The information already exists.
It just isn't speaking to the right people yet.
A climate policy shift, a governance failure, a permitting delay, or a change in community trust can affect a hedge fund, a pension, a foundation, an insurer, and a regulator at the same moment but in entirely different ways. Each investor reads the same signal through a different lens. They need a better shared layer for translating what each sees into something the others can use.
Project Covalent builds that layer. Same signal. Different mandate. Better decision.
The next ten years,
not the last ten.
Climate adaptation, infrastructure resilience, geopolitical fracture, workforce instability, and eroding institutional trust will stress every investment framework built for the last decade. Covalent's research agenda starts with a simple question: what decision tools do investors need to be right about what's coming, not just what already happened?
From correlation
to causality.
Most analytics describe what has been associated with performance in the past. Project Covalent asks why investment outcomes happen and which governance, community, climate, policy, and institutional conditions are moving right now in ways likely to affect financial and systemic results before they show up in ratings, prices, or reports.
One signal layer.
Every mandate.
A hedge fund, a pension, a foundation, an insurer, and a regulator each define success differently. But all of them benefit from knowing what is changing before valuation does. Project Covalent builds shared intelligence that each investor can apply to their own mandate without asking any of them to adopt someone else's definition of value.
Project Covalent:
building the signal layer the field needs next.
Project Covalent tests whether shared signals built from the combined observations of different investor types can reveal risks and opportunities that no single investor is positioned to see alone. The hypothesis is whether investors can help one another connect risk, financial outcomes, and real-world systemic conditions across sectors, asset classes, and time horizons so each can achieve their unique objectives without compromising their mandates.
Covalent is designed to be challenged. The goal is to learn quickly, test what works, and build a signal architecture that serves the field.
More data exists than ever.
Fewer investors know what to do with it next.
Impact investing has grown to over $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Sustainability disclosure is becoming standardized across major markets. Data has never been more available. Project Covalent addresses the next layer: better translation. How do different investors turn fragmented observations into forward-looking signals that actually change what they buy, hold, reduce, fund, or regulate? That is the question this research agenda is built to answer.
This is an open research agenda.
Project Covalent is looking for practitioners, skeptics, researchers, and data partners across every investor type. If you manage capital, advise institutions, fund communities, shape policy, or build the tools investors use — and you think the field needs better ways to see what is coming — we want to hear from you.
You do not need to agree with every assumption . The strongest version of this research will come from the people most willing to say what is missing.