Maze Lines Up a €40 Million Fund to Buy Lisbon Flats for the Homeless, Plus €25 Million for Health and Climate Startups

Maze, a Lisbon-based investment manager specialising in social and environmental impact, is preparing two new funds — including a €40 million vehicle whose sole purpose will be to buy apartments and house people sleeping rough in the Lisbon metropolitan area.

The housing fund, expected to launch early next year, is built around the Housing First model, the approach that gives homeless people a permanent home first and wraps support services around them afterwards, rather than requiring them to "earn" stable housing through treatment or sobriety. Portugal has run Housing First programmes since 2009, but they have long been constrained by the basic problem the fund is meant to solve: a shortage of flats to put people in. By owning the apartments outright, the fund aims to take that bottleneck off the table.

Running alongside it is a second, €25 million fund focused on scientific innovation in health and climate, with a particular interest in companies built around artificial intelligence. Maze expects to open that fund this year and complete its fundraising by the end of next year.

The two vehicles would expand a book that already stands at roughly €46 million under management, spread across about 50 companies in Europe. Between 11 and 12 of those are Portuguese, accounting for close to 30% of the capital deployed — a sign that the firm, founded and led by António Miguel, is putting a meaningful share of its money to work at home. Maze says its existing funds, focused on biotechnology, health and climate, have performed in the "75th percentile" against a benchmark of both impact and conventional funds in the United States and Europe.

The investor base reads like a roll-call of European institutional money rather than charity. It includes the European Investment Fund, the EU's small-business financing arm; pension funds such as that of carmaker BMW in Germany; foundations including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; and corporate partners such as Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas. That matters, because it signals that backers are treating homelessness and climate not as causes to be subsidised but as markets that can pay a return.

That is precisely the case António Miguel makes. "Investing in social and environmental impact is the greatest economic opportunity of our time," he argues — a pitch that the housing fund will test in the most demanding possible setting, Lisbon's overheated property market, where every euro buys less space each year.

For a city where rents and house prices have raced ahead of incomes, the experiment is notable for who it targets. Most private capital flowing into Portuguese real estate chases tourists, expatriates and high earners. A fund that buys flats specifically to house the people the market has pushed out is a deliberate inversion of that logic — and, if it works, a template other investors may find harder to dismiss as unprofitable.