Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Tola Alli is an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, where she is a NAIC Fellow and a recipient of the PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship and the HBS Forward Fellowship.
Tola has spent her career at the intersection of capital and the energy transition. She began at Goldman Sachs in energy sales within Global Markets before transitioning to the Public Sector Infrastructure & Energy group of the Investment Banking Division, where she advised public utilities on financing strategy, including a $608 million green bond for the New York Power Authority. Seeking deeper execution experience, she moved to Commerzbank’s Green Infrastructure Group as an Assistant Vice President, where she managed a $3.5 billion portfolio of renewable energy investments and served as coordinating lead arranger on a $3 billion offshore wind financing, the first to connect into the New York City grid.
Five years of financing large-scale energy projects gave Tola conviction that the energy transition is fundamentally a capital problem, and drew her toward the investing side of the table. That conviction brought her to HBS and, most recently, to Angeleno Group, a Los Angeles-based growth equity firm investing in clean energy and climate solutions, where she spent the summer gaining direct equity investing experience. She plans to build a career in alternative investments, focused on infrastructure private equity, with a long-term interest in channeling institutional capital toward energy and infrastructure opportunities across Africa.
At HBS, Tola serves as President of the Infrastructure Club, Vice President of External Affairs for the African American Student Union, and Vice President of Careers & Education for the Africa Business Club. She is also passionate about mentorship through Minds Matter, where she began as a mentee and now serves as a mentor, guiding high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds.
In her personal time, Tola loves to travel and has visited over 35 countries, driven by a love of learning about the world through human connection. She holds a BBA in Finance and a BA in Political Science from Emory University.