Aina Abiodun is ready for the climate tech sector to recognize that communities everywhere are already experiencing the challenging impacts of a warmer world — and they need help surviving them.
“We’ve got to not just pander to people and say, ‘We’re going to solve climate change in 10 years, it’s going to be all gone,'” Abiodun said. People have urgent climate needs right now, like exposure to smoke, kids with asthma and damage from flooding, she added. “Let’s just talk about those problems.”
As president and executive director of VertueLab, a longtime nonprofit supporting climate tech innovation, Abiodun is mobilizing efforts to take on the issue of climate adaptation and resilience.
VertueLab is raising a new fund for investing in North American climate companies that are tackling the response to warming as well as those working to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The organization was selected by the Washington State Department of Commerce as one of three recipients to receive a share of $49 million in federal dollars for venture capital investments, which will go into the fund.
The fund will be invested in early-stage startups, which VertueLab has traditionally supported, and Abiodun is eager to back growth-stage companies with these new dollars as well.
Portland, Ore.-based VertueLab launched in 2007 and its programs for climate tech startups include an accelerator, assistance in applying for federal grants, and multiple efforts to bolster diversity, equity and justice among entrepreneurs in the sector and in impacted communities.
The organization has invested in more than 80 companies including Ren Energy, which addresses carbon in the supply chain, electric vehicle charging company OpConnect, and Jiminy’s, a maker of bug- and plant-based pet food.
Abiodun took the helm of VertueLab more than a year ago, bringing a wide-ranging career to the challenge. She has launched startups providing climate tech financing and consulting in the sector, served as CEO of a Berlin wellness company, and led brand strategy and been a creative producer for multiple companies, among other roles.
We caught up with Abiodun to learn more about her path to VertueLab and where its work is headed. The conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
You’ve worked in New York City, Berlin, Los Angeles. Why come to the relatively sleepy Pacific Northwest?
Washington state has led on policy, on funding, on action in climate in a way that hardly any other state has led. There are so many climate-forward policies that have really pushed this region forward. However, when I looked at it I thought, “OK, we have everything in place. We have a very friendly, conservationist crowd. We have good policies. We have a whole entire region full of really smart, talented tech people — but not really a climate tech industry.” It’s puzzling to me on some level because it feels like the table was set.
And so I thought to myself, “Wow, if there was ever a place to go, where there’s work to be done and enough tailwinds to get us to the next place, it’s Washington.”
So where is the region falling short in creating a solid climate hub?
We do see a lot of founders getting early, early-stage support when the checks are very small. There’s a very active angel ecosystem here in climate tech. Lots of folks who’ve exited in tech are interested in climate, and it’s wonderful.
What happens here, though, is that we don’t have the rest of the ecosystem. Later-stage checks are harder to come by. There perhaps is a need for a little bit more education on the opportunities — these opportunities are emerging fast and furious. And until you have a core group of people working in the space, and lots of knowledge exchange and deal flow, you don’t really get a buzz. So we haven’t graduated to the next level.
What should VertueLab be doing to grow the climate sector?
Supporting entrepreneurs as they move into the next phase is a huge role that we can play. We are going to be announcing a new fund — we are really excited about that. We’ve been talking to some of our previous investors, and new ones as well, about how this can really push the ecosystem forward. Someone has to jump in first, so we’re happy to do that.
The fund itself is not nonprofit, but we as a nonprofit have the latitude to do a lot of things that a traditional venture capital investor cannot do, including taking money from a foundation. So we did early stage de-risking in technology for around 15 years. Now we can do mid- to later-stage de-risking as well. That’s a huge perk we can offer with our next fund.
And other initiatives?
The other that we are very excited about doing is really rethinking how we elevate the challenges that our state faces in terms of underserved entrepreneurs and underserved communities.
What I learned in Europe was that it’s very challenging to think about how to solve all the climate things. It’s super overwhelming. But actually the most successful projects happened when government, for example, held hands with investors and entrepreneurs and did things at a big enough scale, like an urban scale or suburban scale, where you’re able to see the results because people are very motivated by results.
But if you’re trying to do everything for everyone, create that one killer thing that everyone in the world is going to use, it sort of dilutes the power of what you can do for your region. Now, this is not to say that anything we create here is not valuable elsewhere.
At The Wings Conference in Portland, Ore., in April you gave a tough love talk about how hard and critical it is to address the climate crisis. What should people be doing?
We’re thinking about how do we capture carbon — that’s the majority of the funding — and how do we transition from fossil fuels to electric. It’s all really wonderful.
But here’s the challenge. When we think about adaptation and resilience, they are the stepchild of climate tech. We don’t spend enough time thinking about how we’re going to live now as the effects are being felt.
Understandably they are cool solutions, like spray some aerosol in the air and maybe we can stop the sun from being so hot. It’s interesting. Does that have impacts on anyone’s life who just got flooded yesterday? Not so much.
Folks are starting to gather their wits and say, we need technology to survive right now. So in the context of a regional organization like us, my ambition is really to be as good at adaptation and resilience as we are at mitigation. Because if we’re not good, we don’t get to stick around and get to the part where we build the rocket or we get in the rocket [and possibly escape a damaged Earth].
Should we not be spending 50% or more of our efforts on adaptation and resilience? And in those adaptation and resilience technologies we have the opportunity not only to engage communities right now, but to also source our entrepreneurs from those communities because they’re figuring out solutions to stuff as they’re living it.