Climate risk intelligence company Climate X has raised €16.8 million to accelerate its global expansion and help the world’s leading financial organisations price the impact of climate change across their physical asset portfolios. GV (Google Ventures) led the Series A investment round, supported by Pale blue dot, CommerzVentures, A/O, Blue Wire Capital, PT1, Unconventional Ventures and Western Technology Investment (WTI).
Climate X will use the new funding to accelerate its expansion in Europe, North America, and APAC. It will initially build out the commercial team in its recently opened New York office to service growing customer demand across the region from major financial institutions, global asset managers and real estate investors. The company will also look to augment its products in line with evolving commercial and regulatory requirements by incorporating additional data sources into its platform.
Climate X was co-founded in 2020 by CEO Lukky Ahmed and COO Kamil Kluza, who have over 30 years of combined corporate risk management experience. Lukky has led stress testing and risk transformation programmes for organisations like HSBC Bank and Lloyds Banking Group, while Kamil has modelled risk for organisations such as Barclays, MUFG, and Accenture and was involved in designing the first-ever tranche of coco bonds.
Scalable Model
Recognising an unmet need for more defensible and scalable climate risk modelling in financial services, the duo set about building the technology behind Climate X. Their unique risk assessment model uses a combination of Digital Twin of the Earth, physics and AI, underpinned by more than 500 trillion data points, including a proprietary library of 1.5 billion individual assets and 44 million miles of infrastructure.
Lukky Ahmed, CEO at Climate X, said, “In just over one year since going to market, Climate X has become one of the world’s fastest growing providers of physical climate risk data and analytics, driving value for global financial services clients with over $6.5 trillion in combined AUM. Assessing the impact of physical climate risk on asset valuations and business operations is now a necessity, not a nice-to-have.”
As easy to navigate as Google Maps, the Climate X platform allows clients to model the future likelihood of 16 different climate hazards—from extreme heat to tropical cyclones and flooding—across eight warming scenarios over a 100-year time horizon, right down to the individual asset level.
Translating these risks into expected annual losses, Climate X’s technology then allows clients to determine the ROI of taking pre-emptive climate adaptation action based on a range of 22 different interventions. Climate X’s 50-strong team includes technologists, scientists, and sales leaders from world-leading organisations such as Amazon Prime, Monzo, HSBC, and Mozilla. The company is advised by financial services and real estate luminaries, including Robert Wigley, Chair of UK Finance, Jackie Bennett, Chair of the Bank of England’s Residential Property Forum, and David Carlin, Head of Risk at the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative.
