Cervest

Cervest was a London-based climate intelligence company that provided a platform for assessing climate-related risks on physical assets. The company was founded in 2016 by Iggy Bassi, a serial entrepreneur who had previously founded a sustainable agribusiness in Ghana. The impetus for Cervest came from Bassi's firsthand experience with the destructive impact of extreme weather events on his farming business and the lack of tools to quantify and predict such climate risks. Cervest operated as a provider of AI-powered climate risk solutions, catering to a diverse client base that included enterprises, financial services companies, governments, and growers. The company's business model centered on its AI-powered Climate Intelligence (CI) platform, which transformed complex climate science into actionable insights. This platform combined public and private data sources with machine learning and statistical science to offer a unified view of climate risk. Revenue was to be generated on a per-signal basis for private businesses, with a separate approach for governmental clients. The company's flagship product, EarthScan, allowed users to access on-demand historical, current, and predictive views of how combined risks like flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures could affect their assets. These insights, available for multiple risk categories simultaneously and spanning from 50 years in the past to 80 years in the future, were designed to help organizations with risk management, strategic planning, and compliance with climate-related financial disclosure requirements. Cervest aimed to democratize climate intelligence, offering a freemium model to provide open access to standardized climate risk assessments. Throughout its operation, Cervest achieved several milestones, including raising a total of $36.2 million in funding over two rounds. A significant Series A funding round in May 2021, led by Draper Esprit, raised $30 million. The company also secured partnerships with major firms like Accenture to expand its capabilities in delivering ESG intelligence. However, despite these achievements and outward signs of growth, Cervest was declared insolvent in mid-2023. Subsequently, its intellectual property and intangible assets were acquired by Mitiga Solutions, a climate tech company based in Spain. Keywords: climate intelligence, climate risk, asset-level risk, Earth Science AI, physical risk assessment, climate data modeling, ESG reporting, financial disclosure, risk management, environmental data, sustainable finance, climate adaptation, extreme weather events, climate resilience, enterprise risk management, portfolio analysis, climate tech, AI platform, data analytics, Iggy Bassi