Cervest raises $30M Series A round to lead new $40 billion Climate Intelligence market

Read all about this milestone in our official press release below. Take a deeper dive into the news with investor insights from Future Positive Capital here. And if you are keen to try the platform, sign-up to secure your spot in our Early Access Program here.

LONDON, UK – May 20, 2021 – Cervest, creator of the world’s first AI-powered Climate Intelligence (CI) platform, today announced it raised a $30 million Series A round led by Draper Esprit. Cervest seeks to help enterprises, financial services companies, and governments quantify climate risk down to the asset level and, for the first time, across multiple decades and threats. Current investors Astanor Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital(Chris Sacca), and Future Positive Capital also participated in the oversubscribed round, joined by new investors UNTITLED, the venture fund of Magnus Rausing, and TIME Ventures, the venture fund of Marc Benioff. This financing brings Cervest’s total funding to $36.2 million.

The investment comes at a time of accelerating climate volatility where the persistence and interaction of extreme weather events is putting trillions of dollars of physical assets at risk. Business and government leaders must factor this risk into their day-to-day operations and strategic decisions alongside preparing for fast-approaching regulatory changes. Equally, financial services, including insurance players, urgently need greater asset-level Climate Intelligence to underpin investment decisions.

Cervest closes this gap with a first-of-its-kind automated Climate Intelligence platform, powered by the company’s ground-breaking Earth Science AI technology. Built through extensive, peer-reviewed research over the last five years, the platform combines public and private data sources (i.e. NOAA, ECMWF, CMIP6), machine learning, and cutting-edge statistical science to present a unified view of climate risk that’s never before been possible.

EarthScan™, the first product on the platform, gives users on-demand access to current, historical, and predictive views of how combined risks such as flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures can impact the assets they own or manage. Insights are available across multiple risk categories simultaneously, going back 50 years and looking forward 80 years. EarthScan helps users to de-risk business decisions, meet TCFD financial disclosure guidelines, improve asset resilience, and uncover new opportunities to accelerate low-carbon growth.

Cervest will use the financing to move aggressively into the U.S. and European markets. Through its freemium model, Cervest is providing open access to Climate Intelligence by offering everyone a free, standardized climate risk assessment, spurring new conversations, and fostering an open and common dialogue on shared asset-level risk and opportunities.

“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 Vinoth Jayakumar, Partner and Fintech Practice Lead at Draper Esprit. “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. We believe Iggy and the team’s deep science approach will provide the foundations of the Climate Intelligence market.” Jayakumar will join Cervest’s Board of Directors.

“Much of the spotlight is on decarbonization today. While this is absolutely necessary, it is not sufficient to build asset-level resilience,” said Bassi. “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.”