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.

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.

That instinct – to identify the gap and move – 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’s 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.

Her background is that of a social entrepreneur with deep roots in the nonprofit 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?

“I didn’t see anything here in the Irish market that was focused on those themes,” says  Walsh Drouillard. “And 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.”

“I 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’t the right fit –  it would probably not have worked out for anyone. I wasn’t going to wait for someone to tap me on the shoulder.”

A winding path

The seed of WakeUp Capital was planted in 2019, when Walsh Drouillard – then working in the angel investing world – 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.

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 – she is quick to add – timing.

“Across Europe right now, female GPs stand at about 15pc,” she says. “When I pitch to LPs, investors are looking for track record. There are not a ton of GPs in the world who are women focused on what I’m focused on, where they can say, ‘Oh yeah, I saw how that worked with that fund’. You need to continue to sell a promise of performance. You can’t really go back and say, ‘Have you seen how many fund managers just like me excelled over the last three years?’ So that can be hard.”

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, though Walsh Drouillard is careful to frame that as a quality-driven target rather than a geographic obligation.

Measured impact

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.

“I’m not looking at sweet little metrics they can put in some ESG report that no one reads,” says Walsh Drouillard. “We 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.”

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.

“When people go through the process, I think they’re quite impressed, but I think they also feel like it’s really a value-add as opposed to what I would call a sweet, ‘feel-goodery’ exercise,” she says.

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.

The more receptive audience has been family offices, high net worth individuals and exited entrepreneurs – and, she tells me, an increasingly engaged cohort of US-based investors actively seeking European opportunities.

Quality over geography

The question of geography is one Walsh Drouillard navigates carefully. Positioning Ireland as the fund’s primary market, she notes, can actually be counterproductive when talking to international LPs, 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.

Ireland’s start-up 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 medtech, she suggests, but the scientific and commercial knowledge required for some of the harder climate problems is not always easy to find.

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 scientific expertise, which the team is actively looking to engage.

Toward a transatlantic fund

On the broader European picture, Walsh Drouillard draws on her US background to offer a perspective that is both optimistic and clear-eyed. She is enthusiastic about the concept of EU Inc – the idea of Europe moving towards more unified, cross-border business structures – and draws a comparison to the successful introduction of the euro as evidence that the continent can embrace bold, unified approaches when the political will is there. What Europe sometimes needs, she suggests, is a more of the American bias towards possibility.

“I love the 27-member-state European Union – I am a Europhile,” she says. “But I don’t understand the value of maintaining your own administrative processes when it comes to building businesses. The euro currency is the best analogy. We’ve done so many other things. I have yet to hear a compelling reason why we should do it 27 different ways.”

The long-term vision for WakeUp Capital is to become a globally respected climate impact investment fund. Fund 1 is the foundation. Fund 2, she envisages, could be transatlantic – a structure that would connect the European and US markets, reflecting both her own background and the inherently borderless nature of the problems she is working to help solve.

“For the second fund, which we hope to launch in the coming years, I still believe in the potential of a great relationship between Europe and the US,” she says, adding that the relationship is not exactly at its strongest now. “But as a citizen of both, I still think there is incredible opportunity for collaboration. It’s just a question of understanding where Europe has the right to win right now and optimising for that.”

“Being culturally fluent in both countries gives us a bit of an edge,” she adds. “I’m a believer in ‘let’s see where each place has the right to win’. We will find the edges and the opportunities within that.”

As for her chosen path in the impact investment space, Walsh Drouillard is characteristically clear. “It’s not always easy. But it’s a privilege.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.