Climate change is rewiring the global economy. Every investment is a transition investment. And yet there’s no consistent way to represent climate change in cash flow models. The risks and opportunities facing companies due to climate change are unaccounted for in most financial decisions. This is detrimental to the flow of capital to drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. London-based startup Unwritten is breaking down that problem for investors and enabling opportunities and risks from climate change to be placed into their financial models.
In a recent development, Unwritten, formerly Dovetail Finance, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. London-based software VC Connect Ventures (invested in Torg and Aikido Security) led the round alongside climate VC Planet A Ventures and other VC and angel investors from academia and industry including Sand River and Adapt Nation Capital. The funding will help the company make climate change part of every capital allocation decision.
Ex-Palantir execs’ brainchild
Unwritten was founded in 2022 by Dr. Phillip Marks and Amos Wittenberg who met whilst working at American software company Palantir Technologies, where they built the firm’s climate data solution.
The company’s board of prominent academic advisors to ensure its approach is built around the latest intellectual scaffolding. Prof. Cameron Hepburn (Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford) 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).
“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” said Prof. Cameron Hepburn (Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford).
What does it do?
The company translates the complex system dynamics of climate change into firm-level financial data, using big data techniques to model the complex interactions between regions, sectors, policies, and technologies. This enables Unwritten’s models to cover all private companies and a universe of 40,000 public firms, which are updated automatically when new information is present.
Unwritten’s analytics allow investors, lenders and companies to price climate opportunity and risk at the company level. The company’s modelling quantifies the impact of climate change on the global economy at a billion point data scale, capturing the interdependencies between technology, regulation, and demand across complex supply chains.
Unwritten co-founder and CEO Amos Wittenberg shared: “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”.
“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,” added Rory Stirling, Partner at Connect Ventures.
