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This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

 Eztia creates cooling materials that keep people safe and comfortable in a warming world using a fraction of the energy.

 Climate change leads to extreme heat, which affects over 80% of the world’s population today. The health consequence is 500,000 heat-related deaths each year. The economic consequence is 80 million jobs lost.


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 I first trained as a materials scientist at MIT and then as a medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, and I spent 10 years doing international development work living in some of the world’s hottest environments with minimal infrastructure — definitely no air conditioning! And so it was really a personal pain point in terms of how to solve cooling with minimal resources and with the scientific expertise to back it up.

 Eztia has created a material called HydroVolt. We print the gel onto garments, and the gel comes into contact with the human body and absorbs heat from the body and dissipates that heat into the environment via evaporative cooling. You can recharge the material between use by laundering the garment or soaking it in a bucket to give it water and then air dry the garment.

  We tackle B2B worker safety. What this means is that we sell to employers like construction companies, public safety agencies, and they distribute to their workforce. There are regulatory tailwinds — so literal government mandates when it comes to protecting the workforce, so that's worker safety and wellbeing — and then there's also a performance and productivity aspect in that people just perform better when they're less hot and under less heat stress.

  I think it’s important to explain that even if you don't feel like the material is as cold a few hours in as it was in the first minute that you touched it — the cooling is still working. So it’s still drawing heat from you, but your sensory receptors have adapted.

We use the analogy of jumping into a swimming pool. At first, the water’s really cold, and after you start swimming, you don't feel it so much anymore — but the water temperature has actually remained the same.

When I first started working on this in 2022, climate adaptation and resilience weren’t mainstream yet, and I kind of thought I was crazy for wanting to work on this. And I think what helped me push through was reconnecting and staying true to my ‘Why’ — that I experienced extreme heat myself.

I was making something that I myself wanted, and I trusted that there were many other people in the world who would benefit from it as well.

 I don't think there is a magic bullet for solving problems. Um, I think that every climate adaptation problem has multiple ways to tackle it, and we need all of those different angles. And so I think it's about knowing your technology and your solution's unique value proposition about what it can do and what it can’t do.

So for example, our technology works via evaporative cooling. Um, it works best in environments where there's a lot of airflow. I’m very upfront with people that if you’re in a sealed environment like structural firefighting or a clean room suit, we are not the right technology for you. So it's about knowing where you can win and doubling down on that rather than trying to solve, um, every single angle or every single problem out there. 

 I think there are systems-based solutions and technology-based solutions, and we should invest in both. But I would challenge the capital stack to invest and bet more on deep tech. So for example, in the world of cooling, you can cool spaces with shelters, you can do risk mitigation with insurance. For us, we literally had to invent a new material and validate that to put it on people.

I think there are analogies for other problems like this where you have to just create new technology and it takes a lot longer and there's a lot more to prove. But I’m a techno-optimist, and I believe in the role that science can play to solve problems more completely.

 I want to talk about tackling a global problem by serving multiple markets around the world from the get-go. For example, at Eztia, we launched in the market just a year ago, but we already sell in three countries, and we manufacture out of a fourth.

And it’s fun and challenging at the same time because we want a scalable solution — so how do you make a technology and productize the technology in a way where you have a consolidated portfolio that can serve multiple use cases and multiple environments at the same time? But we also want to contextualize this to the local context, so our go-to-market playbook will look different in different countries. Maybe the popular hero form-factor would look different in different countries.

Are adaptation deeptech solutions harder for VCs and other investors to get behind then software, asset-light solutions?

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Thanks for reading!

Will Everill & Louie Woodall
Editor, The Adapt | Editor, Climate Proof