Welcome to The Adapt Interview Series, a special collaboration between Climate Proof and The Adapt.

Super excited to be partnering with Louie Woodall — founder of Climate Proof Media and the definitive voice in the adaptation media landscape — to create this new multimedia project. The idea is simple: publish bite-sized interviews with early-stage adaptech entrepreneurs in audio, text, and video.

Why? Because we want to deepen our audiences’ understanding of the adaptation innovations taking shape right now, and to spark the kinds of collaborations that help the adaptech community grow.

New interviews will drop every other Wednesday, starting with tomorrow’s sit-down with Iain Willis of Tempest Risk.

First, though, a curtain-raiser: a short interview between Louie and myself, in which we discuss what we hope to achieve with the series and I share his latest thinking on the adaptech investment landscape from building out UpRoot Capital.

Be sure to subscribe to the Climate Proof Series podcast HERE and the Climate Proof YouTube channel HERE to access the interviews across your favourite channels.

We’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Will Everill
Editor, The Adapt

Listen to a podcast of this interview HERE

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This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I’m Will Everill and I’m currently running UpRoot Capital. We’re a small angel syndicate focused on a risk segment of adaptation and resilience that we see as severely under-addressed, which is pest, invasive species, and pathogens that are all getting worse as our climate changes.

Before that, I worked at creating a climate tech community alongside some of the largest, most high-profile investors, not-for-profits, and corporates out there. The Adapt was really born out of a frustration from that — a frustration I had with certain types of conversations that were being had at the events we used to run. It was all focused on the energy transition, and there was almost no conversation about how we make ourselves more resilient to the changes in the climate that are already happening and will keep happening.

Adaptation as an investable space is still wholly overlooked, and that's why I wanted to start The Adapt — to give a platform to people building here who don’t fall under typical climate tech boxes or sit neatly on a VC market map, but who are potentially building what I think, are some of the most category-defining plays out there and solutions that will be sorely needed, probably sooner rather than later.

The honest answer is it’s less about the particular pedigree or type of person and more about the mindset. The founders we’ve spoken to so far — at least the ones we’ve really liked — have had a relentless focus on two things. One is that they understand the problem itself deeply. They’re building a solution for a specific risk or a specific problem, Often they’ve lived it — either they’ve worked at a company in a previous industry, or have been affected by it. And secondly, they care intensely about the customers that are facing that problem they’re building for. In the words of my venture partner at UpRoot, the best founders have a PhD in the customer. They’re obsessed with them. They know them inside and out, and that’s how they become genuine experts within their fields.

In terms of the actual teams, a lot of the technologies we’re looking at tends to have sort of two types of co-founder. One is the scientific or technical co-founder, the person who’s developed the deep IP at the core of what they’re building, because a lot of the moat around the sorts of investment we’re looking at is centred around deep tech. And the other is the more business-focused founder, someone who can clearly articulate the problem and the risks the particular industry is facing. It’s a fairly standard combination, I realise, pretty stereotypical, but it does work.

There isn’t a single ideal sort of CV that we’re screening for — adaptation is such a new space, and it’s still being defined, so a lot of the ideas and the types of companies we’re looking at sound contrarian or a bit out there compared to sort of traditional VC. It’s not sort of SaaS businesses. It’s stranger and more varied, but that’s I think where you deliver real venture-like returns, by betting on that stuff that not everyone wants to look at.

Also, the slightly contrarian thing I'd add is that the best founders have a sort of deep, realistic understanding of where the exits lie — but they don’t set their ceilings too low. [As VCs] we have to know where the exits are, but also you don’t want the founders aiming too short. This is about building a generational company or companies and the founders who stand out have that fire, have that spark and a real belief in the world that they’re trying to build. These are genuine sort of life-changing and generational defining companies that we want to invest in.

One last thing I should add is the founders who really stand out don’t just understand the problem. They are really good at explaining it. They can take it to a layperson or a lay investor in a way that’s insightful and genuinely inspiring. So much of the challenge I find with adaptation is messaging and education. The problem is real, but it’s really poorly understood, and so being a strong communicator is so, so essential to this.

