Company: Groundswell
Year Founded: 2025
Headquarters: Delaware, US
Nber of Full Time Employees: 2

Company Stage: Bootstrapped
Are You Fundraising?: No
If 'Yes', For What Stage: N/A

Contact Info: [email protected] / LinkedIn

The climate crisis is a health crisis. It sounds kind of obvious, [and] I think a lot of people are aware of this in the general sense. High temperatures can cause adverse impacts on the elderly or in children, and is generally not good.

But there are a lot of other consequences and risks. Heat alone increases risks associated with cardiovascular disease, strokes, kidney failure, even mental health and suicide rates.

Our health systems are built on reactive care, not preventative care. So we work really hard to be really good at treating people when they need it. And climate change kind of throws a spanner in the works there, right? Much like pandemics where it forces a lot of people to need care all at once and at the same time, it changes where they’ll be and when that will happen.

The healthcare industry needs predictive forecasted risks with local context rich information so they can build more resilient care services, and that’s the problem that we’re solving at Groundswell.

 It makes it worse in a couple of ways. The first is through uncertainty and volatility. As climate change gets worse and it goes unabated, the volatility of weather systems and the impacts become more unclear, right? They accelerate.

That means our systems and the structures that we have in place now become a lot less effective in responding. Let’s just take drug demand and heat waves as an example. If heat waves occur in relatively the same way and the same pattern year on year, our drug supply chains and medical equipment supply chains have enough time to resupply for those events — but climate change makes it more volatile. So heat waves are longer, they’re more severe, they happen at different times of the year, and that makes it a lot harder to ensure that we have the right supplies going to the right places, [and ensure] there’s enough time between events to restock.

Compounding risks is another really big problem. Climate change is going to impact a lot of different systems, and those systems interact with one another, right? So, it’s not just that heat impacts cardiovascular disease and health in other ways, but it also impacts our food systems. It changes the nutritional value of different food items and that has health consequences on people.

It increases flooding in coastal regions, which can increase the salinity of water tables and increase hypertension rates. There are so many different ways in which if we continue to go down this path of unaccounted unabated climate change, our systems will reach tipping points and we will see broad systemic failures.

 I started this company with my brother, but we’re just one company, and I don’t think we’ll solve the problem alone at Groundswell. We’ve had so much help from brilliant people also working on the front lines of this challenge, and I think that’s what makes any company, any solution like ours possible.

I’ve spent 10 years in climate work from the smallest companies and NGOs to the biggest multinational corporations. I’ve worked with boards, I’ve sat on the boards. I’ve worked with executive committees, and I know how hard it is to make the case when the goalposts are constantly moving, and especially when you're standing there as the only [climate] champion. That’s what I’ve brought to Groundswell, and I think that’s why we take a really collaborative approach to our work, because we know how important it is to have people, organizations, companies, and solutions standing with you and working alongside you. I think that’s what makes us different — that we work really well with our partners.

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Groundswell is built on a simple thesis: climate data and modeling are inaccessible for the healthcare industry. Humans are pretty bad at understanding big numbers, but climate communication has been built almost entirely on it — we like to communicate and show scale, right? [Saying] two billion people are at risk [from climate threats] that shows scale — but it doesn’t show clarity.

We have a hard time picturing the magnitude of two billion people in our heads. And then when climate risk does get scaled down, it usually gets framed in terms of property damage, coastal flooding, insurance losses, and real estate devaluation. [But] sustainable and resilient healthcare is really suffering from unfit information and poorly allocated resources [too].

We reduce vulnerability and exposure in two ways. The first is we bring climate risk insights to human health, enabling providers and systems to build preventative interventions and plan better preparations. And the second is that we bring that data down to earth into localized and contextualized insights for those organizations and systems.

So we replace insights like: ‘green space can provide cooling benefits’ with this nature-based solution. Interventions [like these] could prevent a certain amount of hospitalizations and save [a certain] amount of money and healthcare costs over 10 years.

 We work with the people inside healthcare organizations who carry the weight of climate risk — even when it’s not in their job title. So sustainability and environmental teams at pharmaceutical companies, health and life insurers, resilience planners, etc.

