The investor who learned from the acorn
"If I were to invest in my daughter's business, how would I invest? I would not be transactional," she says. "I would be focused on how to tap into her potential and what she's trying to bring to life, and how I can support that. That's a very different way of thinking and being, where you walk in and say, here is my investment, this is what I want in return, and this is how you should run the business."
This is the question that reordered Ebru Kaya's whole approach to investing. Years inside conventional finance, including running a food-focused venture fund, had already shown her how capital that meant well could still produce extractive outcomes. It left her thinking about capital as something closer to a relationship than a transaction.
She returns often to the image of an acorn.
"Every seed is unique," she says. "They all bring their own essence. Potential is inherent in the seed, but it only comes alive in relationship with the soil, the water and the other conditions around it."
With her business and life partner André Stürmer, Ebru co-founded atreyu: an evergreen investment holding company, steward-owned, deploying capital into early-stage businesses working with living-systems principles. Returns are capped and paid through redeemable preference shares.
"We're not going to take the current system down," she says. "It's too big to fight, and it's bringing about its own destruction anyway. What we can do is create islands of coherence, so that when people start looking for a different way, it's there, ready to be picked up."
One investee, Jackfruit Finance in Kenya, provides affordable loans to under-resourced, community-led private schools that mainstream lenders won't touch. Each school has become what Ebru calls a nodal point in its community: a place through which trust, and the relationships it builds, can reach further than the loan itself.
Ebru is careful not to overclaim what atreyu can do.
"We're not going to take the current system down," she says. "It's too big to fight, and it's bringing about its own destruction anyway. What we can do is create islands of coherence, so that when people start looking for a different way, it's there, ready to be picked up."
She says this is known as the Roger Bannister effect: once someone runs the four-minute mile, others believe it is possible too. The proof point is atreyu and the Regenerative Investing Academy is the invitation: come and do this in your own way.