America’s Flood Risk Draws a Global Crowd of Climate Startups

One of the hottest niches in adaptation tech deals with the wettest of conditions.

In recent years, a throng of flood risk intelligence companies have grown up amidst a sequence of costly deluges that have claimed thousands of lives and inflicted billions in property damage. While these start-ups hail from all over, there’s one market drawing their attention above all others — the US.

Norway’s 7Analytics announced plans to bring its high-resolution flood prediction tech to the US last year. The UK’s Previsico recently secured funding to expand its US footprint. Fathom — another UK company acquired by reinsurance giant Swiss Re — is taking steps to woo US financial institutions with its flood modeling capabilities. The list goes on.

Why are all these companies heading west? “I think that the US is attractive for lots of different types of technology because of the depth of the problems. It’s so globally covered media-wise that there’s a lot of data and there’s a lot of attention around issues of flooding,” says Christine Boyle, a partner at Burnt Island Ventures, an investor in water tech companies including Previsico and US-headquartered Floodbase. “The US is getting a lot of coverage, and people kind of hear about it, see it, start to sort of salivate around the opportunity to be had,” she adds.