Convincing them that climate is a problem is not the hard part. They already know climate change is bad. We’ve had data telling us that and ringing the alarm bells for decades. And so when we sit with those teams, we’re not there to convince them that the problem exists. We’re there to help show them that it’s solvable and help them see and visualize what the impact of their solutions will look like.

That is, for the patients that they serve in the neighborhoods — so populations across their markets, entering different care pathways, and sometimes for the bottom line of the business that they’re serving.

That’s when we unlock action at scale and we make those investment and buy-in conversations a lot easier. As I was kind of alluding to before, our job is to make their jobs easier, better, and faster. That’s what resonates across every customer we talk to, regardless of which corner of healthcare that they sit in.

There are a lot of hard things to explain, but one of the hardest is that we are not a climate risk score [provider]. The market is full of products that will hand you qualitative numbers and exposure metrics, and a lot of those are designed for disclosures and not necessarily concrete, on-the-ground decisions. That’s information that we move away from.

A way we explain it is like: just imagine that you’re a sustainability lead at a health system with say, 40 facilities across some different states and locations. A risk score will tell you climate change is bad for your portfolio, right across these different regions. We go a bit further. We tell you which patient population is the most exposed to extreme heat next summer and why, what the medical demand of that area could be, and how much the health impacts will cost. So you can use that to actively price solutions interventions, determine ROI, and have a very clear roadmap from plan to action and implementation.

Hopefully others can relate to this one — but probably we think about giving up like once a week! Some days of course are better and easier than others. The hardest stretch for us was in February — things weren’t really progressing and it was a bit quiet and we could both feel that it was stagnant.

I think when you’re building something new, it can be really easy to sit and ideate and tweak things together in isolation — especially for us, [since] we’re brothers and co-founders. But that’s a trap, and I think you end up more in a death spiral than anything else. The only way out for us was to stop talking to each other and go talk to other people, build new relationships — and that’s what we did. We reached out to as many new founders, operators, and climate folks as we could, and we filled our calendars with meetings, not even to sell, just to get more embedded in things. And that’s really what pulled us through, right? That cumulative effect of getting back into a community.

I think ecosystems matter so much more than people give them credit for. They don’t just validate what you’re doing. They validate why you’re doing it. They give you a support network of people who understand what you’re going through, and in a lot of ways remind you that the work is worth the difficulty.

So, I think that really, really helped us and we came out of February clearer, more connected, and more committed than ever before.

If you build in isolation, whether that’s your idea, your product, your service — any offering — it will live and die in that isolation. I think community is the foundation of everything we do. Our work is really hard and it can be lonely and we can be sitting on really long time horizons [so], you know, we need community.

So I would say find your people, invest in those relationships and deliver value to the ecosystem because it will, I think without a doubt, pay off. I think that also goes beyond any sale, right? Or even the success of your venture. You may fail. Most startups do. We may fail, but those relationships will endure.

I’d be surprised if folks couldn’t guess what I would say, which is I would love to see more capital flowing into health and health resilience and adaptation.

Capital in adaptation today is really heavily concentrated in physical asset protection, like infrastructure hardening and property-level risk analytics. These are real markets that, of course deserve attention. Where capital isn’t flowing and it should, and it needs to, is into adaptation for people and for the systems that serve them. These are harder markets to underwrite. And we don’t have the atomic level and Nostradamus capabilities where we can say with 100% certainty that: ‘this person will get sick in this exact way.’

So in that sense, buildings are easier to model. But climate change is fundamentally a human health crisis, and that's where it’s going to hit the hardest. The reason that we care about food and agricultural security isn’t really because of profit. It’s because we die if we can’t eat, and those things aren’t secured.

So this is where the absence of funding and solutions will cost the most in lives, in public spending for businesses. And so my hope, and what I want to see and what I think we need, is for adaptation capital to go towards people and not just our properties.

 For anyone listening — if what I’ve said resonated or was interesting for you, I’d love to hear from you, so please, please get in touch. You can find us on our website at www.groundswell.earth or on LinkedIn.

We also regularly release open geospatial data and insights, and those can be found on our website. So if that’s something you need or you’re interested in exploring, go check it out, download it, work with it, and let us know if you have any other questions, comments that come up, or other data and insights that you’d want to see published.

What climate-related health challenges do you think are underestimated at the 10-, 20-, and 50-year horizons?

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