On Thursday, London startup Cervest, which has developed what it calls the world’s first AI-powered Climate Intelligence (CI) platform, announced that it has raised $30 million in Series A venture capital. The oversubscribed round was led by European listed venture capital firm Draper Esprit, joined by new investors UNTITLED, the venture fund of Tetra Pak heir Magnus Rausing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures. Existing investors Astanor Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and Future Positive Capital re-upped their commitments to the firm, raising Cervest’s total venture funding to $36.2 million to date. The company plans to use this latest capital round to expand aggressively in the U.S. and Europe.
Cervest has differentiated itself in the climate fintech space by generating AI-powered data through a platform that allows companies, financial firms, and governments to quantify climate risk down to the asset level, across multiple decades, and threats.
The platform does this by synthesizing information from public and private sources, including data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, World Climate Research Program, and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, machine learning, and advanced statistics, producing an unprecedented view of potential asset risk from climate change.
The platform’s core offering, EarthScan, provides on-demand access to current, historical and predictive views of how combined risks (e.g. flooding, droughts, extreme temperatures), can impact assets under management or ownership. Insights are available across multiple risk categories simultaneously, backtested 50 years and modeled 80 years in future.
“Climate volatility has thrown us into a new era where Climate Intelligence needs to be integrated into all decisions,” said Cervest Founder and CEO Iggy Bassi. “Organizations that fail to do so risk being blindsided by climate events such as the recent floods and fires in Australia, the droughts in Europe, and the winter freeze in Texas.
“Much of the spotlight is on decarbonization today. While this is absolutely necessary, it is not sufficient to build asset-level resilience. To succeed, we need a complete and unified view of climate risk, simultaneously considering the impact of accelerating physical risks, alongside decarbonization investments and adjacent transition risks as we build a low carbon economy. This is exactly what Cervest will do, enabling everyone to become climate intelligent by making fully informed climate decisions,” Bassi said.
“Climate Tech has grabbed a lot of attention recently, with good reason. But solutions come from understanding the problem – Climate Intelligence is a new $40 billion market category which seeks to provide us with answers,” said Draper Esprit partner Vinoth Jayakumar, who will join Cervest’s board. “Cervest’s pioneering approach to quantifying risk, in a way that was never before possible, means we can better understand the economics of the problem and bring real-world market solutions to bear.”
In April 2020, Cervest was one of just two U.K. companies (out of 11 total) selected to join Google‘s first-ever Startup Accelerator program based around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
One Comment