Due Diligence: Cervest Raises $30 Million for Climate Risk Assessment Platform

Real Estate News: Real Estate Investing Podcast

A London-based company is betting on the need for climate risk management for governments, companies, and investors around the world. Cervest just announced $30 million dollars in new venture capital funding to grow its climate intelligence platform called Earthscan. According to media website Axios, the money will be used to expand the company’s presence from London to the U.S. and other countries in Europe. (1)

The Cervest website calls the service “on-demand climate intelligence.” It promises to help you “understand how current and future climate events will affect your physical assets.”

Understanding Climate Change Risk

Founder and CEO, Iggy Bassi, said in a press release: “Climate volatility has thrown us into a new era where climate intelligence needs to be integrated into all decisions. 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.” (2)

The new Earthscan platform is still under development, but you can see the kinds of information it will provide. You can also sign up for a spot in the company’s Early Access Program. (3)

Cervest’s Earthscan Tool

Earthscan is described as an on-demand asset-level risk analysis tool that combines statistical science and machine learning with public and private data. And it says it will make the Earthscan platform openly accessible to everyone for free. It calls this a “freemium model.”

The company says Earthscan will look at data for things like flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures going back 50 years, and use that data to forecast the risk to assets over the next 80 years. It says: “EarthScan equips all organizations with the climate intelligence needed to anticipate and act on climate risk to assets.”

Cervest anticipates that climate intelligence will soon be a requirement for all major asset-related decisions. It claims that climate risk is business risk, and climate intelligence is business intelligence because climate events are expected to be a threat to assets everywhere.

Climate Risk is Business Risk

Of course, the impact and the timeline will vary from place to place. Cervest says that: “Climate intelligence can tell us what’s happening with any asset in the world, right now, as well as how it’s changed over time, and how it will change in the future.”

The questions that Cervest says its tool will answer include:

1 - What are the physical risks to my assets?

2 - How will a changing climate impact my supply chains?

3 - What competitive opportunities will emerge?

4 - How can I calculate, disclose and comply with regulatory requirements now and in the future?

Axios reports that Cervest has been growing the Earthscan database with asset data from around the world. And that by opening the platform up to the public for free, it will help connect all the stakeholders for a particular asset to the same data on climate risk. For example, that might be an investor, the bank that loaned the money to the investor, and a future tenant.

Climate Risk as a Major Industry

Axios says that Cervest isn’t the only player in this field. It mentions a few others including one called Jupiter Intelligence. It says Jupiter claims to have already signed contracts with the U.S. government, a major bank, several insurance companies, and two big U.S. cities.

Jupiter CEO, Rich Sorkin, told Axios that he isn’t concerned about competition from Cervest. He says: “We believe that climate risk management will be a major industry, and we think there will be room for multiple companies.”

Axios listed a few other climate risk companies such as Demex, First Street Foundation, the Rhodium Group, KatRisk LLC, and The Climate Service. Demex co-founder, Steven Bennett, says these companies can be divided into three types. He says that some focus on extreme weather events, while others assess the risk and help clients make plans for climate change events or they are designed to help customers operate within the context of those extreme events.

The Axios report expects to see more climate risk companies emerging, as demand grows for this kind of data and the AI tools become more sophisticated. It also expects investor interest to rise which will help feed the growth of this space. So it may not be a big surprise to hear more about massive funding rounds for these kinds of operations in the near future.

If you want to read more about this, check for links in the notes for this episode at NewsForInvestors.com.

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Thanks for listening. I’m Kathy Fettke.

Links:

1 - https://www.axios.com/prominent-investors-jump-into-climate-change-risk-47e0168b-d416-4338-a427-507f2304b8bc.html

2 - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cervest-secures-30-million-in-series-a-funding-to-launch-worlds-first-ai-powered-climate-intelligence-platform-and-lead-new-40-billion-market-301295454.html

3 - https://cervest.earth/