Karla Mora and Leslie Harwell don't fund T-shirts. They fund the recycling plants, the potato-waste cotton, and the software that reroutes a supply chain - the plumbing every brand quietly runs on.
Most people who want to fix fashion start a clothing brand. They pick better cotton, print a sustainability page, and hope shoppers reward the effort. Karla Mora and Leslie Harwell looked at the same industry and reached a colder conclusion: the brand is the wrong place to intervene. The leverage is upstream - in the recycling line, the raw fiber, and the software that decides how a garment is made and moved. So in 2016 they built a venture fund around that idea and pointedly stopped funding the clothes.
Alante Capital is an early-stage venture firm investing in technology that makes the apparel, footwear, outdoor, and home goods industries more circular and less carbon-intensive. Its own phrase for the mission is plain: modernizing design-driven consumer industries. In practice that means writing checks into deep tech, material science, artificial intelligence, and enterprise software - the unglamorous machinery that any brand can adopt, rather than a single label competing for shelf space.
We target innovations that all brands can use - evaluating the entire value chain, from design through waste recovery.- Alante Capital, on its investment approach
The numbers behind the thesis are not subtle. The founders point to fashion accounting for roughly a tenth of global carbon emissions and generating tens of millions of tons of textile waste every year. That is a systems problem, and systems problems are hard to solve one hoodie at a time. Alante's read is that the industry needs shared infrastructure - the equivalent of roads and pipes - and that almost nobody is funding it because the science is difficult and the timelines are long.
Figures cited by Alante Capital and industry coverage; treat as approximate.
The distinction Alante draws is between a brand and a tool. Fund a brand, and you improve one company's footprint. Fund a tool that drops into existing supply chains - a recycling process, a new material, a production-planning model - and you can improve dozens of brands at once. That is the whole argument for treating sustainable fashion as an enterprise-software and materials problem rather than a marketing one.
No compromise between returns and transformative impact.- The firm's stated operating principle
It is a familiar posture in venture capital - back the picks and shovels, not the miners - transplanted into an industry that rarely gets that kind of patient, technical money. The firm evaluates a company on where it sits in the value chain and whether it has a clear path to commercial adoption inside supply chains that already exist. If a technology needs the entire industry to be rebuilt before it works, it is a harder sell than one that quietly plugs into today's factories.
That framing also changes who Alante's real customer is. A fund like this actually serves two audiences at once. The first is the founder - the materials chemist or supply-chain engineer trying to raise a first institutional round for something that will take years to reach scale. The second is the limited partner writing into Alante's fund, who wants exposure to circular-economy growth without having to build sector expertise from scratch. Alante's job is to sit between them and translate: turning hard science into an investable thesis, and turning capital into companies that brands can eventually buy from.
The catalog reads like a materials-science syllabus with a business plan attached. Circ runs textile-to-textile recycling, returning worn clothes to the raw materials they were made from. Sway grows seaweed into compostable replacements for flexible plastic packaging. Fibe makes a cotton alternative from potato-stem waste, claiming no new farmland and far less water than conventional cotton. Retraced sells supply-chain transparency software. Alongside them sit Novoloop, Mango Materials, Matereal, and AI-driven production tools aimed at bringing just-in-time manufacturing to brands and factories.
The through-line across these companies is that a consumer never buys any of them directly. Nobody walks into a store and picks up a bottle of Sway's seaweed film or a spool of Fibe's potato-fiber yarn. They buy a jacket or a bag that quietly contains the output. That invisibility is the point - Alante is deliberately backing the parts of a garment's story that never appear on the hangtag, on the theory that the parts nobody sees are where the emissions and the waste actually live.
Alante's credibility rests on an unusual pairing of finance and fashion. Mora, the founder and managing partner, spent years in impact investing and economic development, from VilCap Investments to work in Afghanistan, and sits on the board of portfolio company Mango Materials. Harwell, the co-founder and general partner - and the firm's family entry point into the apparel industry - came up through capital markets, with a stint as vice president of sustainable finance at JPMorgan Chase and seven years at Credit Suisse. The two met through a mutual contact at JPMorgan.
The bench around them signals the thesis as loudly as any pitch deck. Eileen Fisher - founder of the women's fashion label that became one of the largest B Corps in the category - is a partner and chief advisor, not merely a brand Alante studies. Venture Partner Lisa Bougie brings three decades of operating experience across Stitch Fix, Nike, Patagonia, and Gap. Principal Tess Krasne arrived from ocean-plastics work at the Ocean Conservancy. It is a group that has spent careers inside the industry it is now trying to re-plumb.
Underneath the mission, Alante is a venture fund like any other: it raises capital from limited partners, buys equity in early-stage companies, and earns through management fees and carried interest when those companies grow or exit. What differs is the filter. Because it invests in B2B tools rather than consumer brands, a single winning investment can ripple across an entire category - and the firm underwrites both financial return and measurable environmental impact rather than treating one as a tax on the other.
The check sizes tell you how early Alante is willing to go. Investments generally run from $150,000 to $1 million across pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds - small enough to get in before a technology is proven, structured to leave room for the company to raise larger sums later from climate and growth investors. It is a strategy that trades quick exits for the chance to be first into companies that, if they work, become infrastructure the whole industry depends on.
For everyone else - founders, brand executives, students trying to make sense of the phrase "circular economy" - Alante's portfolio doubles as a map. Read it top to bottom and you can see the whole loop: where new fibers come from, how garments get made with less waste, how they are tracked, and how they are recovered at the end. It is one of the clearer illustrations available of what modernizing an old, physical industry actually requires, which is patient money spread across many different technical bets rather than a single silver bullet.
Alante operates in a small but growing lane of sustainability-minded venture firms circling fashion and materials - a group that includes networks like Fashion for Good and funds such as Regeneration.VC and Collaborative Fund, plus generalist climate investors who dip into circular-economy deals. What sets Alante apart is the combination of a narrow sector focus, a refusal to chase consumer brands, and a team stacked with people who have actually built and sold clothing. It has also become a visible women-led fund in a corner of climate tech that is still overwhelmingly male, drawing coverage from WWD and 2X Global.
We back solutions that drop into existing supply chains to transform how products are made.- Alante Capital
The open question for any thesis fund is whether the thesis pays. Alante has assembled more than a dozen bets across materials, recycling, and software, moved from a roughly $12 million first fund toward a larger second one, and watched portfolio names like Circ raise substantial later rounds. The wager - that fashion's carbon and waste problems get solved in factories and materials labs, and that doing so can still return money - is now being tested company by company. For founders working on the unglamorous middle of the supply chain, it is one of the few funds built specifically to listen.