Interview Summary

When did you first decide to align your career more closely with your sense of purpose?

Two things were converging. A decade of mountaineering expeditions in Africa, Greenland and Mongolia made climate change personal in a way my finance career never had. At the same time, I was growing increasingly aware that the financial system I was working in was not pricing in its real impact on the environment.

What did you do next?

I built a mental Venn diagram: my skill set, what I cared about, and what the market actually needed. I joined Measurable, an ESG SaaS platform, where my background in real estate finance and asset management was directly transferable. From there, a senior role at MSCI, and now Head of Growth at Credit Nature.

What are you doing now?

Driving strategic growth at Credit Nature, a nature fintech building the infrastructure needed to unlock institutional capital for nature restoration at scale.

What advice would you give looking back?

Trust the skills you already have more than you think you should. And if you are in a commercial role, don't let visionary founder energy pull you away from the grind. Business development, pipeline, closing deals. That is what compounds over time.

Career Summary

Irena Badelska spent over a decade in investment banking and alternative asset management, working across aircraft, real estate, infrastructure and energy assets before transitioning into the climate and nature space. She joined Measurable, an ESG SaaS platform, in 2019, followed by a senior role at MSCI. She is now Head of Growth at Credit Nature, a nature fintech building the infrastructure and methodologies needed to unlock institutional capital for nature restoration at scale.

A Decade of Signals

Irena is careful to describe her transition not as a single pivot but as a long convergence. For over a decade, she was deep in the city, working in structured finance and alternative asset management, investing in real assets she could touch: aircraft, real estate, infrastructure, energy. She valued the groundedness of that work. It had real-world consequences.

At the same time, she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with what that system was not doing. The externalities were not being priced in. Carbon was not being properly regulated across jurisdictions. The financial system, for all its sophistication, was effectively extractive in ways that were becoming harder to ignore.

What made it personal was mountaineering. Over roughly a decade of expeditions to Kilimanjaro, Greenland and Mongolia, Irena was spending time in remote communities that were absorbing the effects of climate change while contributing almost nothing to it. Glaciers that had defined landscapes for generations were retreating visibly. "It made it very visceral for me," she says. "The impact that we were having."

Joining the Conduit Club in London in 2018, as one of its original members, brought her into a community of people already working across green finance and climate tech. She was still in finance. She was listening, networking, and building a picture of where things were going.

The Venn Diagram

When Irena left finance in 2019, she did not look for the perfect role. She looked for the right first step, mapping what she knew how to do against what the emerging market actually needed.

She describes the process clearly: skill set, passion, market need. Three overlapping circles. The goal was not to find where all three perfectly aligned from the start, but to find a credible entry point where her existing capabilities would add genuine value.

Measurable was that entry point. The company was an ESG SaaS platform helping asset owners and asset managers decarbonise the built environment, and was raising its Series B at the time. Irena's background in real estate finance and her existing relationships with asset managers meant she was not starting from scratch. The fit was real, not forced. "I put myself in the way of opportunity," she says. "I was at investment spaces and networking events figuring out where the opportunities were before I even officially left finance."

Her advice to others at that stage is direct: do not wait for the one perfect move. "Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good. The transition can happen in multiple steps." And when you get there, trust the skills you already have. The ability to structure a complex transaction, understand how capital allocates, or stand in front of an investment committee and tell a credible story is not a baseline expectation in sustainability roles. It is a competitive advantage.

The Startup Reality

Irena has now moved between startups and large corporates more than once. After two years at Measurable, she spent three years at MSCI before joining Credit Nature. She is clear-eyed about what each environment offers and what each demands.

Startups give you disproportionate scope. The impact you have on the organisation is larger, the learning is faster, and the personal growth is real. Without a major brand name on your business card, you work harder to open certain doors. But if you come with a pre-existing network and transferable skills, that gap is smaller than people assume.

The more honest piece of advice she would give her earlier self is about focus. Visionary founders create an energy that can absorb entire weeks in ideation, theory of change sessions and inspirational internal meetings. When you are in a commercial role, that energy can pull you away from what actually matters. "If you're in a commercial role, focus on what that role takes," she says. "Some of that stuff can be more boring. You need to bring in the bacon." Business development, product market fit, closing deals, compounding small wins. That is what builds a business, in impact just as much as anywhere else.

The Work Now

Credit Nature is building the infrastructure that nature finance currently lacks. The company's ecology team brings over 30 years of on-the-ground experience, with deep knowledge of what restoration activities actually generate nature uplift and how ecosystems can be restored at scale. The IP sits in the frameworks and methodologies, the measurement tools and the ability to connect investors, offtakers and policymakers around verified outcomes.

Irena draws a comparison to the development of carbon as an asset class, and sees nature as further along that path in some important ways. Nature is place-based. Its outcomes are verifiable. It behaves more like a real asset than carbon does. The ambition at Credit Nature is to see nature become a legitimate institutional asset class by 2050, backed by deep capital. Irena is working on the Series A as part of making that possible.

"I would love to have made a small contribution towards that," she says. It is a characteristically understated way to describe what would be a significant shift in how global capital relates to the natural world.