Olivia Wassenaar, Apollo

Apollo Global Management has launched a closed-end private equity climate fund in pursuit of its $50 billion climate investing target, New Private Markets has learned. The fund, Clean Transition II, is the first dedicated private equity climate vehicle Apollo has brought to market. It follows Clean Transition I, a debt and hybrid evergreen fund that launched last year with $4 billion in investable capital.

Both funds are part of Apollo’s multi-strategy climate platform unveiled in 2022, which involves a target to deploy $50 billion towards climate solutions in the subsequent 5 years and the recognition of an “opportunity to deploy more than $100 billion 2030”. The strategy is led by Olivia Wassenaar, who joined the firm in 2018 to co-lead Apollo’s private equity natural resources strategy. It is overseen by chief sustainability officer Dave Stangis, while partner Joseph Moroney, head of sustainable finance, also supports the strategy, Apollo said in 2022.

Apollo declined to comment when contacted by New Private Markets.

A private equity vehicle had been mooted from the launch of the climate platform, and Apollo co-president Scott Kleinman said last summer that the firm intended to bring such a fund to market in Q3 2023. The firm hired CPP veteran Waleed Elgohary, who had been a managing director in the Canadian pension’s sustainable energies group, as a partner for its climate equity team in September.

But private equity is a small part of the climate platform, which will largely involve debt and hybrid strategies. “We will raise bespoke equity drawdown funds from time to time, but those will be in my opinion smaller than the opportunity that we see,” chief executive Marc Rowan said in August. “The scale of money required [for the transition] is like nothing else we’ve ever seen,” Rowan continued. “What kind of money is that? Most of what we see is debt and hybrid. Our goal is to build a leading financier of energy transition and sustainability worldwide by having put together a perpetual evergreen fund focused on doing that.”

Apollo’s co-presidents James Zelter and Scott Kleinman and chief financial officer Martin Kelly (also co-COO) are named as executive officers of Clean Transition Fund II in a regulatory filing seen by New Private Markets.