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Founded by geography and globalization experts, Climate Alpha’s AI-based platform helps real estate owners and investors analyze the impact of climate change on their portfolios. The Singapore-based startup today announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Jungle Ventures through its new First Cheque@Jungle program for second-time founders and experienced executives.
Climate Alpha’s clients include institutional investors such as Oaktree Capital and BentallGreenOak, as well as American homebuilder Lennar Corporation.
The platform uses geographic information system (GIS) data and economic modeling to help property owners understand how climate change will affect their properties. It also uses public and private data streams and proprietary machine learning algorithms to generate projections of the economic impacts of climate change.
Before founding Climate Alpha, founder Parag Khanna wrote Move: Where People are Going for I wrote a book called “A Better Future”.
While writing the book, Khanna and her brother began helping their parents find a climate-resistant place to live during their retirement. Parag asked FutureMap’s research director Kailash Prasad to correlate the climate profile of different locations with property value projections. This correlation, called “Climate Oases,” started as a practice area in FutureMap and evolved into Climate Alpha. During the pandemic, Climate Alpha secured a grant from the Singapore government to develop its data science capabilities. The company has also started working with real estate developers such as Lennar and CapitaLand.
Khanna told TechCrunch that Climate Alpha “wants to decipher the complex interplay of geopolitics, demographics, climate change, geography, and economics” (the combination of disciplines is called “spatial finance”). He added that Climate Alpha is in many ways an extension of the ‘Move’ theory, backed by data science, climate modeling and econometrics.
“For decades, real estate prices have been rising at an ever-increasing rate, but suddenly that is no longer the case due to climate change, rising insurance premiums, population migration, high interest rates and changing investment patterns.” said Khanna. “We model these complex interactions in a way that gives us more confidence in where to invest and where not to invest.”
Using data from industry-standard climate models, census, economic data, and other sources, Climate Alpha can provide detailed physical climate risk data, including forecasts and scoring, for any location in the world. . You can also include (and add to) factors such as the reliability of energy grids and economic momentum in countries like the US and Canada, both of which can offset risk. Climate Alpha shows the expected future growth of a location’s economy and asset values compared to historical trends to aid investor decision-making.
For example, Oaktree Capital uses Climate Alpha’s risk and resiliency scoring to find hotspots within its portfolio, provide reporting to investors, and identify future high-growth investments. Atlas Capital leverages data from Climate Alpha to build a climate-proof multi-asset ETF.
Climate Alpha will use the new funding to expand its research and sales teams and expand its investment advisory services. Khanna said the company’s goal is to become “a global platform for guiding asset managers to resilient investments across public and private markets.” It has also expanded into the insurance industry, establishing a global fund with a major asset management company to invest in climate-resilient real estate.
The startup plans to raise a Series A round in the first half of 2024 to leverage data and other proprietary geospatial datasets to build a global resilience index and expand its platform to retail investors. is.
Rishabh Malik, partner at Jungle Ventures, said in a statement: Parag has the right domain expertise to solve this problem, and the platform has developed very solid early adopters in a short period of time. ”