The Adapt Interviews

The Adapt Interview Series #8: Harish Pesala (SmartResilience)

An 80-page climate risk report won't stop a flood. Companies spend six figures commissioning them, and almost none of that budget survives to actually get anything built. Harish Pesala, founder of SmartResilience, tells the story of a senior leader who carried one of these reports — beautifully designed, from one of the big names — into a board meeting and asked the only question that mattered: "What's the plan?" The room's answer was that the company was probably fine for the next ten years in most locations. Then the water came for factories on riverbanks in Southeast Asia, and the same leader was left asking why nobody had acted years earlier. Pesala has spent six years building the alternative, and nearly lost the company doing it. SmartResilience's first two years were built around selling to insurers, the way telematics sells to car insurance. It almost finished the business. He learned that insurers price risk, they don't reduce it, and as long as nothing happens within a 12-month policy, that's a win for them. The pivot that saved the company was simple — sell to the people who carry the risk, not the people who price it. That means operators, facilities managers, and site owners who actually lose the factory or the hospital wing when the flood arrives. In this episode, Pesala takes us through how his company evolved in response to the market, and shares what he still thinks it gets wrong.

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The Adapt Interview Series #7: Tim Dudas (Plain Site)

A property owner may spend real money hardening a site against flood risk, with the hopes of impressing their insurer and seeing their premiums reduced. But then renewal season comes around, and nothing changes — the flood-proofing is genuine, but it's invisible to the underwriter deciding what gets insured. It's a mismatch that Plain Site and its founder, Tim Dudas, are determined to fix. Borrowing from the cyber insurance playbook — pricing verified flood defenses rather than relying on pure claims history — Plain Site designs interventions on land the owner controls, models their effect on the site's loss curve, monitors performance with sensors, then writes cover it can defend. Dudas, a former architect, traces the idea back to planning's "red line boundary" — the edge of an owner's responsibility, which flood waters ignore. The episode also covers the pivot that turned Plain Site into an MGA, and Dudas' read on insurance history: most surplus lines, from terrorism to now flood, started as afterthoughts until a catastrophe made them their own market.

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The Adapt Interview Series #6: Elizabeth Foughty (Orbital Sentry)

Most satellite data arrives as a snapshot — a single image, taken in an instant, and updated maybe every 30 minutes, if you're lucky. Elizabeth Foughty wants to replace the snapshot with a livestream. She's the Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Orbital Sentry, a start-up using geostationary satellites to stream a continuous visual data feed of the Earth to organizations hungry for real-time information. Their first commercial product, Fire Sentry, will use infrared sensing to spot wildfire hotspots and trace fire perimeters across the Western US all day and all night, without interruption. Think of it as a video doorbell for the planet, always watching, always ready to flag when something starts. While remote sensing data has never been richer, a continuous, wide-area view of unfolding events simply hasn't existed before. As warm, dry conditions push wildfire into places unaccustomed to it, Foughty argues that data gap is becoming existential for first responders trying to track a fire's movement rather than wait on the next radioed update. Tune in to learn more about Orbital Sentry, Elizabeth's challenges raising capital, and her insights on building an adaptech business in 2026.

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The Adapt Interview Series #5: Tripp Wall (Pantheon Regeneration)

Restoring degraded wetlands and peatlands unlocks a mind-boggling array of climate resilience benefits. These systems mitigate saltwater intrusion, buffer coastal land from sea level rise, and reopen freshwater aquifers that communities and ecosystems depend on. Recharging and enhancing the near-miraculous capabilities of these ecosystems is the mission of Tripp Wall, founder and CEO of Pantheon Regeneration. Starting with just under 20,000 acres of drained, trenched peatland in the US, Pantheon installs water control structures around the perimeter of degraded systems and lets gravity-fed precipitation refill them — monitored via a medley of high-tech devices, from eddy covariance flux towers to water transducers. The payoffs are myriad. Bioaccumulation pulls agricultural runoff, nutrient pollution, and PFAS "forever chemicals" out of the water supply, aquifers recharge for people, animals, and surrounding microclimates, and restored habitat reopens wildlife corridors and flyways for all kinds of manner of species. Tripp also makes the case for where resilience capital should be flowing next — coastal salt marsh, bivalve and oyster bed reconstruction for hurricane and wave energy mitigation, and soil organic carbon work that improves water-holding capacity in agricultural land — arguing that adaptation-focused restoration remains dramatically underfunded relative to lower-risk, carbon-only plays. He also shares the struggles and triumphs involved in building a start-up in an esoteric, long-duration category. Tune in if you think about climate adaptation in terms of physical infrastructure and risk mitigation, want to understand how ecosystem restoration gets financed and monetized, or are curious what it takes to build conviction through a decade-long slog toward an unproven market.

