A 2023 Retrospective.

Note: This statement is written in a personal capacity and is not intended to represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of Climate X, or any other individual, at any level.

Before I start, I want to acknowledge that 2023 has been a testing year for almost everyone I know. Great founders, building great businesses in massive markets, haven't made it to 2024. The Climate Tech industry, whilst resistant, hasn't been immune – peers in our industry have scaled down their teams significantly (in some cases by 40-60%) or are no longer operating (as was the case with EarthScan – kudos to the great team there, many of whom continue to work on the climate agenda).

Founders and teams – please keep building. Ideally, to help solve problems in the climate space – this is the greatest challenge of our time, and we need all hands on deck. Investors – I hope you continue to back ideas that have the potential to change the world for the better. Climate tech is poised to be one of the best-performing investments you can make, and it comes with a positive impact you can be proud of – the time is now.

Climate X has broken that trend and shown resilience.

We're ending 2023 on a high; this marks our busiest year since the company was founded, we've delivered world-class products that our customers love, and have favourable tailwinds going into 2024.

We’ve entered our next hockey stick moment with exciting new challenges – and opportunities – all yet to come.

A fast moving tunnel made of constant stimulus

Earlier this year, a good friend – Samuel Gill , co-founder and President at carbon ratings scale-up Sylvera , told me something that sticks in my mind today.

He said to me that life sometimes feels like racing through a tunnel. And that tunnel is a constant flow of information and stimulus, coming at you 24/7 and in every direction. As founders, we're sat in the driving seat – and whilst we're aware of what's happening in the moment, in retrospect, it feels like we've been living on reflexes and being in a permanent state of autopilot.

The vast amount of information we consume every day, the decisions we have to make – sometimes in a split second, and the number of plates we're spinning at any one time would overwhelm any sane person if they tried to plan for and acknowledge the scale of the gauntlet we run every day.

This blog is published on the third anniversary of Climate X – we were officially registered as a company on 31 December, 2020.

I want to take this opportunity to look back at the tunnel and celebrate some of Climate X's 2023 key accomplishments.

Caveat: It is impossible for me to list everything in this short blog. Please forgive me in advance in case of any omissions or if you're not specifically mentioned as part of this 2023 wrap-up. If I write a book about the story of Climate X someday, I'll do my best to include you then!

Building a world-class team

Steve Jobs famously once said:

"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." ?

At the end of 2022, we had hit a critical milestone. Our model coverage went global, and the market started to move – customers wanted what we had spent the past two years building. We needed to build a team that would get stuff done. And fast. After all, a company is just a collection of humans working toward the same goals.

While it wasn't easy, we successfully grew our headcount by c.2x through the year. Thank you to Jake Knight , who worked tirelessly throughout the year to make that happen. We often give recruiters and headhunters a hard time, but I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to the selected partners we worked with and found success with. Thank you to every new hire who joined Climate X at this critical time in our journey.

The talent that exists inside Climate X is inspiring. People from diverse backgrounds are all dedicated to our mission and solving problems nobody has solved before. The energy is electric, and I love coming into the office daily to experience it. Whilst Climate X isn't an easy place to work (this is true of any fast-paced company), I can confidently say the team is delivering some of their careers' best work.

Thank you for your contributions to those who moved on to new pastures. We wouldn't be where we are without you and I genuinely wish you the best for your future endeavours.

We also welcomed new advisors and experts to Climate X. Their experiences range across Real Estate, Banking, and Financial Services, as well as expertise as operators building global businesses. Your conviction in what we're building matters. Your insights will help Climate X deliver scalable impact faster than we could manage on our own. Thank you to each of you for your contributions and ongoing support as we head into 2024: Craig Robinson , Robert Wigley OStJ, BSc, Hon DBA, FCA , Jackie Bennett OBE . More to be announced soon.

Finally, a thank you to the leadership team at Climate X. As Directors, VPs, and my co-founder & CPO – ?? Kamil Kluza – we're a strong horizontal team leading an engaged workforce: Andrew Ellam (VP Tech), Manuel Vicente (VP Commercial).

I'm looking forward to your continued support as we scale the company next year, putting strong DEI initiatives and team development at the centre of the growth agenda.

