American-born, Ireland-based fund manager Faye Walsh Drouillard talks conviction, climate tech and what it takes to build an impact VC fund from scratch.<\/p>\n
When Faye Walsh Drouillard sought out an impact-focused venture capital fund in Ireland, she looked at the market and could not find a structure that matched her vision. So she built one herself.<\/p>\n
That instinct \u2013 to identify the gap and move \u2013 speaks to someone who has spent two decades operating at the intersection of purpose and capital. Born in Washington DC and raised in DC and California, Walsh Drouillard has lived in Europe for 20 years, 12 of them in Ireland, where she arrived initially due to her husband\u2019s work in aircraft leasing. What began as a relocation for family reasons has, over time, become a genuine commitment to the Irish ecosystem and the founders building within it.<\/p>\n
Her background is that of a social entrepreneur with deep roots in the non-profit world and a long-standing preoccupation with two of the defining challenges of our time: climate change and inequality. Long before WakeUp Capital existed, she was active in angel investing, serving on non-profit boards and, increasingly, asking a question she found difficult to answer: where was the fund for founders building solutions to these problems?<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t see anything here in the Irish market that was focused on those themes,\u201d says \u00a0Walsh Drouillard. \u201cAnd I also felt like those themes, particularly the climate side, were going to become more and more important to the global economy, and certainly within Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to build. I like to create, and I brought an entrepreneurial approach to building the fund. Joining an existing fund to try to do that work probably wasn\u2019t the right fit \u2013 it would probably not have worked out for anyone. I wasn\u2019t going to wait for someone to tap me on the shoulder.\u201d<\/p>\n
A winding path<\/p>\n
The seed of WakeUp Capital was planted in 2019, when Walsh Drouillard \u2013 then working in the angel investing world \u2013 made clear to a syndicate her interest in climate tech opportunities. It was there she met Mark Peters, who at the time was at Google, and who would become her co-founder. Together they spent the years that followed conducting market research, making four early investments across Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK, and laying the foundations of what would become a dedicated VC fund.<\/p>\n
It was not, she acknowledges, a straightforward path. Building a first-time fund is challenging for anyone and especially for an outsider. Building one as a female general partner in venture capital adds a layer of difficulty that Walsh Drouillard is candid about. What got her through, she says, was a combination of conviction in the thesis, resilience and \u2013 she is quick to add \u2013 timing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAcross Europe right now, female GPs stand at about 15pc,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I pitch to LPs, investors are looking for track record \u2013 there are not a ton of GPs in the world who are women focused on what I\u2019m focused on, where they can say, \u2018oh yeah, I saw how that worked with that fund\u2019. You need to continue to sell a promise of performance. You can\u2019t really go back and say \u2018have you seen how many fund managers just like me excelled over the last three years?\u2019 So that can be hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
WakeUp Capital achieved its first close in 2024 and is currently working towards a final close in Q2 of this year. The fund now has eight companies in its portfolio, two of them Irish, with three additional Irish deals expected to close in the near term. The ambition is to invest with Irish companies as a primary market \u2013 though Walsh Drouillard is careful to frame that as a quality-driven target rather than a geographic obligation.<\/p>\n
Measured impact<\/p>\n
The fund occupies what Walsh Drouillard describes as a distinct position on the impact spectrum: it marries the commercial discipline and portfolio accountability of traditional venture capital with a mission-first focus on climate, health, and inclusive tech. The fund seeks to deliver competitive market returns by backing scalable technologies where financial growth and measurable positive impact for the planet and society are closely linked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not looking at sweet little metrics they can put in some ESG report that no one reads,\u201d says Walsh Drouillard. \u201cWe cannot approve a deal without a recommendation from our Impact Advisory Committee. And part of our carry is linked to the impact success of the companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
That rigour extends to every deal the fund considers. The impact advisory committee reviews each potential investment to ensure portfolio companies are addressing genuine market problems rather than simply wearing the impact label. It makes the work harder, Walsh Drouillard says. It also makes it more meaningful.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people go through the process, I think they\u2019re quite impressed, but I think they also feel like it\u2019s really a value-add as opposed to what I would call a sweet feel-goodery exercise,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
On the fundraising side, the experience has been instructive. Institutions such as the Irish Strategic Investment Fund, the European Investment Fund and Enterprise Ireland have invested in the fund alongside private capital, though Walsh Drouillard is candid about the harder task of convincing larger private institutional LPs, whose focus on track record and proven returns can make a first-time fund a difficult sell.<\/p>\n
The more receptive audience has been family offices, high net worth individuals and exited entrepreneurs \u2013 and, she tells me, an increasingly engaged cohort of US-based investors actively seeking European opportunities.<\/p>\n
Quality over geography<\/p>\n
The question of geography is one Walsh Drouillard navigates carefully. Positioning Ireland as the fund\u2019s primary market, she notes, can actually be counterproductive when talking to international LPs \u2013 which is why WakeUp Capital presents itself as Ireland-based but Pan-European in scope. The Irish commitment is real, but it is the quality of deals that drives allocation, not the passport of the founder, she says.<\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s startup ecosystem, she tells me, is genuinely strong at the early stage. Enterprise Ireland and the broader support infrastructure provide a solid foundation, and there is real energy around entrepreneurship. But scaling remains a challenge, and in sectors like climate resilience, Walsh Drouillard identifies a gap in the kind of deep scientific and commercial expertise needed to evaluate technically complex opportunities. Ireland excels in software and med tech, she suggests, but the scientific and commercial knowledge required for some of the harder climate problems is not always easy to find.<\/p>\n
It is a challenge she acknowledges close to home. Her own team brings very strong commercial and technical experience, she says, but evaluating the technical feasibility of certain climate and health tech propositions requires additional\u00a0scientific expertise, which \u00a0the team is actively looking to engage.<\/p>\n
Toward a transatlantic fund<\/p>\n