Blue Earth Summit

The venture capital world has a volume problem. Thousands of pitches, hundreds of meetings, and a handful of cheques. So what actually separates the companies that get funded from the ones that don't?

Charlie Lyon Carroll has seen both sides. As Investment Director at IW Capital, he reviews around 1,000 pitch decks a year, and he'll tell you the answer isn't what most founders expect.

 

 

An Unlikely Path to the Cap Table

Charlie didn't set out to be a venture investor. He started studying neuroscience, aiming for medicine, before pivoting into banking and eventually finding his way to early-stage companies. It's a trajectory that shaped how he thinks about risk, complexity, and people.

"Working with early-stage companies means you can have more impact," he says. "Instead of analysing whether a huge corporation might grow one percent next year, you're helping innovative businesses that are actually changing industries."

At IW Capital, Charlie focuses on late-stage venture investments, typically companies between seed and Series A that already have commercial traction and need capital to scale. Tickets generally range from £2–5 million, deployed across technology, healthcare, sustainability, and consumer businesses. The thread connecting them all: meaningful financial returns paired with measurable real-world impact.

 

What 1,000 Pitches Taught Him About Founders

A thousand decks a year is a lot of noise to filter. But Charlie says the signal often comes down to something surprisingly human.

"At our stage of the market, it's very much about the relationship with the founder. You're often working with them for five years or more, so you need aligned values and shared goals."

And while most founders arrive having polished their story to a shine, Charlie is actually more compelled by the ones who don't hide the rough edges.

"Every company has challenges. What stands out is when founders acknowledge them and explain how they're tackling them."

Humility and conviction, together, are rare. When investors see both, it signals something important: a management team that can navigate the messy reality of building a company, not just pitch a perfect version of it.

 

A Different Kind of Investment Model

IW Capital doesn't operate like a traditional fund. Rather than deploying capital from a single pool, the firm raises money deal-by-deal, meaning each investment is backed by a network of investors specifically aligned with that opportunity.

It sounds slower. In practice, it can move fast. Charlie recalls one deal where £4 million was raised in just two weeks, driven by investor conviction in the specific sector and the specific team.

The model also creates something harder to manufacture: genuine expertise around the cap table. When sector specialists invest, they often bring more than money.

Today, IW Capital manages around £125 million in portfolio companies, deploying £25–30 million into new businesses each year.

 

The Investments That Excite Him Most

Ask Charlie about the portfolio companies he's proudest of, and sustainability and healthcare come up quickly, not because they're fashionable, but because the problems they're solving are genuinely hard.

In sustainability, IW Capital has backed businesses tackling electronic waste, refurbishing enterprise technology and redirecting devices toward education and charity. Others are developing recycling technologies for flexible plastics, including the packaging materials like crisp bags that most facilities simply can't process today.

These aren't quick wins. Some technologies take years of development before they're commercially viable. But when they arrive, the impact scales with them.

"When you finally see these technologies reach commercial scale after years of development, it's incredibly exciting," Charlie says.

In healthcare, the firm has invested in augmented reality therapeutics for neurological conditions including Parkinson's disease, a category where the intersection of deep science and commercial potential is genuinely compelling.

 

Sustainability Isn't a Differentiator Anymore, It's a Baseline

One of the more striking observations from the conversation: sustainability has shifted from competitive advantage to basic expectation.

Consumers have become more sophisticated about environmental claims. Greenwashing, once an effective shortcut, is increasingly easy to spot and punish.

"People are much better at spotting greenwashing now," Charlie notes.

Research consistently shows that beyond price, environmental impact ranks among the most influential factors in purchasing decisions, particularly for consumer-facing brands. Businesses embedding sustainability into operations, not just marketing, are the ones building durable advantages.

 

The Real AI Opportunity

Everyone is talking about AI. Charlie has a more specific view of where the interesting money is.

It's not in the companies building the models. It's in the companies built around them.

"AI-native businesses are incredibly exciting. You can design the entire company around efficiency from day one."

Rather than retrofitting AI onto legacy structures, these companies treat it as the operating system from the start, leaner teams, faster iteration, tighter margins in sectors where that matters most. For sustainability businesses in particular, where margins are often thin, that efficiency advantage can be decisive.

 

Cautiously Optimistic About the UK Ecosystem

The venture market has had a difficult few years. Capital has become more selective. Valuations have corrected. The enthusiasm of 2021 feels distant.

Charlie is clear-eyed about the UK's challenges, a cultural tendency toward risk aversion that still holds back parts of the ecosystem when compared to the United States.

But he's also genuinely optimistic. IW Capital has continued deploying capital through the uncertainty, and the pipeline of high-quality opportunities hasn't dried up.

"There are always exciting businesses to invest in. If it's a good business, capital will find it."

 

What Great Founders Have in Common

When Charlie describes the founders who inspire him, he returns to a familiar type: those with the discipline of elite athletes translated into the relentlessness of company building. Drive, structure, resilience, the ability to keep going when the plan doesn't survive contact with reality.

Beyond any individual, though, it's the technologies themselves that hold his attention. After years of development, innovations in healthcare and environmental science are finally reaching commercial scale. The potential impact (financial and societal) is no longer theoretical.

 

The Venture Bet on a Better World

Venture capital, at its best, is an optimistic profession. It requires believing that new ideas can reshape industries, solve problems that have resisted solutions for decades, and build lasting businesses in the process.

As Blue Earth co-founder Guy Hayler puts it: "There are a lot of problems in the world, but there are more solutions being built than ever before."

For investors like IW Capital, that's not a platitude. It's the thesis.