We provide philanthropic capital ourselves and offer real impact capital that works regeneratively rather than extractively.
Karma Capital was founded in 2018 as an investment holding company, from which Sebastian Klein reinvested the profits from his entrepreneurial work into further startups and other companies.
When Blinkist was sold in 2023, a company that Sebastian co-founded in 2012, he decided to give away 90% of his entire personal wealth and dedicate it to charitable purposes. This capital is now the foundation of the non-profit Karma Capital.
The basis of our work is always maximizing effectiveness: How can we use money in a way that achieves maximum effectiveness? To ensure this, we formulate clear impact theses for everything we do: on the one hand for our investments, but also for our charitable work and our donations.
We start with two areas of focus:
First, we provide capital to companies in steward-ownership. We believe that these companies can make an important contribution to overcoming the inequality crisis and the economic division of society.
Second, we support public interest media companies because we believe that our democratic society needs a strong media landscape. Therefore, we specifically invest in these companies and are also a co-founder of the Media Forward Fund, which supports media companies with philanthropic capital.
Further areas of focus will follow. To this end, we are looking for experts who want to use our infrastructure to explore additional areas that need capital with karma.
The world is full of problems. At the same time, there has never been so much private wealth. However, most of it is invested in areas that do not help society, but rather harm it.
We have therefore set ourselves the goal of building the field of systemic investing, which aims to solve this problem: money should be used as a resource to solve big problems and change systems.
This way, money can become a force that has a positive impact on societies.
Our Vision
Economics and capital markets do not follow natural laws, but are systems created by people – and therefore we can change them at any time.
Instead of elevating profit maximization as an end in itself, we want an economy that serves people and respects planetary boundaries. To achieve this, a new capital market 2.0 is needed, which does not act extractively but regeneratively on the systems that embed it.
This capital market ensures that money flows where it generates the greatest systemic benefit.
This is a huge task that no one can handle alone. Therefore, we want to be part of a network of courageous actors who are developing the field of systemic investing.
The core of our work looks like this: we invest in fields where capital can bring about systemic change. We invest ourselves there and build funds that others can participate in.
In the first step, we focus on two fields that we attribute a significant systemic impact: companies in ownership responsibility and common-good-oriented media companies.
Our Drive
We are convinced that another way of doing business and investing is possible. We want to lead by example and unite with all who pursue similar paths.