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The Adapt Interview Series #4 Charlie Bilsland (Temperate)

Here's a fact that should stop you in your tracks: there is no such thing as cooling. Every air conditioner, every refrigerator, every cooling system ever built doesn't actually 'cool' anything — it just moves heat from one place to another. The refrigerator ejects it into your kitchen. The AC unit ejects it into the street. Twenty percent of global electricity is spent doing nothing more than shuffling heat around — and not very efficiently, either. Charlie Bilsland and his co-founders at Temperate think there's a better way: send the heat to space and be done with it. Using passive daytime radiative cooling, Temperate's NIX unit attaches to existing refrigeration condensers and dispatches heat as infrared light directly through the atmosphere. This means refrigeration units don't have to work so hard or consume as much electricity. The upshot is more reliable heat transfer and a lower risk of refrigeration downtime. In this conversation, Charlie walks through the physics of heat transfer (accessibly), the pivot away from a home cooling product that was, in his words, "less achievable but more exciting," and why he thinks too much capital is chasing SaaS products and data center cooling — and not nearly enough is going toward the kind of welfare-level heat solutions that will matter most to ordinary people as temperatures keep rising.

Christy Swann (RCOAST)

Twenty-two thousand miles of coastline are actively eroding right now — a number projected to nearly triple, to 60,000 miles, in the years ahead. In the US alone, coastal counties generate $9.5 trillion in economic activity, and close to a billion people live in vulnerable coastal zones worldwide. For these communities to survive and thrive, they need to understand their coastlines, and what adaptations could help them beat back the seas. That's the problem Dr. Christy Swann built RCOAST to solve. A coastal and aeolian scientist who's spent her career studying wind-blown sand, Swann left the Naval Research Lab in 2023 to go full-time on the company, skipping her own paycheck for two years to get it off the ground. RCOAST catalogues how every coastal mitigation strategy — reefs, sand fencing, beach nourishment, living shorelines — performs across different environments, then trains a machine learning model on what Swann calls "data cakes" of geospatial, wind, wave, and tide data to recommend what's likely to work on any new stretch of coastline. Swann also explains why governments, HOAs, and NGOs are already paying for this, why engineering firms have little incentive to bring costs down, and why she believes coastal erosion deserves far more capital than it's getting. For anyone working on physical risk or adaptation finance — this episode is for you.

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David Adler (Groundswell)

Climate risk has long been viewed as a threat to physical assets and business revenues. In this episode, we sit down with David Adler, co-founder of Groundswell, to make the case for a different framing entirely — one that puts human health at the center of the adaptation story. Groundswell is a US-based platform that connects climate hazards directly to health outcomes, drawing on over 500 climate-health risk factors from peer-reviewed research and layering in demographic and socioeconomic data to produce neighbourhood-level forecasts of mortality, hospitalisations, disease burden, and healthcare costs. In this conversation, David explains why our healthcare systems are poorly equipped for a climate-changed world where demand surges are harder to predict and cascading risks interact in ways we're only beginning to understand. David also shares some hard-won wisdom: that in the entrepreneurship game, community matters. Whether you're selling to a health system or surviving a rough quarter, the relationships you build in the ecosystem are what carry you through.

Dr Iain Willis (Tempest Risk)

Most companies know climate risk is coming for their assets. Far fewer know how to measure it — or what it would cost to do something about it. That's the gap that Iain Willis at Tempest Risk is working to close. Tempest Risk is a UK-based software company that models physical climate risk across ten different perils — from flooding and wind to tropical cyclones and sea level rise — at high resolution, for assets anywhere in the world. It goes beyond pure risk measurement, though, by also showing clients the return on investment of actually doing something about it: namely, implementing adaptation measures. In this episode, Iain walks us through how the platform works, who's using it, and why. He also reflects on what he's learned as a founder: the value of patience, the importance of shipping early and not being precious about version one, and why the sectors you end up serving might look nothing like the ones you originally had in mind. Subscribe at climateproof.news/subscribe and theadapt.co to get every episode delivered to your inbox.

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Adapt Interview Series: Preview

The Adapt Interview Series is a collaboration between Climate Proof and The Adapt newsletter platforming those adaptech founders working to strengthen our planet's defenses against runaway global warming. In this curtain-raiser episode, Will Everill — founder of The Adapt — lays out what the series is, who it's for, and why it matters now. Will argues that adaptation tech is one of the most overlooked corners of climate investment, ignored by generalist funds or considered a mere footnote relative to splashier clean tech opportunities, even as climate physical risk impacts pile up and forward-thinking entrepreneurs lean in. He breaks down what separates the adaptech founders he gets excited about, why hybrid hard-and-soft tech models are winning over investors, and the three things any adaptation founder needs to nail: massive market scope, genuine velocity, and unignorable ROI. Future interviews will be published bi-weekly on Wednesdays via the Climate Proof and The Adapt newsletters, and can also be found on YouTube and your favorite podcast channels. Subscribe at climateproof.news/subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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