Svetoslav Slav Gatchev

About Svetoslav Slav Gatchev

Slav is a senior emerging market financier and executive with nearly 30 years of global experience in team leadership, origination/business development, relationship management, structured & project finance and the development and financing of infrastructure projects for corporates and governments. Since April 2026, he is Vice President for Innovative Finance at the Rockefeller Foundation. He started his career at Delphos, a specialized EM investment bank, in 1997 and became an equity partner/Managing Director in 2010. Leading multidisciplinary teams, he structured and raised $3 billion of DFI/private financing for energy, telecommunications, and social infrastructure projects in the global emerging markets for Fortune 100, middle-market, and government clients. Having facilitated the sale of the firm, he departed in 2020. Between March 2021 and September 2025, Slav led the Sustainable Debt team of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation NGO with employees in 70+ countries and $9 billion in assets. The team, which is a core part of TNC\'s Nature Bonds strategy, arranges large-scale sovereign financings - such as the award-winning Nature Bonds transactions in Belize, Barbados, Gabon, Bahamas, and Ecuador - to facilitate ambitious national conservation commitments, refinance $3 billion of unsustainable pre-existing sovereign debt, and unlock $1 billion of large-scale, long-term financing for biodiversity and resilience projects at no additional burden to national balance sheets. He is one of the principal authors of an industry-first Practice Standards for Debt Conversions.Between September 2025 and January 2026, Slav was a strategist on the Adaptation and Resilience team of TNC and helped conceptualize and market test a nature-based infrastructure strategy for coastal resilience, including the possibility to create and market Verra-approved Coastal Resilience Credits.Slav is a member of the Advisory Board of the Blue Bonds Accelerator, a global not-for-profit dedicated to unlocking the potential of capital markets to finance ocean and coastal resilience. He also served on the credit committee vetting all NatureVest and other impact investing deals of TNC.A native of Bulgaria, Slav earned an executive MBA (with honors) from NYU\'s Stern School of Business. He lives in Washington, DC with his family. Outside of work, he loves skiing UT and CO,[solidcore], Bulgaria and Greece in the summer, DC United/Washington Spirit/Fulham FC/World Cup 2026! Sasha, the cardigan corgi, passed away after 13 years of friendship. I miss him terribly!

Experience

1. Vice President, Innovative Finance

   The Rockefeller Foundation

   Apr 2026 — Present · New York, NY, US

   I work with the entire organization to deploy and mobilize funding and change markets for our strategic priorities and “Big Bets” on universal energy abundance, Food is Medicine, and regenerative school meals in the global emerging markets and underinvested areas of the US.

Education

• NYU Stern School of Business

  Master of Business Administration - MBA, Finance

  2001 — 2003

• American University in Bulgaria

  Transferred, Business, political science

  1992 — 1995

• Washington College

  BA, Business, political science

  1995 — 1997

Skills

• Valuation
• Due Diligence
• Infrastructure
• Hedge Funds
• Venture Capital
• Financial Analysis
• Emerging Markets
• Investments
• Trading
• Investment Banking
• Finance
• Financial Structuring
• M&a Experience
• Capital Markets
• Energy
• Alternative Investments
• Private Equity
• Financial Modeling
• Economics
• Credit Analysis
• Structured Finance
• Renewable Energy
• Project Finance
• Fixed Income
• Mergers & Acquisitions
• Corporate Finance
• Portfolio Management