I was recently joined by Craig Sanders, CEO & Co-Founder of Helpen, for another episode of “The Impact” on FinTech TV. We discussed how Helpen is using an AI assistant to help investors and developers reduce risk, unlock investment and capture predictive insights. Watch our interview and read a partial transcript below.

Jeff Gitterman: Hi, this is Jeff Gitterman at the Impact on FinTech TV down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  I’m joined this morning by Craig Sanders, CEO & Co-Founder of Helpen. Craig, thanks for being on  the show today. 

Craig Sander: Jeff, thank you for having me. 

Gitterman: So on this show, we have a tradition of always asking people — because most people don’t start their careers in impact — what really was the transition moment or the “aha moment” that moved you from more traditional finance over to the impact space? 

Sander: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it’s important to state our mission first, which is to use AI to accelerate  clean energy investing. It will make sense in a second. A lot of this started about 75 years ago. 

My grandfather led community development efforts for what would become USAID in Nepal and India. A very proud pillar in our family’s history and something that was kind of a benevolent undertone  growing up. 

Years later, I found myself as a fixed-income trader at [Susquehanna International Group]. I really gained a  supreme understanding of opaque markets, money flows, psychology behind money. But at the same  time, I was also fundraising for several nonprofits on the side and developed a massive passion for  directing money their way. And after nine years of trading, I decided, hey, it’s time to bet on myself. And I left to build Helpen. And the underlying premise behind the entire thing is really about using technology and creative ways to direct capital into causes or communities that need it most. 

And so the first chapter of Helpen was really around philanthropy and we tried multiple products, all of which failed. But our last effort was actually around using AI to capture and track climate rates. It’s  aligned with an initiative from the World Economic Forum that was trying to really increase public,  private and philanthropic partnerships. And so that was our first foray into this coordinated capital allocation. And so, while we liked that, we realized, hey, it was time to put philanthropy behind us. I was looking more to get back into it on that level of competition of traditional finance, and we decided to pivot into clean energy investing. 

Gitterman: It does seem the trend lately that a lot of impact has moved out of the stages of philanthropy only and into the investing world over the last decade. So a really important trend because we were never going  to solve the global challenges that we have today just from philanthropic efforts, unfortunately. 

So we  need people in the impact space. So I’m glad you jumped over and hopped in. Talk to me about some of  the challenges that exist in the clean energy space in matching up this allocation of money that’s trying  to find an outlet. 

Sander:  Yeah, absolutely. So it’s important first that Helpen is an AI assistant for clean energy investors and developers to help them find deals fast and spot risks that others miss. Now, to set the scene here, this year, we’ve got $2 trillion going into clean energy investment globally. That being said, we’re still short about $18 trillion that we need by 2030 in order to stay online with net zero goals. 

Last year we saw around $300 billion invested into energy transition financing domestically here within EV renewables, as well as power grid. So exciting stuff there. 

However, this year we’re also seeing for the first time, what in 15 years, a drastic increase in demand and power. And so we need to see basically more investment faster. Unfortunately, there are barriers for both investment and development that are  preventing that from actually accelerating. And so several of them are massive amounts of fragmented information out there, right? Information that’s critical for making decisions. 

You have investment teams that are small relative to the amount of capital they’re deploying, so limited bandwidth and high risk, showing up in the forms of a lack of established track records, growing community opposition and now some political headwinds. 

So what we do is we go out, use AI to capture all of this unstructured data, organize it, make sense of it,  and allow investors and developers to search for things that were previously unsearchable. So  something that would take three to four days to figure out, can now take three to four minutes  answering complex questions like “Are there any community solar developers that are gaining momentum in Ohio” or “Is there opposition risk in Lee County, Iowa? And what should I know about it?” Right? Looking at projects and seeing suggestions that, “Hey, you’re interested in that project. Here are several others in similar communities just like it.” So arming these investors and developers with kind of a team of their own researchers.

To catch the full conversation, you can watch my interview with Craig Sanders. 

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