"I finished the trek with a broken leg": Impact Investor Lexi Novitske on her brutal Arctic journey

Impact Loop: Last time we spoke you were in Kangerlussuaq in Western Greenland, just about to set off. How was the trip?

We had really good conditions to start, it was a solid wind, the sun was out, great visibility. But then Daphne had a crash and tore her ACL. We were getting into the centre of Greenland, where it was just stormy, and that went on for weeks. Daphne had to make a call, and she decided to pull out. I think she didn't want to hold back the team. And that was sad, but the rest of us kept pushing.

So then it was just the three of you (alongside polar explorers Camilla Ringvold and Jussi Uusitalo)?

But my skill level was lower than the other two. They’re professionals at this, I was holding the team back when it was stormy. One day, we'd been stuck in the tent for a couple days. I decided to try to put up a kite in the storm to see if we could go, and I just got flown and broke my leg. I thought it was a bad sprain, but the days after that were, as you can imagine, really painful.

So you carried on – and finished the expedition – with a broken leg?

And I also got snow blindness, which was my own fault - I lost my goggles, and it was midday so I thought it won't damage my eyes, there's no sun out anyway. But it did - I couldn't see my hands. And then a little bit of frostbite also, that certainly didn't help.

Okay, so you had some serious challenges in the expedition. Is there any sense that climate change had something to do with the intense weather you experienced?

The conditions were much harder than what Camilla had experienced in previous years. Some of those are potentially related to climate change, right? And when we were coming down off the glacier, it was already melting through to the rocks, Camilla had never seen that before. This was in the far north. Typically, every year, she's been able to do it completely on skis. And this year we had to take off our skis and walk down because there were so many rocks coming through. It's just another sign that the snow, the ice and the glacier are receding.

So after you got back, you were first recovering in Copenhagen, then you went back to Lagos where you’re based. How was it to get back to ‘normal’ life?

When we came out, it was like the world hadn't changed at all. The deals that I was working on were right where I'd left them. With Norsken22, things are going really well. We’re working on closing four deals, doing pretty exceptional things with founders working mostly across FinTech in Africa. But Greenland gave that additional perspective of how all of this is actually changing the lives of people far up North and their livelihood, and changing the landscape of one of the last truly wild spaces we have left.

And you come back to an industry that is still in a weird place – with so much funding, be it investment or development funding, drying up. What is your outlook for the coming year?

I think there is still a huge need for development funding, (which) can catalyse a lot more of that private capital to come in. Especially on the African continent, it's really sad to see a lot of that being pulled out, and what that means for education, employment - all of these first-layer foundations that you need to build commerce. I think private capital is plugging some of those gaps, but there's only so much it can do, and that development funding, we still absolutely need it. I do think we'll see a reversion to the mean, hopefully, and I think then that's going to be a much more positive landscape, but we're certainly dealing with a lot of repercussions now.

And to what extent has your expedition focused your investor eye on more climate-related opportunities?

A lot of our focus on impact investing has been around social commerce and FinTech. But I think (climate) is also something that we can't ignore, and certainly something we're focusing a lot more energy on. Here on the African continent, where a lot of these industries are much earlier stage, there's still some really interesting solutions for understanding certain data sets and how that feeds into AI when it comes to climate measurement or sustainability in farming and logistics, EV-replacement or mobility solutions. So I think there's a lot more that we're looking at now, even though the feedback cycle is much longer in terms of return on investment.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)