage of development, money raised to date, and developments in voluntary carbon markets. Impact Investing coursework also helped me to articulate the business model to different parties as making the most of the market being unable to value biodiversity. Coursework in Strategy paired with my own experience in the NGO sector permitted me to contextualize findings from due diligence discovery of potential parks and partners in a for-profit, private sector context, and to make evaluations and recommendations based on the outlook for being able to stop deforestation.

The challenges that I faced in my role were highly correlated to the challenges of being an impact-oriented for-profit startup. EQX Biome's business model is yet unproven by any other prior companies. This is reflected in fundraising efforts, with the organization necessarily adopting a flexible approach to different financing options to fund park investments. While I was not directly involved in fundraising efforts, it was relevant to my work as it is challenging to balance the due diligence process for parks and partners when it is concurrent with fundraising efforts. NGO's time is typically highly programmed and accounted for by existing funding, which leads to limitations in their ability or willingness to connect when we do not immediately have funds to offer. It was also challenging to be able to make judgments with a high amount of certainty regarding the carbon rights paradigm in a given country. In many of the relevant nations, laws and regulations on this matter are still in development, such that the operating environment in question is constantly evolving.

My summer spent with EQX Biome has been an incredible real-world look into the opportunities and challenges of working for a thematic investing organization. This summer made me realize that even though I have come to business school focused on learning the skills I will need as an investor, I have realized that my studies have added to my already existing skills as a fundraiser, serving to increase my interest in fundraising for thematic impact investments. This experience also reaffirmed for me the personal importance of being able to find variety in my work, being able to move forward multiple work streams over a short-to-medium period of time, as it is highly motivating to me. Another significant motivating factor for attending business school was the conviction that I wanted to play a role in motivating capital to address the climate crisis. My summer spent with EQX Biome has reaffirmed and further strengthened that priority as I consider the rest of my MBA education and my post-MBA career.