Cesare Pesci: Impact Is Not a Trade-Off. It Is the Business Model.
Cesare Pesci
Cesare Pesci is a venture capital investor specialising in growth-stage companies at the intersection of advanced technologies and global transformation. Currently an Associate at YXS Capital, he has supported the deployment of over $10.4 million in investments and contributed to raising more than $71 million for founders across the tech and AI landscape.
He brings hands-on experience across investment banking, sustainable finance, trading, and consulting, and thrives in multinational, high-performance environments. Currently completing his MSc in General Management and Analytics at Copenhagen Business School, where he minored in Risk Management. Cesare previously earned a BSc in International Business from CBS, the most competitive undergraduate business program in the Nordics.
Having lived, studied, and worked across Italy, France, the UK, Japan, and Denmark, he brings a highly adaptive and global perspective. Native in French and Italian, and fluent in English and Spanish, Cesare is recognised for his technical rigour, international mindset, and relentless drive.
"The biggest challenges aren't technological. They're structural: capital patient enough to match innovation timelines, regulatory systems fast enough to match deployment urgency, and talent allocation rational enough to recognise that the highest-impact opportunities are also the highest-return opportunities."
Cesare, tell us about how your work intersects with the impact space.
My career has been built around one core conviction: the most compelling investment opportunities sit at the intersection of technological innovation and systemic global challenges. I focus on identifying and backing founders building solutions in AI, robotics, clean energy, fintech, and defence technology, sectors where innovation directly addresses climate change, energy security, supply chain resilience, and democratic access to financial infrastructure.
What draws me to this work isn't altruism, it's pattern recognition. The largest market opportunities of the next decade are in solving humanity's hardest problems. I've spent my career developing the analytical frameworks to find those opportunities early and the operational instincts to help founders scale them.
What is your own definition of impact?
Impact is the creation of durable, scalable solutions to systemic problems that improve human flourishing and planetary health, measured by outcomes that persist beyond any single transaction, company, or investment cycle.
For me, impact has three defining characteristics:
Economically sustainable: solutions must scale without relying on perpetual subsidies.
Measurable and verifiable: outcomes must be quantifiable and externally validated.
Systemic: the best companies don't just succeed individually, they reshape industries, shift capital flows, and influence policy.
In practice, I look for companies where impact and financial performance are mutually reinforcing. A clean energy solution that's cheaper than fossil fuels wins because of economics. A fintech platform serving underserved markets grows faster because it unlocks demand.
Impact isn't a feature added onto a business; it's the core reason the business exists and succeeds.
Cesare, what do you see as the most important issue to address in the next 10 years?
The Critical Issue: Energy Security and the Clean Energy Transition
Having evaluated hundreds of companies across AI, defence, and infrastructure throughout my career, I believe that, specifically, achieving energy security while decarbonising at scale is the most critical challenge of the next decade.
This isn't just a climate issue; it's a geopolitical, economic, and technological imperative that touches every sector I invest in. Energy underpins everything:
National security
Economic growth
AI and compute infrastructure
Industrial development
The AI revolution, for example, is fundamentally constrained by energy availability. Training and deploying next-generation systems requires infrastructure that doesn't yet exist at the necessary scale.
At the same time, emerging markets face a structural dilemma: grow using fossil fuels or slow development to meet climate goals. The only viable solution is making clean energy cheaper, more reliable, and more scalable than fossil alternatives.
This decade is a narrow window. Capital is mobilising, technologies are maturing, and political will exists, but deployment must accelerate. If we fail to scale by 2035, we risk locking in carbon-intensive systems for another generation.
Venture capital plays a critical role in backing companies building grid-scale storage, advanced nuclear, AI-driven energy systems, and carbon-negative industrial processes. These are not charitable bets; they are massive market opportunities where impact and returns align.
What is the greatest challenge you face to scale your impact?
Capital Structure, Regulatory Friction, and Deployment Speed
Working at the intersection of venture capital and impact-driven technologies, clean energy, AI infrastructure, defence tech, I see five systemic challenges that slow the deployment of solutions:
1. Misaligned Capital Structures and Risk Tolerance
The most transformative impact technologies, advanced nuclear, grid-scale energy storage, carbon capture, next-gen materials, require patient, deep-pocketed capital that traditional venture timelines can't support. These are capital-intensive, hardware-heavy businesses with 7–10 year development cycles before meaningful revenue. Yet most VC funds operate on 3–5 year deployment windows with LP expectations for quick markups.
