Climate risk intelligence firm Climate X has secured $18 million to expand globally and aid leading financial organizations in evaluating the impact of climate change on their physical asset portfolios.
The Series A funding round was led by GV (Google Ventures), with additional support from Pale Blue Dot, CommerzVentures, A/O, Blue Wire Capital, PT1, Unconventional Ventures, and Western Technology Investment (WTI).
As one of the fastest-growing entities in the $2 trillion climate adaptation market, UK-based Climate X provides proprietary financial insights on the potential impact of climate risks on physical asset valuations, encompassing residential and commercial properties as well as infrastructure like roads, railways, and power networks.
Renowned financial institutions and asset managers, including Legal & General, CBRE, Virgin Money, and Federated Hermes, rely on Climate X’s data analytics platform for informed investment and portfolio management decisions amidst stringent climate risk-related capital requirement regulations.
Climate X was co-founded by CEO Lukky Ahmed and COO Kamil Kluza, who collectively bring over 30 years of corporate risk management experience. Ahmed has spearheaded stress testing and risk transformation projects at HSBC Bank and Lloyds Banking Group, while Kluza has modeled risk for organizations such as Barclays, MUFG, and Accenture and contributed to designing the first tranche of coco bonds.
Identifying a gap in scalable and defensible climate risk modeling in financial services, Ahmed and Kluza developed the technology behind Climate X. Their unique risk assessment model integrates a Digital Twin of the Earth, physics, and AI, leveraging over 500 trillion data points, including a proprietary library of 1.5 billion individual assets and 44 million miles of infrastructure.
CEO Lukky Ahmed commented: “In just over a year since our market entry, Climate X has become one of the fastest-growing providers of physical climate risk data and analytics. We deliver value to global financial services clients with a combined AUM of over $6.5 trillion. Assessing the impact of physical climate risk on asset valuations and business operations is essential.”
Ahmed emphasized that their workflow solutions transform physical climate risk assessment from a compliance requirement to a competitive advantage, enhancing business outcomes for clients and their customers.
The Climate X platform, as user-friendly as Google Maps, 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, down to individual assets.
By converting these risks into expected annual losses, Climate X’s technology enables clients to evaluate the ROI of preemptive climate adaptation measures based on 22 different interventions.
COO Kamil Kluza remarked: “The climate adaptation market will be crucial in the coming years. Historically, it has been dominated by expensive consultancies dependent on manual analysis and opaque solutions that reduce climate risk to a single rating. We’re revolutionizing this with technology that drives business value, helping clients make critical decisions about their asset portfolios and investment strategies to build resilience, reduce insurance premiums, and protect asset values.”
- Press Release
