London-based Unwritten (formerly Dovetail Finance), a climate tech startup, announced on Monday that it has secured $3.5M (approximately €3.2M) led Connect Ventures, with participation from Planet A Ventures and other VC and angel investors from academia and industry, including Sand River and Adapt Nation Capital.
Previously, the company has secured over £750K in pre-seed funding to build the technological infrastructure behind the solution.
Making climate change part of every financial decision
Unwritten was founded by — Dr. Phillip Marks and Amos Wittenberg, a team that built Palantir’s climate data solution.
The company is on a mission to make climate change part of every investment decision, helping investors and companies to make financial sense of the climate transition.
Climate change is impacting the global economy, and every investment has a role in transitioning to a low-carbon economy.
However, most financial decisions don’t consider the risks and opportunities related to climate change, hindering the flow of capital.
The UK startup addresses this problem by enabling investors to incorporate climate-related risks and opportunities into their financial models.
Unwritten co-founder and CEO Amos Wittenberg says, “Great analytics help people ask the right questions in the right language, to inform the decisions their organisations make. Unwritten makes financial sense of the climate transition — not to predict the future, but so our clients can make the capital allocation decisions to build it.”
Use Big Data to model the dynamics of climate change
Unwritten is a platform that uses big data techniques to model the complex system dynamics of climate change into firm-level financial data.
It takes into account various factors, such as regions, sectors, policies, and technologies, and translates them into financial data.
Unwritten’s models cover all private companies and a universe of 40,000 public firms. The platform is updated automatically with new information, keeping the data current and relevant.
Examples of how Unwritten is shaping the future of capital allocation, in a global economy that is being rewired by climate change:
- A private equity firm can diligence prospective deals and assess existing portfolio companies for climate risk and opportunities, without reliance on uncertain emissions data or opaque ESG labels.
- An asset manager can understand the value and directionality of climate risks for portfolios and quantify climate factors in firm-level valuation modelling.
- A bank can effectively integrate material financial risks from the climate transition into lending decisions and pricing, enabled by analytics that is well-understood by all team members.
- A mining company can quantify and communicate the climate transition-driven opportunities for growth in its existing business lines to investors.
“New approaches are quickly emerging to predict the impact of the climate transition on markets around the world. Unwritten brings climate economics into financial decision-making, helping investors react to these seismic shifts” says Prof. Cameron Hepburn (Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford).
Professor Hepburn sits on Unwritten’s advisory board alongside Dr. Alex Edmans (Professor of Finance at London Business School), Dr. Ashby Monk (Director of the Stanford Research Initiative on Long-Term Investing), and Daniel Firger (Advisor for Sustainable Finance at the Bezos Earth Fund).
The investor
Connect is a European pre-seed and seed venture fund.
The VC invests in Europe’s product companies building opinionated products crafted and loved by many.
The investments include Typeform, Intropic, Oyster, Lifebit, and TrueLayer.
“The climate transition is the biggest risk and opportunity facing the global capital markets in our generation. We believe every capital allocator will utilise transition risk intelligence in the same way they do with audited financial statements today. We’re incredibly excited and proud to partner with the Unwritten team and believe they have the unique domain insights, technical capabilities, and vision to build a category-defining company in the emerging field of climate risk intelligence,” says Rory Stirling, Partner at Connect Ventures.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/uks-unwritten-raises-3-2m/