The result: promising technologies get starved in the valley of death between R&D grants and commercial scale. We need more hybrid capital structures, venture combined with project finance and government co-investment, and longer fund tenures. But institutional LPs are often structurally constrained from committing to 15-year funds, even when the impact and financial opportunity justify it.
2. Regulatory Lag and Permitting Bottlenecks
In clean energy and infrastructure, regulatory approval timelines kill momentum. A breakthrough battery technology or small modular reactor design can take 5–10 years to navigate permitting, environmental reviews, and grid interconnection queues, even when the technology is proven and economically superior to incumbents.
From my experience: companies building next-gen energy storage or advanced nuclear face fragmented state-by-state regulations, outdated federal frameworks designed for 1970s reactor designs, and NIMBY opposition that delays projects indefinitely. By the time approvals come through, capital has moved on, teams have disbanded, or the competitive window has closed.
We need fast-track regulatory pathways for climate-critical technologies, streamlined permitting for proven innovations, and federal preemption of obstructionist local regulations, but political will is inconsistent.
3. The "Impact Premium" Perception and Talent Allocation
There's a persistent myth in venture that impact equals concessionary returns. This drives top-tier capital and talent toward pure software plays rather than hard-tech impact opportunities, even when the latter offer comparable or superior returns.
From my diligence work: I see brilliant engineers and operators choosing to build another B2B SaaS tool over joining a fusion energy startup or grid optimisation company, because the perceived career risk is higher, equity comp is less liquid, and exit paths are less understood. The best impact companies struggle to recruit against FAANG compensation and late-stage unicorn equity packages.
4. Deployment Bottlenecks: Manufacturing and Supply Chain Constraints
Even when technologies work and capital is available, scaling production is brutally hard. Clean energy hardware, advanced materials, and defence tech require specialised manufacturing, rare earth materials, and supply chains that don't exist at commercial scale in Western markets.
Battery technology breakthroughs are meaningless if you can't source lithium, cobalt, and rare earths without Chinese supply chain dependencies. Building domestic manufacturing takes years and billions in capex, capital that venture alone can't provide without government co-investment. The gap requires industrial policy coordination between venture capital, strategic corporates, and government to de-risk manufacturing scale-up.
5. Measurement and Standardisation Challenges
Impact measurement remains inconsistent and self-reported. LPs increasingly demand rigorous ESG and impact metrics, but there's no standardised framework across climate tech, fintech inclusion, or dual-use defence technologies. This creates diligence friction and scepticism.
What's needed: industry-wide adoption of credible third-party impact verification—carbon accounting, financial inclusion metrics, supply chain transparency—that's as rigorous as financial audits. Until impact is as measurable and comparable as IRR, institutional capital will remain cautious.
Bottom Line
The biggest challenges aren't technological—they're structural: capital patient enough to match innovation timelines, regulatory systems fast enough to match deployment urgency, and talent allocation rational enough to recognise that the highest-impact opportunities are also the highest-return opportunities. Solving these requires coordination across venture, government, and industry. That's where I focus my energy, backing founders who navigate these constraints and building the institutional infrastructure to accelerate solutions at scale.
"Impact isn't a nice-to-have feature bolted onto a business model. It's the core reason the business exists and why it will succeed."
Cesare, what is your long-term vision and how do you measure & quantify your impact?
Over the next decade, I see my work contributing to a fundamental shift: enabling democratic societies to achieve technological sovereignty, energy independence, and broad-based economic resilience through venture-backed innovation.
Concretely, this means backing the companies that power the next industrial revolution, AI infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, clean energy systems, and secure digital infrastructure, so that Western democracies maintain technological leadership rather than ceding it to authoritarian regimes or incumbent monopolies. It also means democratising access to transformative technologies, ensuring that AI capabilities, clean energy, financial services, and automation tools aren't luxuries for Fortune 500 companies but accessible to SMBs, emerging markets, and underserved communities. Impact at scale requires mass adoption, not niche solutions.
Long-term, I want to look back and see portfolio companies that collectively power millions of homes with clean energy, eliminate gigatons of CO₂, and secure critical infrastructure for billions of people. I want to see an institutional LP ecosystem that treats impact rigour as seriously as financial due diligence—where ESG isn't a checkbox but a competitive advantage. And I want to see a generation of founders who build transformative companies because mission and margin align, not despite it.
