Case Study

HSS: Based on your background, you seem like you were born to be an entrepreneur.

Alisha Fuller-Armah: It's funny, now I'm a mother, and I have the pleasure of reflecting on my own upbringing, I can see I was born into entrepreneurship. My mother is a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur who built and scaled multiple businesses long before being a 'founder' was fashionable. That was the model I grew up with, so it felt normal: if you want something to exist, you create it. I never absorbed the idea that you have one job, one vocation, or one calling either. My mother earned a doctorate in a field she genuinely cared about, and then followed wildly different interests through business. I took the same approach, following curiosity, then building and scaling in different industries, because it's what I saw at home.

A conventional job has never really appealed. The stability can look attractive, but it comes with limits, and I've always been more comfortable creating my own path than fitting into someone else's structure. I've found I'm happiest on the white-knuckle ride that is founding, building and scaling. It shapes how you think, how you spend your time, and the level of ownership you take over outcomes, and yourself, and I like operating that way.

HSS: What inspired you to found BlazeBalm?

AFA: After I sold my first business, Hummingbird Hall, which we built from scratch, with my mother as my quiet partner, we moved to a remote part of Scotland. It's stunning and peaceful, but it also brought a risk I hadn't really considered before: wildfire. The reality hit hard, a serious fire could wipe out everything, and even the suppression methods can leave lasting damage.

The first iteration of BlazeBalm was pure self-preservation. I'd just started a mushroom farm, and working with mycelium opened my eyes to how many natural materials have inherent fire-retardant properties. I couldn't understand why those weren't being used to protect buildings and assets. BlazeBalm has evolved a lot since then, we're now many iterations on and the current formulation doesn't use mycelium, but that was the original spark.

Living somewhere truly remote also changes your mindset: if a fire comes, help isn't immediate, water isn't on tap, and you can't assume anyone is coming quickly. I built BlazeBalm to protect what we had, and then realised many other people, it's said around 3.5 billion, live with the same risk.

HSS: I feel like I hear the phrase a lot, necessity is the mother of invention, and you're living that phrase right now. My next question is, how were you able to raise £400,000 in grant funding?

AFA: I didn't even know grants existed. My previous businesses were built and scaled without equity or investors, so my plan here was the same: grow organically, using revenue.

Then, by luck, a local development agency toured my mushroom farm. I decided to share what I'd been working on as a passion project, inventing a fire-retardant membrane, and that's when I first learned about grants and the wider world of science, innovation and biotech funding. It was completely new territory, especially because I didn't see myself as a bioscientist. Art History actually gave me an edge, though, part of our formulation is derived from an illuminated manuscript binding, and it's not something I would have thought up without my background!

The words "innovation grants" sent me into a beautiful spiral of Googling. Since then, we've been fortunate to secure what we've applied for, across government innovation agencies, accelerators, and competitions, though I'm never complacent. The goal has always been to use non-dilutive funding to accelerate market entry and de-risk the path to scale.

I also think BlazeBalm was attractive because I'd already de-risked it through bootstrapping. Alongside my really supportive family, I did the early, unglamorous risk-taking myself. I'd started inventing and testing it four or five years before I applied for the first grant, funded through the mushroom farm, tutoring, and marking exam papers. One summer I counted roughly 1,000 papers, alongside being a mother, running the mushroom farm, and developing BlazeBalm.

So by the time I applied, I wasn't pitching an idea, I could show a well-developed solution with a compelling story. Wildfire risk is real and growing, and it's said around 6% of the Earth burns. But the other side of that story was execution: the solution already existed, and it was far enough along that funders could clearly see what they'd be accelerating. It felt like they were compounding traction that was already there.

HSS: That's amazing. That is not the story I hear from anyone else. Usually, the founders I talk to will apply to hundreds of places before they hear their first yes. Congratulations!

AFA: I think it's because I assumed I'd have to do it on my own, so by the time I applied I was further along than most. I wasn't pitching a concept, I was showing something that already worked.

Getting the grants was a real moment: it validated the technology. But then the question shifts. Proving it in a lab or small pilot and filing a patent is one thing; scaling it, manufacturing it reliably, and selling it at scale across multiple markets is quite another. That's the chapter we're in now.

HSS: What would you say is your biggest challenge?

AFA: Our biggest challenge is education, and, specifically, positioning. BlazeBalm is category-defining: it doesn't map neatly onto what people already know. We're not a chemical you spray on a property, and we're not a powered system. We're a self-deployable, compostable asset-protection membrane, and that means the 'how' of using it is different. The work is helping people understand what it is while also anchoring it to familiar categories so adoption doesn't feel like a leap, and doing that in a way that isn't wildly expensive.

Close behind that is the noise you get when you're challenging incumbents. Even with testing and real-world evidence, it's easy for people to seed doubt, sometimes casually, sometimes aggressively. I had one particularly acerbic analyst tell me that BlazeBalm is 'nothing more than a science project'. That sort of commentary can be designed to shrink your ambition before you've even entered the market.

So the challenge is twofold: build understanding for something new, and keep moving through scepticism long enough for execution to speak louder than opinion. And yes, I do think female founders often get a heavier dose of that doubt.

HSS: That reminds me of a professor from my MBA. I majored in Marketing, and this professor was in charge of brands like Lipton tea and Wishbone salad dressing. He would always say, once you're in the top spot, your whole strategy is defense. He would talk about buying up shelf space in stores so that challengers can't even get in. I can see the parallels in your business of the incumbents playing defense.

HSS: As you look back on the business, was there an event or an inflection point that had a significant effect on the business?

