London-based climate intelligence platform Cervest secures $30 million in Series A round

London’s AI-powered climate intelligence platform Cervest has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Draper Esprit. Existing investors Astanor Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, and Future Positive Capital followed on, and new Magnus Rausing’s UNTITLED and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures jumped aboard. As part of the deal, Draper Esprit’s Vinoth Jayakumar will join the board. The company reports that the funding will be used to spearhead entry to the US market and aggressively pursue European projects.

“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 of 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.”

Founded in 2016 by Iggy Bassi, Cervest provides an AI-based climate intelligence data platform that enables oranisations to manage and adapt climate risk, down to the asset level. The offering combines both public and private data sources, runs them through an extensively peer-reviewed machine learning process, tosses in a dash of statistical science, et voilà, a homongenised view of climate risk.

Cervest’s first offering, EarthScan, provides commercial and government entities access to current, historic, and predictive views of how combined risks such as droughts, temperature shifts, and mass flooding can impact the assets they own and/or manage. In other words, EarthScan uses AI to generate any and every, “Oh shit, we’re fucked; we’d better not do X,Y, and Z,” scenario.

“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.”