October 28th, 2021 — The climate crisis poses fundamental risks to business operations, assets, and supply chains around the world. Financial institutions and investors assume this risk, creating increasing levels of fiscal uncertainty as climate impacts multiply.
As shareholders push for greater accountability and regulators begin to require the disclosure and accounting of systemic climate risks, financial institutions lack the accurate, validated and transparent data needed to take action and mitigate financial risks.
Sust Global transforms complex climate data into granular financial signals with best-in-class data integration into customer workflows. Sust Global’s industry-first platform enables investors and businesses to assess the physical climate risks facing their business, measure the emissions their assets produce, and build climate-ready financial products and services.
The climate crisis threatens to decimate our financial system—and we’re not properly assessing its impacts.
The climate crisis is equally a financial and existential risk: the world stands to lose 14% of its total $85T GDP if temperatures rise by 2.0-2.6°C by 2050.
In 2020, economic losses from natural disasters were estimated at $268B, while insured losses totalled only $97B, representing a global protection gap of $171B.
As this gap underscores, institutional investors, large corporates, and small businesses (SMEs) lack comprehensive, transparent, and easy-to-use tools for risk assessment in the face of the climate crisis.
But it’s not all doom and gloom: accurate and actionable climate data has the potential to accelerate economy-wide change.
As investors and financial service providers become empowered—and required—to granularly measure and track the physical risks and carbon emissions of their portfolios, companies that rely on these financiers will be increasingly pushed to create their own decarbonization frameworks, resiliency plans, tracking systems, and reporting in order to comply and access capital.
Regulators are increasingly mandating that financial institutions take climate risks into account, with governments and central banks in New Zealand, the EU, and the UK beginning to implement robust risk disclosure standards and regulations, and with the US expected to follow.
As the market matures, the climate risk intelligence landscape is no longer characterized by competition for data. It’s an integration game.
First-generation climate risk intelligence companies have validated market demand across key sectors like finance, insurance, and asset management.
Selling access to complex or proprietary data streams, these solutions have relied on collaborations with consulting services in order to provide comprehensive analysis and recommendations.
As access to data sources and meteorological modeling becomes increasingly commoditized, the primary challenge for climate risk intelligence providers is now integration: accurately and efficiently sourcing, validating, and incorporating data into specific customer needs in a scalable manner.
Sust Global scalably delivers credible climate data with seamless integration and asset-level granularity.
Sust Global uses deep learning to transform complex climate models and geospatial data streams into validated data on physical climate risks and near real-time emissions output. The founding team’s expertise in satellite-derived geospatial data brings a unique dimension to Sust Global’s approach to climate risk analytics.
Sust Global takes a scalable and productized approach through an API-based, cloud-native architecture that delivers efficient integration and validation for banks, financial data providers, and ESG consultants.
The company also empowers their financial services customers to create and monetize their own climate-risk adjusted products, layering in data from SustOS to provide everything from risk analytics to sustainable ETFs.
The industry-first platform enables cost-effective climate risk reporting that marks a dramatic improvement from the multi-week, multi-team approach used today.
Powerhouse Ventures is proud to join Sust Global’s $3.2M seed round, led by Hambro Perks with additional participation from Vala Capital, Thirdstream Partners, and angel investors from leading UK and US financial firms. We look forward to working with Co-Founder & CEO Josh Gilbert, Co-Founder & CTO Gopal Erinjippurath, and the entire Sust Global team to deliver more credible climate data to global businesses, investors and financial institutions.
Special thanks to Marie Thompson, Ry Storey-Fisher, Mick Acevedo, and Nick Curran.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.