Introduction
Tranquillion’s mission is to deploy capital with intention—to drive meaningful, measurable impact across climate, health, and arts & culture while generating sustainable returns. We believe that financial success and mission alignment are inseparable, and we invest in transformative solutions that stabilize our climate, improve human well-being, and build open, accessible infrastructure for the future.
This mission reflects the beliefs of Marike and Greg Fitzgerald which led to the creation of Tranquillion. Our goal is to drive global impact through investment and philanthropy over multiple generations. Accomplishing this level of change requires a strong organizational foundation and a first class team. 2025 was about building that foundation while making a few early moves to drive direct impact.
By the end of 2025 Tranquillion transformed into a fully functioning investment and philanthropy organization with a growing team and supportive surrounding community. Notable year end outcomes include investments in Direct Biologics, Culture House Immersive, Zanskar Geothermal, and growth in Philanthropic Giving.
We’re very proud of this year’s progress. However we’re just at the beginning of a long journey to build a healthier, more sustainable future. 2026 represents the next phase of growth where we intend to formalize our focus areas and grow our team to scale investment and philanthropic impact in the years to come.
Following is an overview of the successes and milestones reached in 2025 across Tranquillion’s focus areas.
Tranquillion Strategy Building
Building Tranquillion’s identity and foundation was jumpstarted by the hire of Aaron Vaughn as COO. Aaron’s early work included establishing a mission, vision, and the core focus areas. A powerful mission statement was developed as the acceptance criteria for our focus across investment, philanthropy, and general operations. “Mission-Aligned” has become the buzz word for every major decision!
Mission-aligned operational focus areas were defined to direct organizational buildout. These include:
- Climate Investment
- Health Investment
- Arts & Culture
- Community Development
- Philanthropy
With our mission defined, attention shifted to filling knowledge and experience gaps. Key hires were made with Vipul Devluk as the Managing Director of Climate Investment and Heather L. Porter as the Director of Philanthropic Strategy.
Climate Investment
2025 marked Tranquillion’s foundational year in climate infrastructure investing. We began by establishing an Investment Thesis, made our first direct investment, and built a robust pipeline for future deployment across direct investments and thematically-aligned funds.
2025 Achievements
Climate Investment Thesis: We developed and formalized our “Slate 1” Investment Principles, establishing guiding pillars:
- Creating new categories by backing first movers in clean tech
- Exploiting capital structure gaps where risk is misunderstood
- Targeting catalytic climate impact (1M+ tCO2e annually at scale)
- Pursuing non-concessionary returns
- Deploying pragmatic capital to underwrite opportunities
Pipeline Development: Vipul also built significant deal flow capacity, identifying 30 direct investment opportunities across our priority sectors and evaluating and building relationships with approximately 20 climate-focused funds spanning venture, growth equity, infrastructure, and credit strategies.
Key Metrics
- Direct investments closed: 1 (Zanskar Geothermal)
- Direct pipeline developed: 30 opportunities
- Funds evaluated: ~20
- Potential climate impact (Zanskar at scale): ~7 Mt CO2e avoided per GW deployed
Zanskar Geothermal: Vipul completed our first 2025 Climate investment in Zanskar, a next-generation conventional geothermal company. This investment exemplifies our “valley of death” thesis: backing transformative technology at the demonstration-to-deployment phase. Zanskar’s technology has the potential to avoid approximately 7 Mt CO2e per GW deployed, assuming coal displacement. The company’s target is ~3GW by the mid-2030s (equivalent to 3 large scale nuclear plants).
Climate Portfolio Company Highlights
Jubilee Transmission (invested 2022) was our first direct investment and our entry point into Climate Investment. Following are key updates and 2026 goals.
2025 Highlights
- Grew a pipeline of several early-stage projects with real data and modeling enabled by our own proprietary platform, Atlas IQ: our in-house solution for prospecting and development.
- Made inroads with utilities across the West, including Xcel Energy, PacifiCorp, Tri-State, LaPlata, APS and more. These relationships will be crucial for advancing commercial viability of our projects
2026 Goals
- Pipeline development, moving projects towards initiation
- Operational Improvements, Recruiting
Health Investment
Our Health Investment strategy is in its early developmental stages. Aaron built a preliminary investment thesis that has guided our general focus.
2025 Achievements
In 2025 we aligned on a few core focus areas within Health to begin our exploration. These include:
- Disease prevention and response
- Women’s health
- Holistic Wellness
- Access to health
Notably, we made a series B investment in Direct Biologics in June, 2025 as our first investment in Health. Additionally, we had introductory conversations with several impact-focused Health funds and built a strong network of experts across Health innovation and investment.
Health Portfolio Company Highlights
Direct Biologics, our first investment in this category, is a late-stage biotechnology company leveraging a regenerative medicine platform to address multiple disease indications. Their therapeutic product candidate, ExoFlo showed great results for COVID patients while in emergency approval during the pandemic. They’re currently conducting Phase 3 clinical trials of ExoFlo for the treatment of hospitalized adults with moderate-to-severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and in earlier stages of ExoFlo trials for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. Following are key updates and goals from their side.
