Haas’s Sustainable and Impact Finance (SAIF) initiative hosted its seventh-annual Haas Impact Fund pitch day on May 1, 2026. This year’s Haas Impact Fund MBA course returned to the stage in Spieker Forum to pitch early-stage investment opportunities in impactful sectors to an audience of VCs and other industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and fellow students.

This Haas Impact Fund is taught by professors Adair Morse and Jeep Kline. Throughout the semester, students sourced and performed diligence on startups that demonstrated promising financial and impact return potential.

The students were split into teams tasked with finding companies within the following impact themes: EdTech & WorkTech; Fintech & Smart Enterprise Services; FrontierTech & Industrial Tech;  Health & BioTech; Built Environment; Infrastructure & Industrial Decarbonization; Energy, Transport & Logistics;  Consumer Tech; and Nutrition, AgTech & Food.

At the pitch day, finalist teams presented opportunities for the HIF to invest out of its endowment in one of the finalist companies, including:

Students in the HIF class also worked with:

Professional VCs and impact investors judged the pitch competition. This year’s winner, Inevitable, creates hardware and software that optimize agricultural operations for profitability, predictability, and equity across the  agriculture industry’s farmers, laborers, and customers. The company also sells native crop seedlings.

Dean Jennifer Chatman presented the winning team with a check to announce Haas’s investment into Inevitable. HIF investments offer prospects for future returns to benefit Haas and SAIF education in the future and are the enduring legacy of the 2026 HIF students.

“This class was such an awesome experience. We got the chance to act as real VCs and meet so many inspiring entrepreneurs we never would have crossed paths with otherwise.

With the support of the elite dynamic duo Jeep and Adair, our fabulous GSI Julianna, our great mentor King, and my teammates, I felt incredibly empowered and equipped to get out there and think like a real VC. Beyond the learning itself, the class created such an exciting and inspiring environment to think bigger about startups, investing, and the kind of impact we want to have after Haas,” says Hannah Longwill, a member of the winning team which pitched Inevitable.

Longwill’s teammate, Holden Price, adds: “Haas Impact Fund was one of the most meaningful experiences of my time in business school. Our team had the chance to move through the full investment process, from sourcing to diligence to making a real investment decision. We learned so much from our professors, our mentor King, and the founders we had the pleasure of meeting along the way. With Inevitable, the product and team stood out immediately. But the relationship we built with Inevitable’s CEO, Luci Kempton, helped us earn her trust and, ultimately, the chance to support Inevitable through the fund”

Haas invited a panel of industry-leading judges to ultimately select the final investment. This year’s judges were Wendy Lim, General Partner of Burst Capital, Curtis McKee, Partner at Third Point Ventures, and Toussaint Bailey, Founder and Managing Partner of Uplifting Capital. While judges deliberated on their final decision, the event continued with a fireside chat with Anna Patterson, a computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and CEO of Ceramic.ai. 

With another year of HIF in the books, we’d like to thank our judges, mentors, students, and SAIF supporters for their part in making the event a success. See you back on the Spieker stage next year to see where HIF invests next!