Experience Stern | News & Events

The student-led NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) has completed its sixth investment, this time backing Rolli, a company dedicated to fostering a thriving media ecosystem by equipping journalists with innovative tools and resources. Through its Newsroom as a Service® platform, Rolli aims to help journalists by connecting them with a diverse range of vetted experts and providing advanced AI newsgathering resources. It marks NIIF’s first-ever investment in a media company.

“NIIF is thrilled not only to make its first investment in a media company, but also to be the first student-led fund to make such an investment, and a financial difference, while Rolli is in an early growth stage,” said Professor Andrea Armeni of NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, who oversees the program. “Rolli is providing a unique and invaluable service to journalists, and we are excited to champion a company that uses AI in a novel way for good.”

NIIF is the first-of-its-kind student-operated impact investment fund built on a unique cross-school collaboration between NYU’s Stern School of Business, NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and NYU Abu Dhabi.

“Participating in NIIF gave me a unique window into the decision-making process for early-stage impact investments. It crystallized what I had learned in more theoretical classes and gave me an appreciation for all the work that goes into combining social outcomes with investment results," said Stern MBA student Lawrence Luo, a member of the Culture, Media, and Democracy team, which sourced and presented Rolli to NIIF’s Investment Committee. 

NIIF is supported by NYU Stern’s Experiential Learning team. It acts as a springboard for preparing emerging professionals for competitive impact investing roles globally while providing much-needed investment capital to early-stage impact enterprises. It is funded, in part, by Golub Capital through the Golub Capital Social Impact Investment Education Fund, which was created in 2024.

"Participating in NIIF turned out to be one of the highlights of my senior year at Stern! It offered me a rich yearlong experiential learning opportunity where I collaborated and problem solved with peers with expertise different from my own. NIIF gave me hands-on exposure to impact investing and pushed me to think critically about both financial returns and social outcomes. Leading my team through sourcing and due diligence taught me how to consider the needs of different stakeholders, drive investment conversations, and craft compelling pitches,” said Stern Undergraduate College student Olivia Hamant.

NIIF’s Investment Committee is composed of three Stern and Wagner alumni practitioners: Graham MacMillan of the Visa Foundation, Monique Aiken of The Investment Integration Project, and Maria D. Toler of SteelSky Ventures. The due diligence for NIIF’s final investment prospects was supported pro bono by Orrick's global Impact Finance & Investment practice.

Now in its seventh year, NIIF has supported more than 200 students and made nearly $200,000 in investments in six companies, including Rolli:

• Maternova, a company improving maternal and neonatal health in low-resource settings
• Sapient Industries, an environmental impact company 
• SmartGurlz, a STEM business teaching young girls to code
• KIGT, a company that brings electric vehicle charging stations to underserved communities
• EdVisorly, a community college-to-university platform

NIIF continues next academic year with a diverse group of about 40 graduate and undergraduate students, competitively selected from a large pool of applicants.

About the NYU Impact Investment Fund
A joint venture between the faculty advisors and students of New York University's Stern and Wagner schools and now collaborating with NYU Abu Dhabi — NIIF leverages the diverse expertise of business and public service faculty to support student investors targeting enterprises in sectors such as financial inclusion, healthcare, and food systems. Philanthropic support for NIIF comes from foundations, alumni, and Golub Capital through the Golub Capital Social Impact Investment Education Fund. The experiential course includes processes to train the students on impact investing, provides practitioner guest lecturers, and creates an interdisciplinary learning laboratory. NIIF is pursuing additional donations and grants to enable this experiential platform to continue well into the future. Learn more on the NIIF website.

About NYU Stern School of Business 
New York University Stern School of Business, located in the heart of Greenwich Village and deeply connected with the City for which it is named, is one of the nation’s premier management education schools and research centers. NYU Stern offers a broad portfolio of transformational programs at the graduate, undergraduate and executive levels, all of them enriched by the dynamism and deep resources of one of the world’s business capitals. NYU Stern is a welcoming community that inspires its members to embrace and lead change in a rapidly transforming world. Visit www.stern.nyu.edu.

About NYU Wagner
Since 1938, NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service has been educating and preparing the world's future public service leaders to translate ideas into actions that have an effective and lasting impact on the public good. Our faculty’s research changes the way people frame, understand, and act on important public issues. We provide our students with critical skills, access to all that New York City has to offer, and a deep understanding of the context surrounding public service challenges—which they use to improve cities and communities across the globe. Ranked seventh nationally among all schools of public affairs, we offer a Master of Public Administration in Public & Nonprofit Management & Policy, Master of Public Administration in Health Policy & Management, Master of Urban Planning, Master of Health Administration, Master of Science in Public Policy, Executive Master of Public Administration, and PhD in Public Administration. Learn more at NYU Wagner.