Operational excellence that keeping the wheels turning

A lot is happening behind the scenes that – if things go well – nobody will notice on a day-by-day basis. Throughout 2023, we started with a major office move – Climate X was growing and we needed a new home for the team. The office has been made into a welcoming place where people are surrounded by the brightest minds in the business.

A massive thank you to the folks who keep the machine moving and have helped ensure our new hires have the best possible onboarding experience and keep the spirits in the office high. Often the unsung heroes, I'd like to sing their praises today.

Thank you to Lorraine, our superstar office manager, for making sure the wheels on the cart keep turning smoothly, day in and day out.

Thank you to Joshuah who has taken like a duck to water and made sure our tech actually works without any of the glitches.

Thank you to my Founder's Associate, Julio C. Othon , for being better organised than me and helping to support me, the entire leadership team, and our investors with anything we need – a true Brazilian-army knife!

Building at the edges of scientific and technological innovation

By the end of 2022, we delivered up to 10mx10m grids of physical hazard projections across a land area of nearly 30 million square kilometres. During 2023, that land coverage was expanded with an additional 52 million square kilometres, bringing total coverage to 82 million square kilometres, representing 83% of global economic activity.

That's the equivalent of just over 10 billion grid cells at a 90m x 90m resolution and just under 1 trillion grid cells at a 10m x 10m resolution. To put that into perspective, if each grid cell were a jigsaw puzzle piece, the stack would reach the Moon and back to Earth 1.6 times.?

Understanding physical risk data through ratings is great, but on its own often too nebulous. The real challenge is translating those physical risk impacts into financial impacts – that's what our customers ultimately need to know and have familiarity with actioning.

We've made that job easy for our customers. Over 1.5 billion properties have been painstakingly mapped to specific locations, including use types and structural integrity data, allowing our customers to link an address to asset-specific vulnerability and valuation impacts.

For our commercial asset owners, we took things a step further and mapped out over 44 million miles of critical road, rail, power grid infrastructure, and flood defences. For the first time, customers can understand how a specific site could be disrupted by physical risks and calculate site-level revenue impacts. It doesn't stop there.

Data is only as good as it can be trusted.

Every output comes with validation metrics that help us and our customers understand how well our models perform when we back-test them in that Region. Everything is supported by comprehensive model and methodology documentation – giving our customers unprecedented transparency in our process. You get the ingredients list, the recipe card, and the cake to go with it.

With over 500 trillion data points and growing, it can be intimidating to know what to do with it all. That's where the Product and Tech teams come in.

Their obsession throughout 2023 has been to ensure all this data is turned into accessible insights. That meant developing a world-class platform; Spectra is multi-award winning and regularly cited as the most advanced – yet easy to use – software climate risk platform on the market. If you can use Google Maps, you can use Spectra. Within seconds (rather than days or weeks), our customers upload entire property portfolios into the platform, and they get immediate access to a portfolio-level dashboard with a clear information hierarchy, with the ability to drill down into specific locations simply by clicking on them.

Need an asset report? Click the 'Generate PDF' button, and it's done. Want the underlying data? Click the 'Export .csv' button, and it's done. It really is that easy.

Our APIs mean customers can easily integrate our data into existing workflows and process high-volume data calls, fast.

Throughout it all, the teams have worked hard to ensure services are online, run in a stable, secure environment, and ensure the user experience remains smooth.

Our customers can rely on Climate X to deliver what they need, when they need it.

A massive thank you to the Science, Product and Tech teams for making what sometimes felt like the impossible, possible.

A record year of brand and customer growth

Thanks to the completeness of our solutions and growing awareness that climate risk management is more than a regulatory tick box, but when done right, drives immediate business value, we've had our busiest year to date with record levels of inbound, new customer sign-ups and a strong pipeline for 2024.

Our commercial team – sales, partnerships and customer success – have gone above and beyond to ensure every customer experience is world-class, and that world-class experience is felt with every interaction.

From helping customers define their pain points, translating those into business needs, to matching our products to those needs, the commercial teams have become more than a vendor to our customers.

Our customers often describe our team as an extension of their businesses – a team of dedicated climate risk specialists always working in the customer's best interests, on call and always responsive to their needs.

We're proud to have garnered the trust and custom of the world's most respected logos in the financial services and real estate industries as customers this year.

