Climate Risk Startup Cervest Secures $30 Million In Series A Funding Round

Cervest, a startup that has created a Climate Intelligence platform to assess climate risk, has secured $30 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Draper Esprit and included current Cervest investors such as Lowercarbon Capital, Astanor Ventures, and Future Positive Capital, as well as new investors TIME Ventures and UNTITLED. This financing round was Cervest’s largest to date and brings the company’s total funding up to $36.2 million.

Founded in 2015 by CEO Iggy Bassi, Cervest provides a cloud-based Climate Intelligence platform that can be used by governments, financial service companies and enterprises to assess climate risk at an asset level, and to evaluate this risk across multiple decades.

Cervest claims that its Climate Intelligence platform is a world first. It’s powered by what the company calls its Earth Science AI technology, which has been built using peer-reviewed research conducted over a five year period and combines both private and public sources of data, statistical science and machine learning.

The first product Cervest has unveiled for the platform is EarthScan. It is designed to give its users invaluable insights into the combined risk of factors like droughts, flooding and extreme temperatures and how these factors might affect assets that the users manage or own.

This type of software could prove invaluable to governments and businesses. The world is experiencing more and more extreme weather events and the volatility of the climate is increasing. These scenarios have the potential to jeopardize trillions of dollars worth of physical assets. Cervest CEO Bassi acknowledged this fact in a statement: “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. By using EarthScan to baseline, monitor, and forecast risk, organizations can take action to protect their assets and navigate toward a more resilient future.”

Cervest is planning to use the funding to push itself into European and US markets. It will do so by offering a freemium model that will provide anyone with a free, standardized climate risk assessment. It is hoped that this will then open up new conversations and create dialogue around the areas of asset-level risk and possible opportunities. The widespread nature and frequency of extreme weather events should make conversations like this easy to start.

The goal of Cervest differs from a lot of other companies operating in the environmental space. Most companies are focused on reducing carbon. Bassi understands this is important, but explained the Cervest approach in a statement: “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.”