Independent charity Shell Foundation and the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) have provided cornerstone catalytic capital for the Lendable Transportation and Energy Fund (LTEF).
Funded via the Transforming Energy Access (TEA) platform and the Catalysing Agriculture by Scaling Energy Ecosystems (CASEE) programme, the investment forms the fund’s primary first-loss tranche, designed to crowd in private institutional debt and development finance.
LTEF achieved a first close of $135 million in December 2025, with a target final close of $200 million by mid-2027. Co-investors anchoring senior and Class A tranches include the International Finance Corporation (IFC), FMO, SIFEM, and several family offices.
Lendable utilizes its proprietary Maestro data platform to evaluate asset-backed credit risks and monitor impact metrics across frontier markets.
Key operational allocations and initial transactions include:
- Subordinated risk architecture: Shell Foundation’s first-loss capital absorption enables senior debt and equity investors to achieve market-rate, risk-adjusted returns across emerging market asset classes.
- Electric mobility scale-up: Deploying capital to African asset finance provider Watu to scale lease-to-own electric motorbikes to approximately 1,000 units per month across East Africa.
- Rural solar financing: Allocating a $5 million facility to Indian non-banking financial company Metafin to finance solar photovoltaic installations for 1,300 rural micro, small, and medium enterprises across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
- Inclusion metrics: Metafin’s deployment targets 46 per cent first-time credit recipients and 49 per cent female co-applicants, while avoiding an estimated 11,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions.
Nick Jones, Head of Financial Solutions at Shell Foundation, stated that catalytic first-loss investments are vital to unlocking commercial capital flows for early-stage clean technology deployment across developing economies.
Daniel Goldfarb, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Lendable, added that blended finance structures bridge the persistent funding gap between institutional capital markets and high-impact decarbonisation projects in Africa and Asia.
