Natalya Wallin
Natalya Wallin is the founder of Vitality

As a child growing up in Chicago, Natalya Wallin was raised on stories that most Americans never hear. Her grandparents had survived deportation from Poland to a Siberian labor camp, uprooted in the dead of night and forced into the brutality of exile. Those stories, woven into her earliest memories, weren't just history lessons. They were fuel. "I've always had this fire in the belly to do something about situations in the world that I don't think are okay," Wallin says. "It's just how I'm wired."

Today, Wallin is the founder of Vitality, a Nature-Inspired investment fund founded in 2023, aimed at catalyzing early-stage solutions that work in harmony with the natural world. The path to this moment, where science, justice, economics, and ecological restoration intersect, was anything but conventional.

Wallin began her journey with a scholarship to study biology, eventually entering a Ph.D program in molecular genetics. Her love of scientific rigor and the art of breaking down complex systems was real. But her mind was elsewhere.

Her lab bookshelf was filled not with gene sequencing manuals but with volumes on global justice, human rights, and international affairs. One day, a mentor finally named what was already obvious. "He told me, 'You light up when you talk about global issues. You should pay attention to that," she recalls. That conversation set Wallin on a different track altogether: out of the lab and into the world.

She pivoted to humanities and public policy, seeking answers to the root causes of global injustice. That clarity led to a defining moment: an invitation to help build a fund focused on the economic systems driving forced labor in global supply chains. The fund, in partnership with a former corporate procurement executive, was dedicated to untangling how opaque, fragmented systems allow human exploitation to thrive in industries like apparel and construction.

"For me, that fund was an opportunity to build something from the ground up," she says. "It was about systems thinking. About figuring out: where are the biggest leverage points? How can we bring together the private sector, public sector, technology, and civil society? And use every tool available to solve problems?"

Over the next several years, Wallin led global fundraising efforts, built and managed cross-continental teams, and immersed herself in the mechanics of systemic change. The work was hard. It was often uphill. But it solidified her belief that complexity isn't a barrier but an invitation.

While winding down that fund, Wallin enrolled in an executive MBA program. It was a chance to reflect, reorient, and ask a question that would once again reset her trajectory: What is the most important thing I could do next? "Everything I'd done up to that point suddenly came full circle, right from biology, to public policy, and systems work," she affirms. "I realized the biggest leverage point of all was our relationship with the natural world."

Her new mission became clear. If the soil isn't healthy, if the water isn't clean, if the air isn't breathable: human systems, economies, and even human health collapse. "If the phytoplankton communities in the ocean collapse and we can't breathe," Wallin says, "how much is your financial portfolio worth? It's worth zero."

That clarity gave birth to Vitality, an early-stage fund based on the Biophilia Hypothesis: the idea that humans are biologically and psychologically wired to thrive in connection with the natural world. Wallin began to build a thesis rooted in biomimicry, working with scientists to define a practical, investable lens: fund entrepreneurs whose technologies tap into nature's intelligence.

"We're talking about solutions that are resilient, circular, and energy-efficient by design," Wallin says. "From agriculture to the built environment to textile manufacturing, we're looking for people who are solving problems at the intersection of human and planetary health."

Natalya Wallin
Natalya Wallin

Vitality, for Wallin, is her idea of a full-circle moment. Her early passion for biology, her systems acumen from fund management, and her lifelong instinct to confront root causes have all converged. And behind it all, there's still that same tenacity she had as a kid in Chicago, compelled to take action against what isn't right.

A long-distance mountain runner and Life Time Foundation athlete, Wallin's connection to the natural world has always remained deeply personal. She's visited more than thirty countries, drawn inspiration from the wild, and learned firsthand the endurance required to build something meaningful from the ground up. "We're not just trying to put a band-aid on broken systems," she says. "We're asking, how do we redesign them altogether, starting with how we value nature, and how we value each other?"

With Vitality, Natalya Wallin isn't just investing in startups. She's investing in a future that acknowledges our biological, ecological, and moral interdependence and puts it at the heart of innovation.