 It’s a really interesting moment within adaptation because there’s a lot of talk about generalist climate funds moving into the space, but the reality is we haven’t seen that wholesale conversion yet — and not in new funds being raised either. That’s potentially more indicative of the funding landscape than anything. I think geopolitical shifts have sort of re-hyped the energy transition and left adaptation somewhat behind. With the new firms that have raised, I will say, [they] have adaptation as a footnote and not as one of their main investment theses. And the problem with that is these sorts of generalist firms will then disperse their capital across a diluted spread of ideas within adaptation instead of having concrete examples or theses about how they’re going to deploy that capital within it.

One of the more compelling opportunities that we see right now, I think, is the reimagining of traditional industries along certain lines. One example is agtech through the lens of national security or food security. As the world becomes more isolationist, I think we’re settling into a massive period of potential industrial shock where upstream supply crisis and critical inputs like, for instance, sulfuric acid and naphtha — which are used in industrial fertiliser and pesticide use — are colliding with a severe El Niño, and that creates systemic risks for the 2026 and 2027 harvest cycles. Indeed, Y Combinator’s top request for start-ups I think this year was explicitly for AI for low-pesticide agriculture, and I think it underscores how quickly the intersection of deep tech and resource preservation is moving to the forefront of venture mainstream.

It sort of feeds into the type of company that investors who truly understand this space are looking for, which is: do you have to sell into a hard present financial loss or at least the imminent risk of one? Because climate risk is ultimately a commercial opportunity for solutions that protect assets more cost-effectively than legacy incumbents can.

The winning business models that will be achieving some real traction are a sort of hybrid of hard and soft tech, and they feature deep IP on a physical hardware layer that can generate unique data sets, and then that feeds into a software platform that produces highly defensible and actionable insights.These models win because I think they don’t require any customers to invent new sustainability line items or rely on regulatory tailwinds. Instead, they sort of plug into existing operational budgets that are set up there to deal with this risk. And we’ve already established that risk equals opportunity and the risk is getting worse and therefore the opportunity is getting better.

I think that’s crucial to investing and building a thesis and building a company within adaptation tech. It’s precisely why we built up [UpRoot] around biological risk, right? Because pests, invasive species, and pathogens represent the fastest growing climate hazard or natural disaster and therefore the fastest growing market opportunity. For us as an angel syndicate as well, the extreme specificity is really important because ultimately we’re defined by the quality of our network. And by hyper-focusing on this single risk profile, we can purposely recruit angel syndicate members who possess deep domain specific expertise within these exact fields. That means our investors are not only more likely to back the type of deals that we put before the syndicate, but they can also offer an unparalleled level of strategic and built-in insight into these companies that I think generalists probably couldn’t recreate.

Well, we’re hardly omniscient, but I think the first thing is about scope and I think avoiding what I call the “niche trap”. A lot of adaptation products — incredible adaptation solutions even — end up focusing on a very small, hyperlocal problem, which might be great and fine for a business that is just built for themselves or is looking to return early investors or family and friends two or three times their money. But it’s not a venture backable business where, you know, the investor is blown away by the sheer magnitude of the market opportunity and potential scale across a global stage.

The second thing is maintaining relentless momentum and velocity. It’s incredibly easy to get choked up by elongated sales cycles or trapped in an endless loop of pilots. I think you have to manufacture urgency by securing early commercial validation, whether that’s through fast-track initial deployments [or] strategic partnerships, [either way you have to] prove to investors that your business can move with the speed of a high-growth startup rather than a sort of a slow research initiative.

Finally, you have to demonstrate a deep understanding of your customer by translating adaptation impact into straight, hard, undeniable economic value for them. I think in all fields, customers are facing shrinking discretionary budgets, and therefore you need to position your offering immediately around cost savings, potential regulatory preparedness or supply chain resilience, and framing the conversation around religiously preserving their bottom line. And if you can do those three things, you know, massive market scope, genuine velocity, and unignorable ROI, then I think that's a category-defining company in the making.

What sector(s) do you believe have been overlooked by adaptech so far?

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