Scaling EM From the Ground Up: Why Underserved Markets Hold the Biggest Upside (#096)

In this second compilation focused on emerging markets, we revisit conversations featuring three investors who are channeling substantial capital into regions where others hesitate to go – and they’re doing it with discipline, innovation, and deep local insight.

Each of these guests brings a different strategy and perspective, but all are working toward the same goal: building sustainable, scalable businesses that meet the needs of underserved communities.

And they’re doing it in ways that challenge the old assumptions: that impact comes at the expense of return, that emerging markets are too volatile to be investable, or that scalable solutions must come from the West.

Here are the featured voices:

Sandeep Farias, Founder and Managing Partner of Elevar Equity

Elevar backs what they call entrepreneurial households – more than 50 million families across emerging markets who’ve moved beyond the bottom of the pyramid. While they’re making economic progress, they still lack access to the products and services that support their ambitions and daily lives.

Sandeep and his team take a bottom-up, equity-focused approach to identify the “core solutions” these families prioritize – like education, healthcare, and agriculture – and invest in entrepreneurs building businesses to serve them.

With five funds deployed across India and Latin America, Elevar stays close to both customers and founders, spending time in the field to understand how people live, what they value, and where capital can make the greatest difference.

Full episode

Rochus Mommartz, the CEO of responsAbility

Rochus leads responsAbility – one of the world’s largest dedicated impact asset managers, with $5 billion under management and more than $15 billion deployed across emerging markets since inception.

His team doesn’t start with products. They start with problems – like the 500 million people in Africa who still lack electricity, or the small businesses across Asia and Latin America that can’t get financing. Then they find the companies solving those problems and shape capital to support their growth.

Rochus draws a clear line between real and perceived risk. Emerging markets aren't short on opportunity – they're just often misunderstood by investors who rely too much on spreadsheets and not enough on what’s actually happening on the ground.

Check out the full interview:

Part 1

Part 2

Sugandhi Matta, Chief Impact Officer at ABC Impact

Sugandhi helped launch ABC Impact with backing from Temasek and Temasek Trust – and helped shape it into the largest Pan-Asian private equity fund dedicated to impact.

From the start, her focus has been on building a strategy rooted in Asia’s realities – not imported from somewhere else. That meant starting with evidence: mapping the region’s most urgent needs, identifying where scalable solutions could take hold, and designing an impact framework from the ground up.

ABC now manages close to $1 billion across sectors like healthcare, financial inclusion, sustainable food, and climate resilience. They back mission-driven founders solving problems they’ve lived – and who have the resilience and discipline to scale.

Full episode

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