Builders Vision Hands CEO Role to Matt Knott as AUM Passes $20 Billion

Builders Vision, the sustainability-focused investment and philanthropy platform with more than $20 billion in assets under management, has appointed Matt Knott as CEO, ending a year-long interim stint and formalizing a leadership transition that pulls founder Lukas Walton back to the Executive Chairman seat.

The Chicago-based firm, founded by the Walmart heir in 2018, also confirmed Lisa Forbes as Chief Strategy Officer, removing her own interim tag after several months in the role.

For a platform that deploys capital across grants, direct investments and fund investments in both public and private markets, the leadership change lands at a moment of scale. The $20 billion AUM figure, cited by the firm in its announcement, is driven in part by strong portfolio performance, according to Knott.

Who is Matt Knott?

Knott isn't a newcomer. He joined Builders Vision in 2019 as President and Chief Operating Officer, and the firm credits him with helping design and develop the organization since its inception. He has served as interim CEO for the past year.

Before Builders Vision, Knott was President of Feeding America, one of the country's largest hunger relief organizations. That background — operating at scale inside a mission-driven national organization — maps closely onto what Builders Vision does with capital rather than food.

He succeeds Walton, who has held the CEO title since founding the firm in 2018 and now shifts to Executive Chairman.

The takeaway: Builders Vision is promoting from within, keeping continuity with the person who helped build the machine.

What does Lisa Forbes bring to the strategy role?

Forbes arrives at the Chief Strategy Officer post with a dual track record at the firm — she has served as General Counsel and as interim Chief Strategy Officer for the past several months.

Prior to joining Builders Vision, she was Senior Corporate Counsel at industrial software company Uptake, and earlier served as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Sheffield Asset Management. The Sheffield experience in particular gives her direct familiarity with the asset management side of the platform's operations.

The takeaway: the strategy function now sits with someone who already knows both the legal and investment plumbing of the firm.

Where is the capital going?

Builders Vision focuses its deployment on three material streams: sustainable food and agriculture, healthy oceans, and clean energy. The platform's model mixes philanthropic grants with market-rate investment — a structure that lets it fund early-stage sustainability solutions and then back their commercial scale-up through direct and fund investments.

Knott laid out the case in the firm's announcement post:

"What excites me most is the opportunity ahead. Builders Vision now has more than $20 billion in assets under management, driven in part by the strong performance of our portfolios. We have a talented team, a powerful network of partners, and the unique ability to deploy investment and philanthropic capital to scale promising solutions in food and agriculture, energy, and oceans."

That quote reads as a mandate: the new CEO sees the $20 billion base and the dual-capital toolkit as the firm's competitive edge, not just its balance sheet.

The takeaway: the capital thesis is unchanged — food and agriculture, oceans and energy remain the three lanes.

What happens next?

The appointment closes a transition that has been running for a year, since Knott first took the interim role. With Walton as Executive Chairman and Forbes installed permanently in strategy, the firm has its full leadership bench set.

The milestone to watch now is deployment: whether the $20 billion platform accelerates new commitments across its three focus areas under a CEO who explicitly frames the opportunity as "ahead" rather than behind.