2025 Highlights
- Phase 3 trials for ARDS, a deadly disease with a 50% mortality rate and no FDA approved drugs currently available for treatment
- Phase 2 for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases: Crohn’s & Ulcerative Colitis
- Phase 2 for rare disease: Perianal Fistulizing Crohn’s Disease
- Awarded RMAT (Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy) designation
- IP Portfolio with 7 issued patents
- Closed a $100M series B round
2026 Goals
- Further progress on Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials
Performing Arts
Performing Arts is a long-standing passion of Tranquillion’s founders with multiple years of prior support primarily via philanthropy, accounting for almost 20% of our philanthropic giving in 2025. This is another emerging focus category for us where we plan to build upon our progress to date.
2025 Achievements
In addition to our local and national-level giving to Performing Arts in 2025 we made our first official investment with Culture House Immersive. This unique organization is led by some of the best in its category with the goal of scaling projects to a range of different venues from civic spaces, under-utilized malls, sports arenas, etc to immersive technology spaces and performing arts centers, ultimately making immersive theater more accessible and mobile.
Community Development
Community Development at Tranquillion centers on doing impactful work across a range of categories in the communities we’re a part of. Cross-over exists between this category and each of our other core focus areas. We’ve also begun to explore a variety of other opportunities that are unique and exciting with potential to enhance the lives of those in the communities we directly engage with.
2025 Achievements
2025 was a year of ideation and exploration, identifying opportunities and beginning to assess the resources required to formalize this focus area.
Philanthropy
Philanthropy is Tranquillion’s focus area that has seen increasing progress for a few years with 2025 as the turning point where we established ambitious growth goals and began strategic work.
2025 Achievements
In 2025 our philanthropic strategy was distributed across a number of categories as displayed in the graphic below.
Philanthropy Partner Highlights
Climate
EDF has been building strong momentum to support a 2026 Colorado convening to develop a policy framework to drive power sector decarbonization and set the stage for future policies to cut economy-wide climate pollution under the next gubernatorial administration.
Tranquillion’s investment in this work has expanded EDF’s capacity to leverage and deepen their existing relationships to engage the right stakeholders, starting with the Xcel Energy, bringing them to the table to shape the policy conversation and achieve buy-in. We anticipate continued collaboration with them as they consider expanding the convening to include utilities, industry and business representatives, and other environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs).
2025 Impact Highlights
- Hired former Colorado governor Bill Ritter to collaborate with them on developing and ultimately facilitating the convening process.
- Achieved significant buy-in and commitment from Xcel Energy toward building a path to decarbonization.
- Set a kick-off date for the first in-person meetings of the convening for early February 2026 between EDF and Xcel Energy.
2026 Goals
For 2026, EDF will organizing a convening with Xcel Energy and key corporate and NGO partners to build alignment around a decarbonization policy framework for Colorado’s power sector, with the goal of delivering a concrete playbook to shape the next Governor’s climate and energy agenda from day one.
We began building a great relationship with The Nature Conservancy and in November, 2025 provided our first gift to their Meeting the Moment Campaign, part of their Climate Policy Defense Fund. The Climate Policy Defense Fund is a strategic resource that enables The Nature Conservancy to proactively defend and advance climate and conservation legislation. Our contribution to the campaign will sustain a network of more than 100 policy experts and advocates working across priority geographies, enabling them to respond to hundreds of legislative and regulatory threats annually, ensuring conservation progress is not reversed.
Health
2025 Impact Highlights
Givewell has been a valued Tranquillion grantee partner for several years and we’re grateful for their close collaboration and continued partnership. We particularly love their data-driven approach to optimizing philanthropic impact. In 2025 our gift to Givewell was divided equally among three programs: Clinton Health Access Initiative’s community-based tuberculosis (TB) household contact management program, Taimaka’s malnutrition treatment program, and Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program.
Givewell estimates that with Tranquillion’s contributions more than 38,000 additional children will be reached by these programs, saving 180 lives.
Final Thoughts from Aaron
Upon joining Tranquillion in March of 2025 there was no way to truly know what the future held. To begin with, I believed in and was inspired by Marike and Greg’s vision for Tranquillion and their dedication to impact. The world, especially with some of its current societal and geopolitical challenges, needs people and organizations to step up and look beyond self-interest and divisions to create a better world for now and into the future. It’s incredible to have the first-hand opportunity to build that with Tranquillion. We’re a small talented team (who uses a ton of AI! and a “test > measure > learn > adapt” philosophy) with an incredible support system of partners and a motivated community to help us move our mission forward. I’ve been overwhelmed by the breadth of people who’ve been excited to learn about and assist us in our journey. The numerous phone calls, coffee/lunch meetups, and chance conversations I’ve had this last year have contributed to surprising progress and shaped the way we’ve evolved and grown our team. We also had some fantastic outcomes in philanthropy and investment I’m certain will drive future impact. I’m humbled and amazed at the progress we’ve made this year but we’re only getting started. Our potential is growing with 2026 as the year we’ll become more established across our focus areas to scale the external impact we can make in the years to come!
To connect with Tranquillion, reach out via our contact page.
