Catalyze
The platform for capital entrepreneurs and changing who allocates capital, and where it flows.
Catalyze is the platform for capital entrepreneurs, the fund managers working to move capital toward businesses the mainstream overlooks. It gives those managers the capital and support they need to build enduring firms, and it helps allocators find and back exceptional, differentiated managers. Catalyze was birthed out of Blueprint and today Access Ventures serves as its fiscal sponsor and a strategic partner, providing the charitable home, infrastructure, and partnership that lets the Catalyze team focus on its mission.
Why we partner with them
Most of our portfolio changes what gets funded. Catalyze changes something further upstream: who gets to decide. In today's financial system, a great many entrepreneurs — especially those from underrepresented backgrounds — are systematically overlooked, because the people and institutions holding the capital apply narrow criteria and familiar networks. That lack of diversity runs all the way up the funding hierarchy, from founders to fund managers to allocators.
Catalyze works on both levers at once, who is making investment decisions and what strategies they use. That's a direct expression of our own conviction that flourishing requires both access and agency: it isn't enough to fund overlooked businesses; we have to widen the circle of people empowered to allocate capital in the first place. Backing Catalyze is how we invest in the plumbing of a more equitable capital system.
What Catalyze does
Catalyze supports capital entrepreneurs through capacity building, community, and capital:
Fund Fellowship — an annual, six-month flagship program supporting first-time, underrepresented, and innovative fund managers with access to capital, resources, and networks.
GP Runway Fund — flexible working-capital loans that give emerging general partners strategic growth capital while raising their first through third funds.
For Allocators — investment consulting and fund offerings that connect allocators to exceptional, hard-to-find managers.
Its impact shows up in the managers it has helped build — firms like Streetlife Ventures, Dark Pool Capital, and Fiat Ventures have credited Catalyze's hands-on support as a genuine difference-maker and the program is backed by a range of leading philanthropic and institutional funders.
Why it matters to us
As fiscal sponsor, we don't just cheer Catalyze on, we carry part of the institutional weight, so more of its energy can go to the work. And the work matters deeply to us: a financial system reflects the imagination of the people who steward it. By helping more capable, diverse, mission-minded managers into that role, Catalyze is quietly reshaping who the economy is built to serve. That's flourishing pursued at the level of the system itself.
Our role: Partner and fiscal sponsor
Type: Nonprofit initiative supporting emerging, underrepresented, and innovative fund managers
Focus: Improving the flow of capital to overlooked businesses by backing the people who allocate it
