A growing number of LPs is looking for assets that sit outside public-market cycles, and yet that still carry a clear sense of purpose. They want predictable cash flows, but they also want investments tied to real cultural or environmental value.

In most corners of private equity, “alternative investing” means infrastructure, credit, or secondaries. At Pophouse Entertainment and Qarlbo Biodiversity, it’s ABBA and woodpeckers. They turn music catalogues into scalable brands, and forests into biodiversity engines with cash-flow profiles that behave nothing like public markets.

Moderated by Natalia Fontecha, Partner and Head of Capital Raising and IR at Pophouse Entertainment, her discussion with Qarlbo Biodiversity CEO Aleksandra Holmlund highlighted two investment strategies that are commercially serious and culturally fearless at the same time. 

Pophouse and Qarlbo operate under the wider Qarlbo Group umbrella, but in entirely different universes. One is built on soundtracks, the other is built on soil. As Fontecha put it, they “combine the worlds of music and investment to partner with artists and offer investors access to what we think is a lifetime opportunity”. Holmlund’s mission is similarly unconventional, namely “making biodiversity a new asset class and really taking forestry investments to the next level”.

Investor = storyteller

Pophouse is not exactly a royalty-yield vehicle. The firm treats artists as brands whose cultural equity can be expanded across geographies and generations. Fontecha said: “We don’t buy catalogues to put them on a shelf. We bring them back to life”.

That approach allows Pophouse to operate more like a creator studio backed by institutional capital. Its strategy combines building new revenue streams through immersive formats like Mamma Mia! The Party with reactivating legacy artists such as Cyndi Lauper and KISS and treating each catalogue as a long-duration private equity asset capable of international scaling.

It is also, fundamentally, a strategy designed for the social-media age. The value of music and its reach have become algorithmic. Fontecha gave the example of her 19-year-old niece discovering ABBA on TikTok. “We’re harnessing the power of instant access to social media to find new formats to expose the music”.

Forestry 2.0: the biodiversity upgrade

On the other side of Qarlbo Group’s portfolio, forest assets behave nothing like entertainment IP, but they share the same structural logic: alternative investing that blends purpose and hard economics.

Holmlund recounted the moment Qarlbo’s founder, Conni Jonsson, first approached her to explore climate-oriented tree planting. Her response marked a defining step in the strategy: “Have you thought about biodiversity? Because I think biodiversity is going to be the next big thing”.

Their projects in Louisiana show how the firm integrates biodiversity into its forestry assets. One project protects the red-cockaded woodpecker, a species that relies on old pine trees for nesting. Another project focuses on restoring longleaf pine, a slow-growing species that has declined because commercial forestry favours faster-growing trees. By changing the species mix in these areas, Qarlbo aims to repair the ecosystem while keeping the land productive.

Investors want to know how this becomes a business. This is done by integrating timber production with diversified “payments for ecosystem services […] carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and different types of government grants”. The result is a portfolio whose biological growth continues “regardless” of market cycles. “Trees don’t read the Financial Times”, she added.

Private capital meets pop culture and natural capital

Both Pophouse and Qarlbo treat long-term assets as living systems that can be scaled and monetised without stripping away their meaning. Similarly, both view legacy as something to be grown continuously. And both integrate private equity as a platform for revitalising assets that previously sat outside institutional allocation.

This is illustrated in practice by their approach to exits. “You exit to a strategic buyer or to another financial buyer”, Fontecha explained, with continuation vehicles as an option for assets that become long-term income engines. Holmlund pointed out that forestry exits can be piecemeal or packaged, but typically flow to “an institutional buyer or a professional investor”.

Both firms make different arguments, but the direction is similar: investors are expanding their definition of what alternative assets can be, and the category is becoming broader and more inventive as a result.

by Andreea Melinti

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