When you first start making climate tech software, it might make sense to work on something related to carbon accounting. This is because the most popular climate tech software companies are working on accounting, offsetting, removing, or telling regulators about climate change. It’s easy to see where funders are interested by looking at the startups in the area: The accounting firm Persefoni in New York has raised $164.2 million so far, while Plan A in Berlin has raised $43 million, Supercritical raised $15.8 million, and CUR8 raised $6.7 million.
But there was a short period of growth in this sector before it was swallowed up by a wave of mergers and acquisitions: figuring out the climate risk of physical assets. To get to that rich seam again, the U.K. startup Climate X is now going out of stealth mode with a Series A round of $18 million led by GV. The new company wants to help banks figure out how much climate change will cost their real assets. They will use the extra money to grow in Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.
CommerzVentures, A/O, Blue Wire Capital, PT1, Unconventional Ventures, and Western Technology Investment (WTI) were also investors in the round. Pale Blue Dot, an existing investor, also took part.
The new company says its platform can figure out the climate risk of homes, businesses, and assets like roads, trains, and power plants. It has worked with Legal & General, CBRE, and Virgin Money so far.
Lukky Ahmed (CEO) and Kamil Kluza (COO), who have worked in corporate risk before, started Climate X on a road that many other startups have taken. Before being bought by Moody’s, Four Twenty Seven did a good job of figuring out how climate change would affect towns and infrastructure. The Climate Service, on the other hand, helped businesses make decisions that took climate risk into account and was later bought by S&P Global.
Still, the World Economic Forum says the market for adapting to climate change is worth about $2 trillion. This means Climate X has a pretty big place to play in.
Ahmed and Kluza built a digital twin of the Earth using more than 500 trillion data points and a private library of 1.5 billion assets and 44 million miles of infrastructure because they saw a need for more scalable climate risk modeling in the financial services industry.
With an interface that looks like Google Maps, Climate X’s platform lets customers see how extreme weather events like flooding and heat waves will affect properties over a 100-year period of time. They can even narrow it down to specific properties. Ahmed said the tool now checks climate risk for clients in the financial services industry who have more than $6.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM).
Climate X Almost Didn’t Happen, Though
Ahmed told TechCrunch, “We re-mortgaged a house in Birmingham because we didn’t know how to raise venture capital and we had hired some people.” “We thought, ‘We need to pay them!'” That’s what we did. Lucky for us, Pale Blue Dot finally said yes after saying no three or four times. They sent a small check, and all of a sudden, that check turned into new talks about winning the seed round.
Ahmed says that he has learned “a lot about fundraising” since then.
Ahmed used to be in charge of stress tests and risk transformation projects for HSBC Bank and Lloyds Banking Group. He says that becoming a tech entrepreneur wasn’t easy or quick for him. “I didn’t go to college because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.” “I worked in a number of stores and call centers,” he said. “Once I joined HSBC, I worked on mergers and acquisitions and then moved to Hong Kong to build the stress-testing function. This is where the bank used macroeconomic shocks to test the balance sheet and P&L across different regions.”
In 2017, Ahmed felt like there was more to life than just working for a bank, so he moved back to London and started working for Accenture. It was there that he met his co-founder Kluza, who had modeled risk for companies like Barclays, MUFG, and Accenture. Ahmed remembered, “I basically told him, ‘Let’s go do this for ourselves because Accenture is taking 60% of our work, what are we doing?'”
He said that Climate X raised the Series A with GV in the lead “because the team is great.”
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“After evaluating many tools and services for a year, we are now working with Climate X to help our clients understand and get ready for the risks that come with climate change,” said Robert Bernard, chief sustainability officer at CBRE.
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