Responsible technology, defense investing and the future of impact in venture capital will be on the agenda at next week’s FRAME 2026 and Impact Flock conferences.
The back-to-back events, taking place Thursday and Friday, bring together investors from Europe and beyond as AI, climate change and shifting geopolitics create new risks and opportunities for the continent.
AI is opening up new investment opportunities at the same time it is forcing investors to revisit questions of governance, inclusion and risk. And resistance to once-taboo defense investing is softening as resilience and sovereignty rise to the top of the bloc’s agenda.
FRAME, staged at London’s Barbican in the city’s financial center, describes itself as a community conference for venture capital investors and limited partners focused on ESG and responsible investing. It is organized by Reframe Venture (formerly VentureESG), a London-based nonprofit that helps venture capital funds and limited partners integrate responsible investment practices into their work. Its global network spans more than 500 VC funds and 120 LPs.
This year’s speaker lineup includes a mix of institutional and venture capital investors, including Jörg Goschin of KfW Capital, Annachiara Marcandalli of Cambridge Associates and Norbert Lagerweij of Dutch pension fund PGGM.
AI sovereignty
AI will be front and center at FRAME. Ray Eitel-Porter, an AI safety and ethics expert and coauthor of “Governing the Machine: How to Navigate the Risks of AI and Unlock Its True Potential,” will give a talk on AI, geopolitics and the need for human agency.
Embedding responsible AI in term sheets will be the focus of a workshop led by Sophie Walker, an sustainability and responsible AI advisor at Swedish private equity firm EQT, and Suzanne Tavill of StepStone Group. The goal of the practical workshop, Walker says, is to bring LPs and GPs working together to craft “a set of standard terms that could become common practice across the industry.”
A late afternoon panel discussion with Walker, Tavill, Paul Murphy of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Alexander Joël-Carbonell of HV Capital will tackle the unfolding future of AI.
EQT is taking a “very strategic and programmatic” approach to AI across its portfolio, Walker tells ImpactAlpha. The firm invests in technologies that can “unlock the AI trust stack” while increasingly integrating responsible governance across its AI transformation projects.
“We’re doing that because we have the conviction that responsible AI is how we unlock AI’s potential for the long term,” Walker said. “For us, trust is a competitive moat.”
The Scaleup Europe Fund, which is managed by EQT, co-led the €3 billion Series D round for Paris-based frontier AI company Mistral this week. The three-year old company, known for its open weight models that enable tech sovereignty and human agency, is Europe’s answer to the proprietary models of US juggernauts OpenAI and Anthropic.
EQT is large enough to have AI advisors and resources. For smaller investors scrambling to keep up, “Reframe Ventures fills such an important gap because it helps the smaller VCs keep that knowledge flow.”
Lagerweij of PGGM and Meredith Veit of the Business Human Rights Centre take on the defense dilemma with a breakout discussion entitled “Defense, Surveillance and AI: When civilian data gets weaponized.” William Janeway of Warburg Pincus, ‘Tokunboh Ishmael of Alitheia Capital and Saul Klein of Phoenix Court close out the FRAME conference with a panel debating the future of AI.
Birds of a feather
The conversation is set to continue the next day at Impact Flock, with up to 120 senior leaders and impact leads from VC funds and LPs. The event, hosted by ImpactVC and Impact Europe, will take place at Sustainable Ventures, a coworking space that is home to 160 climate tech firms at London’s County Hall. (Impact Europe is also hosting The Business of Impact Sept. 15 and 16 in Lisbon).
Structured as a peer-to-peer gathering rather than a large conference, Impact Flock will feature representatives from Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, Eka Ventures, Bethnal Green Ventures, 2150, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, KfW and British Business Bank.
The wide-ranging discussions will touch on nature-based solutions, diversity, equity and inclusion, women’s health and the just transition. Matthew Jenner of Better Society Capital, which incubated Impact VC, and James Turner of Hg Foundation will take part in a discussion about AI for economic empowerment. Stuart Ferguson of Sustainable Ventures will join speakers including Amy Rennison of Earth Set to discuss how the energy system needs to change to deliver a just transition.
Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Brambles Partners and sustainable food chain Leon and the author of two independent reviews on the UK government’s food strategy and school food plan, will talk with Clara Barby of Just Climate and Bridges Fund Management in a fireside chat about what impact VCs can do to advance systems change.
For VCs, the two events offer more than good networking.
“It really matters to collaborate with your peers at this stage of the capital stack,” says Walker of EQT, who also sits on Reframe Venture’s steering committee. “You’re always in a round with multiple others, so you’re typically a minority investor, not a majority investor, and therefore you have to have aligned perspectives with others in the market.”