Our customers now include the most recognisable investment banking groups in the world, UK's mortgage lenders - from the largest to innovative challengers, the UK's leading surveying services business, global leaders in commercial asset management, real estate investors, as well as a healthy ecosystem of partners including the largest consulting group in the world with others electing Climate X as their vendor of choice.

Whilst private company data isn't available, our market intelligence suggest strongly that:

Climate X is one of the fastest-growing, if not the fastest-growing, dedicated climate risk providers in the world.

Our Marketing team have been working hard to build a community and to shine a light on all things climate physical risk. During 2023, we welcomed 4.5k new followers to our LinkedIn page, bringing us to nearly 9k people from around the world who regularly engage with our content and support Climate X's mission. That's translated to tens of thousands of page views and people like you clicking through our website to learn more about Climate X.

That growth is driven with good reason and almost entirely organically – 265 posts over the past year. According to LinkedIn analytics, this is by far the most of any climate risk vendor anywhere in the world. Our content has been curated specifically to drive value for our customers – a mix of the latest relevant news in the market, regulatory updates, practical guides, and longer deep dives featured on the Climate X blog.

We've also produced incredible content that you can still download today; the content ranges from 'How to Assess a Climate Risk Vendor' to detailed industry-specific Operating Models (the A-Z of how to get started with Climate Risk in the Banking and Real Estate industries). Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and shared that content – it's humbling to sit with industry experts from anywhere from New York to Singapore and hear that our articles and downloadable content have been travelling across organisations.

These efforts haven't gone unnoticed. Climate X has been privileged to receive multiple awards and recognitions that mark our position as a clear industry leader. Thank you to everyone involved in nominating and awarding Climate X, but more so, bringing a light to climate risk adaptation and resiliency. Our mission is critical, and the more awareness the industry can garner, the better it is for us all.?

Thank you to the commercial and marketing team for leading this colossal effort and bringing Climate X to the market.

The 'venture' in Venture Capital is still alive

Climate X emerged from a period of deep R&D that was only possible thanks to the support of our investors. We raised our first capital when the market wasn't quite ready for what we were building. Dealing with COVID-19 was a top priority for our prospective customers, and the only 'climate' related issue with explicit green shoots was on the transition risk agenda. While we had data to support our hypothesis for why physical risk would trend upwards, it still took a leap of faith and shared vision to have investors back not only the market but also us – first-time founders.

We've managed to build at unprecedented speed, quality, and efficiency compared to other companies operating in similar spaces to our own.

This is an achievement we're proud of and something we will seek to maintain as we enter the next phase of Climate X's growth.

Thanks to our Board Members: Heidi Lindvall , General Partner and co-founder at Pale blue dot , and Paul Morgenthaler , Managing Partner at CommerzVentures . We appreciate your candid feedback during our Board Meetings and your ongoing support and mentorship – both personally and professionally.

Thank you to our 2023 Board Observers, Gregory Dewerpe at noa , Bertie Highmore at Blue Wire Capital , and Craig Robinson for your valuable contributions.

To any early-stage (pre-seed – Series A) founders building in Climate Tech, FinTech, or PropTech – my message is this:

If I were to do this all over again, would these folks be at the top of my dial list? Yes.

2024 outlook and beyond

Now that the markets have recalibrated, I'm expecting many companies won't make it through 2024 as the final wave of the washout hits. There is a silver lining.

Those who endure will have the potential to lead their markets and have an impact on a global scale.

Climate X, with the support of a world-class team, our investors and most importantly – our customers – will be one of those companies.

• We will continue to obsess over driving as much value as possible to our customers and realising positive impact at a global scale – it's why we exist.
• We will continue to innovate and push scientific and technological boundaries with integrity and trust every step of the way.
• We will work with our peers, industry leaders and regulators to help establish standards the market can use to navigate climate risk management confidently.

I'm humbled by the journey and excited for what the future holds. It won't be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.

In three years, we've gone from founders in our bedrooms to the top of the agenda in the boardrooms of the biggest companies in the world.

The journey continues… see you in 2024!

Lukky Ahmed

Human, Co-founder, CEO – Climate X

Learn more about Climate X and subscribe to our newsletter by visiting www.climate-x.com.