AFA: The first was meeting the person who introduced me to grants — that single conversation accelerated everything. It wasn't just the money; it changed what felt possible, and how quickly we could move.

The second was realising there's actually a name and a world for what I'm doing: deep tech. It sounds obvious now, but it was a big shift to understand I'm not just a lone, slightly strange person working on this — there's a whole community of people trying to solve genuinely hard problems, including wildfire.

Joining the Undaunted accelerator in London really brought that to life. You're in a room with someone trying to sequester carbon, someone else tackling plastics, and people working on all sorts of massive challenges. It's inspiring — but also strangely calming. Online, you can read someone's story and think, "Oh my goodness, they've done so much…" Then you meet them and you realise we're all just humans trying to figure it out — and we're more similar than we realise. That sense of community is powerful, and it gave me confidence — not because I doubted BlazeBalm, but because it helped me show that confidence more clearly.

HSS: What's your growth strategy for BlazeBalm?

AFA: Wildfire affects every continent. 3.5 billion people are at risk of wildfire. Our eventual aspirations are to be everywhere and to be the choice solution for wildfire protection. To do that, we must be strategic about our entry into the market.

Initially, we will be launching in America, Canada, and Australia, because the knowledge about how to spend on prevention is slightly more ingrained in their culture. The growth strategy is via homeowner associations, individual households, and insurers.

We've actually had some offers of equity from insurance companies, which we didn't go through with at that time. They wanted equity in exchange for scaling through their networks, which is not part of our growth strategy right now. I think we'll be going by the insurers, individuals, homeowner's associations, and fire councils.

Once we are established in these channels, the real fun begins. There are a lot of people in the Global South, especially, who have very little wildfire technology or exposure. That could lead to partnerships with NGOs or governments.

Even though we're just concentrating in the crowded Global North, that's not really the growth that I envision; it's just a starting place. Once the concept is fully established and we have a blueprint of how to educate our customers, it's very important that BlazeBalm be equitable at its core.

For example, many people have been removed from the insurance ecosystem because wildfire is so destructive that people are simply not renewed. There's a social impetus behind what we're doing in ensuring people are protected. It's very important that we're not a hugely expensive solution.

We are commercial, and we are a business, but we're not doing it in a way that exploits those most at risk. To use a drug analogy, we're not looking to be an expensive drug that only a few people can afford. That's not what we envision.

HSS: What are the lessons you've learned so far?

AFA: One of the biggest lessons and it's linked to meeting other deep tech founders is that no one is as certain as their shiny pitch deck suggests. Behind every confident narrative there's uncertainty, trade-offs, and a lot of figuring-it-out in real time.

I've spoken to founders who've raised £25 million and, honestly, many of them are almost as unsure as I am just at a different scale. That was surprisingly grounding. It's easy to assume everyone else has it all mapped out, but most people are making decisions with incomplete information and moving forward anyway.

HSS: Would you agree when you speak to people?

AFA: I feel like there are two types of founders. There are ones that tell me you just fake it till you make it, and no one knows what they're doing. Then you have some people, it's typically with a more niche product or solution, where they say, I know this is the best solution. I don't speak to as many of those founders, but my theory is that their market is so small, and they can clearly map it out. Your market is the entire world, and your problem is huge. It's a mammoth undertaking to map that out.

I see it even in the corporate world, you may think, wow, this person's really sharp. Then all of a sudden, they start talking, and you think in your head, what are they saying?

HSS: Yes, I see that too.

AFA: Exactly — and I think people could be a bit more honest with themselves about that. When you've built businesses, you know the internal story. Other people see the polished outcome, but you've lived the messy reality that got you there.

With the wedding venue, for example, it looked glossy — and it was — but it didn't happen overnight. It was up-down, up-down. It wasn't a perfect linear journey.

HSS: Do you have any advice for female-founded businesses?

AFA: Honestly, I feel like I should be getting advice. But if I had to offer something, it would be this: don't let age or family decisions deter you from founding a business.

There's still this narrative that you have to be a certain age, or that you have to choose — family or business, as if it's a binary decision. I turned 40 on my last birthday, and I don't buy that framing. You can build at any age, and you can build with a family.

You're a mother, Lisa, I'm a mother. Motherhood is probably the most fulfilling thing I've ever done, and I love it. And I think it's fine to say that and still run a serious, ambitious business. You don't have to hide that part of your life to be taken seriously.

My mother often says that in her generation, when women were building businesses, they almost couldn't show they had a family, and they definitely couldn't admit that family was a priority. I think now it can be different. I was in an accelerator where one founder had just given birth, she was baby-wearing through sessions, and it was brilliant to see. Technology helps too: we're having this conversation online, which makes so much more possible than it used to.

So my advice is: don't shrink yourself. You can build a business and have a full life, and you're allowed to show both.

HSS: I love that. When was being a female founder an advantage for you?

AFA: I think it's often when people would underestimate me. I think that sometimes one goes into a room and there are some very confident men. I think women display their confidence very differently. I can be confident, while at the same time I can be quiet and grounded.

HSS: Yes, because you live in reality. Some of these men, I don't know where they live, but it's not reality.

AFA: Exactly. In these situations, I think it's a benefit because everyone is just focused on their business, and it means that I can go in there and just outperform on execution. I wasn't even someone that people thought that they had to measure up to. We as women display our confidence or competence in a slightly more nuanced way. I don't mind everyone looking at someone else and thinking they're more suited, because at the end of the day, I often believe it's how you execute.

HSS: Yes. Well said. Thank you so much for your time.

Insights

How We Met: LinkedIn

Alisha reached out to me on LinkedIn and I'm so grateful she did. After a bit of a hiatus How She Started is back at it!