On Thursday, Washington D.C.’s Demex Group, which has developed a climate risk management tool for property owners, tenants and managers, announced that it has raised $9 million in a Series A venture capital round. The round was led by impact VC investor Anthemis Group, AI/IoT and cybersecurity VC Blue Bear Capital, QBE Investors, and IA Capital. The new capital raise follows a $4.2 million seed round led by Anthemis and IA Capital one year ago.
Demex describes its technology as a “first-of-its-kind” platform for analyzing, pricing and transferring climate-linked risks at scale, built around the notion that extreme weather events lead to dramatic fluctuations in business revenue and operating costs, but in a manner that is highly localized to each property, individualized at the occupant level, and increasingly more impactful than natural catastrophes.
“Property owners, tenants and managers are typically overlooked by the incumbent weather risk marketplace that focuses on agriculture and energy,” Demex Founder and CEO Ed Byrns said in a comment on the capital round. “Recent advances in cloud computing, big data, and blockchain have enabled us to deliver a simple, secure, and scalable platform that’s specifically designed for climate resiliency. We are thrilled to both retain our investors from the seed round and excited to be joined by Blue Bear Capital and QBE Ventures on our journey creating global climate resilience.”
According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, provided by Demex, the first six months of 2021 brought 8 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States. This follows a record set in 2020 with 22 events, breaking the previous record of 16 events set in 2011 and again in 2017. According to NOAA data, the number of extreme weather events in the U.S. increased from 29 in the decade 1981-1990 to 105 between 2011-2020.
The company recently launched its Demex Climate Indicator as a free public resource for analysis of localized climate spanning multiple weather variables including summer-heat, winter-chill, rainfall, and snowfall. The Center includes over 650,000 unique climate assessments.
“We see an ecosystem teeming with new tools for ‘climate intelligence’ to help businesses understand the risk of volatile weather for their assets, operations and budgets. The question then becomes how to address that risk,” said Blue Bear Capital’s Hank Hattemer, who will join the company’s board. “Demex has built a masterful answer to this question – the definitive platform for pricing and transferring complex weather risks that are ubiquitous yet behave in highly localized ways. The Demex team has the industry experience and product development expertise to scale its platform as managing climate and weather risk becomes standard protocol for CFOs and risk managers in virtually every industry.”
Last month, Demex Group and insurance tech company Vave announced a partnership to offer extreme temperature insurance to commercial properties across the United States. Under the partnership, Demex technology is embedded in Vave’s policy offering, so that claims are automatically triggered when the local temperature passes a predefined threshold.
