Demo · synthetic data

Diligence

Cartograph

A geospatial model that prices physical climate risk for insurers and grid operators.

BerlinIndustrialFounded 202127 people

Team

80

Climate scientist who stayed for the sales calls, plus a CTO from mapping infrastructure. Rare combination, still a small bench.

Weight 30

Market

77

Insurers already buy catastrophe models. The budget is not hypothetical. Switching costs are political.

Weight 25

Traction

62

€1.2m ARR, three paid pilots converting slowly. The pipeline is wider than the revenue, which is either healthy or a warning.

Weight 25

Moat

73

Labelled loss data from two carriers and a grid operator. That corpus is the asset. It is not yet exclusive.

Weight 20

Investment memo

Advance

Screened 7 Oct 2026Pre-written. The replay is simulated.

Summary

Cartograph sells a risk surface, not a dashboard. A carrier or a grid operator asks what a flood or a heat week does to a book of assets. The model answers with a number their existing vendor also answers, and the diligence is whether Cartograph is righter often enough to switch.

Why now

Two European carriers are rebidding catastrophe tooling in the next two quarters. Cartograph is in one process and adjacent to the other. Kiln’s buyer made the introduction, which is a real reference, not a logo slide.

Product

They fine-tune on loss events the customers provide, on top of public satellite and weather series. Outputs land in the tools actuaries already use. The interface is deliberately dull. The value is the delta versus the incumbent model on the last five years of claims.

Business

Annual licence, €1.2m ARR, gross margin 82% because compute is bursty and someone else owns the satellites. Sales cycles are two quarters. A €5m cheque buys us a seat while those rebids resolve. It does not buy a winner.

Recommendation

Stay in diligence through the first rebid. If Cartograph is a finalist and the backtest beats the incumbent on the customer’s own claims, bring it to IC. If they are a ‘nice second model’, pass without drama.