How I Measure Impact
Impact measurement in venture is notoriously difficult, too often, it's marketing narratives without rigorous metrics. I approach impact measurement the same way I approach financial diligence: data-driven, third-party validated, and benchmarked against credible standards.
The first test is whether impact is economically sustainable. Technologies that require perpetual subsidies or concessionary capital don't scale. I track portfolio company growth metrics, ARR growth, customer acquisition, and margin expansion, because companies solving real problems grow faster due to structural rather than discretionary demand. If it's not profitable at scale, it's not impact, it's charity.
For AI and automation, I measure productivity gains through labour hours saved, cost reductions, and efficiency improvements validated by customer case studies, as well as accessibility by tracking the number of SMBs or emerging market users gaining access to AI tools previously available only to enterprises.
In fintech and financial inclusion, I quantify underserved users reached—the number of individuals and SMBs gaining access to banking, lending, or payment infrastructure, disaggregated by geography and income, and capital mobilised for previously unbanked or underbanked populations.
For defence and dual-use tech, I track supply chain resilience by measuring the value of critical supply chains onshored or de-risked from adversarial dependencies, and national security outcomes through government and defence contracts awarded, critical infrastructure protected, or vulnerabilities mitigated.
I don't rely on self-reported impact metrics. Instead, I use carbon accounting standards through tools like Plan A, Watershed, or Normative for independent emissions tracking; ESG ratings such as B Corp certification, SASB standards, or GIIN IRIS+ metrics where applicable; and government or regulatory validation like IRA tax credit eligibility, DOE/DOD contracts, or EPA certifications as objective proof of impact.
Beyond individual company metrics, I track ecosystem-level shifts: policy influence, market creation, talent mobilisation, engineers, operators, and capital redirected toward impact themes because portfolio companies prove the model works.
Impact measurement is iterative. I build feedback loops through quarterly portfolio reviews that update impact KPIs alongside financial metrics, post-exit analysis to assess whether realised impact matched projected impact, and LP feedback incorporated into reporting standards.
If venture capital is going to solve humanity's hardest problems, impact must be as rigorous, transparent, and comparable as financial performance. My vision is to help institutionalise this standard, so that in ten years, every VC fund reports carbon metrics, financial inclusion outcomes, and supply chain resilience with the same discipline they report IRR and TVPI.
What are some misconceptions you’ve noticed regarding what “impact” is all about?
The biggest misconception is that impact requires a trade-off with returns.
In reality, the strongest opportunities sit at the intersection of:
Large, urgent problems
Scalable solutions
Strong economic incentives
There's also a tendency to confuse impact with intention rather than outcomes. What matters is not what a company claims, but what it measurably achieves. Many underestimate how systemic impact works. The highest-impact companies don't just succeed—they shift industries, influence policy, and redefine market standards.
How Impact Manifests in My Work
Portfolio Focus on Climate and Energy Transition. A significant portion of my investment pipeline targets clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate tech companies. These investments aren't just financially compelling; they're essential to decarbonisation, grid modernisation, and energy independence. I evaluate companies developing next-generation battery technology, renewable energy infrastructure, and carbon capture solutions, ensuring capital flows toward technologies that accelerate the global energy transition while delivering institutional returns.
Democratising Access Through Fintech and AI. My fintech and AI investments focus on expanding financial inclusion and operational efficiency for underserved markets. I back companies that democratise banking for startups and SMBs, and AI companies building tools that reduce cost barriers to automation, data analysis, and decision-making for businesses globally. Impact here means enabling economic participation and productivity at scale.
Dual-Use Technologies for Security and Resilience. Through my defence and dual-use tech mandate, I work with companies building technologies that enhance national security, supply chain resilience, and critical infrastructure protection. These investments support democratic societies' ability to protect their citizens, secure supply chains against geopolitical shocks, and maintain technological sovereignty, outcomes with profound societal impact beyond financial returns.
I measure impact not as a trade-off against returns but as a driver of long-term value creation. The most transformative technologies solve humanity's hardest problems while generating exceptional financial outcomes, and that alignment is what I find most compelling about venture capital.
“That's the level of impact I focus on, where mission and margin are fully aligned.”
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