Primo Capital | Meet the Portfolio - Eoliann - Helping financial institutions forecast climate risks

04 ott 2023 Meet the Portfolio, Eoliann

Meet the Portfolio is a Primo Ventures format to discover the game-changing companies we support.

In the interview below, Eoliann tell us about its vision, its objective and what makes its company unique.

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How was Eoliann born?
Eoliann was founded a little over a year ago, in June 2022. We are now four co-founders (Chiara, Giovanni, Emidio and myself, Roberto), but everything started with three of us. We met in December 2021, during the selection process of Vento, a venture building program. We were grouped together by chance (teams were made up randomly). The last step of the selection process of Vento consisted of a five days in-person session at OGR Tech Torino where we started working together. We soon realized that we were/are very different people, with very different backgrounds and personalities. I am myself a business adept, Giovanni is an aerospace engineer and Chiara a data scientist. But we worked together particularly well. Therefore, in January 2022, when the program started, we asked to be kept together. This is how the team was born: quite the roll of a dice.
We choose a challenge on how to use satellite data and we embarked on a four-month exploration into an array of industries, including the natural catastrophes one.
We analyzed 11 different verticals, we deep dived markets and conducted numerous interviews. After a few months of exploration, we found out that there was a gap for insurance companies that wanted to forecast increasing volatile events. This gap prompted the question: can these events be better forecasted by using satellite data? Soon after, we started the technical feasibility phase, where the pumping heart of our company was created.

Where do you see Eoliann in 10 years?
We are set with our vision. Sometimes, I feel like companies write visions and missions just because they have to, but in our case it was so much more than that.
We organized a retreat immediately after we founded the company: a couple of weeks together to understand what type of company we wanted to build and not just the problem we wanted to solve or the solution we needed. We focused on designing a vision that would describe what Eoliann was as a whole and what it will be in the future.
Our vision is to create a world where capable people can leverage technology to make society safer from natural catastrophes.

And I want to emphasize these words “Where capable people can leverage technology”, so it is not just Eoliann’s team members, or us co-founders, who will solve the problems of the world.
We want to build a hub, a place where every talent can contribute to solve this issue (the one caused by climate change) that is very complex. We will need many brilliant people to solve this problem. And Eoliann in 10 years will be the place to be, where people, from all over, come to work to tackle one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century, that is climate change. Not just reducing emissions, but rather comprehensively understanding how climate has changed and how it is changing/impacting the life of people, corporations, financial institutions, etc. Because we have the potential, thanks to new technologies, to solve those intricate issues.

In 10 years, Eoliann will be the place to be and the leading climate tech company in Europe.

What was the biggest challenge?
It is something that we are experiencing right now and it is “doing the step up”. In the past, we managed to take big and sometimes controversial decisions that not everybody enjoyed. For example, our first hire was for a Head of People, which was quite a controversial move, but also one that brought great results. From four founders we are now twelve people and each and every team member is extremely talented. Most startups would say hiring, recruiting and enlarging the team is a big challenge, but for us, it was a smooth experience (thanks also to our company purpose and what we do).

What remains tricky is instead “doing the step up”, not just building a company, but rather receiving a reaction from the market to what we offer.
We are building a deeptech product and it took a lot of time to do it well. Now we have to go to the market. The hard part is to convey the value of something which, as of today, was not intrinsically part of the decision making process of corporations.
Regulations are going in our direction and banks will soon have to align with them. However, people still have to understand the urgency of making precise forecasts a part of their decision making process and that their money is at risk due to these volatile events, together with their investments and their sustainability.
Doing the step up means breaking the crystal wall, making our problem one that the broader public understands smoothly.
Going to the market will be the biggest challenge to date, for at least another year, because we have to bridge the gap between our product and the weak public perception of the problem it solves.

What are the trends in your sector?
There are many trends that relate to our scope of work.
Let’s start with the one related to the problem we are trying to solve: natural catastrophes are increasing fast. In the last 70 years, we had an increase of 1100% in terms of recorded number of natural catastrophes worldwide. To quantify, we are talking about 300 billion USD in economic losses generated by natural catastrophes globally only in 2022.
Solutions are emerging and the market is expanding. People are understanding that we have a problem and that we need new solutions to solve something that has been the result of decades of unchecked managerial practices expanding, growing and impacting the climate.
The trend now is to invest massively into climate mitigation (thus reducing the impact of men on the climate and decreasing the impact of emissions), but climate has already changed, so we need to delve into climate adaptation as well. This is the sphere we work on, which is often overlooked.
A lot of climate-related funds are being established but they mostly focus on reducing emissions, thus on mitigation; which is of course important, but it cannot completely overshadow the need to focus on adaptation too. Climate is something that has already undergone a transformation and we need to understand what happened and how to adapt to it.

Another sector of significance for us is the one of downstream data. In the growing space sector, there are a lot of industries, all of them growing at different paces and using different applications of downstream data. The leading sector in terms of market share for application of this data is agriculture, where space observation and data analysis are most commonly used. But agritech is not the one growing the most.
The fastest growing sector using downstream data is in fact the one of financial institutions. Finance and insurance will grow more than 20 percent per year in the near future, and in 2030 they are projected to become the main sector for downstream data applications.

Who is the ideal investor?
Doing a capital raise is not just about money.
The financial backing is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make a good investor. What makes a good investor is what comes afterwards the funds are secured.
Each company has different fields in which it operates, in our case we are both in the space and climate industry, plus we target financial institutions and insurance companies as clients, so we are in the fintech and insurtech sector as well. The situation is quite complex. We target multiple sectors: one for what we do, one for our technology and one for who we do it for.
The investor should be someone that can support you in what you do in all these different fields. Where support means different things.

First, it means fostering synergies; having other companies under the portfolio that can cooperate or can have touchpoints with you. This allows for faster learning and better problem solving other than creating better value for your own company and the investor itself.

Second, it is to bring to the table valuable knowledge and understanding of the different sectors you are involved in to support the decision making process. Sometimes, we have to make decisions for which we do not have the answer or for which we have limited information (on pricing, go-to market strategy, marketing strategy). In these cases, a well-versed investor can empower us to make better informed decisions.

Third asset that can be brought to the table are connections: they are very valuable, not just in terms just clients, but also mentors or other companies with which you can exchange ideas. An investor that brings you in an advanced network of players is always appreciated.

Lastly, an investor should guarantee the right support on company management. It is nice to have a good balance between having free movement (it’s still your company) and very valuable insights for your governance and management coming from someone who has seen many companies before yours.

What makes Eoliann unique?
That’s easy! The people.
We tend to talk about companies as legal entities, but then, behind that, there are the people that truly make the company.
When you are building a business, your are also building a culture, a way of working. You are creating specific ambitions, expectations and objectives.
A good CEO has to look at strategy, execution and people. All of the aforementioned are however made by people. Strategy is defined by people and execution is implemented by the people. People are what make our company unique.

We were lucky, but also put a lot of effort in, to find the right people that aligned with the culture we wanted to build. During the initial retreat, after we defined our vision and mission, we defined the values of Eoliann. Starting from the personal values of the co-founders we found some common ones and created the six values that today guide our work.
Based on these six values we build our hiring archetypes: the scientist, the artist, the builder and the sailor. Each of this archetype is driven by one or more of our values and we use these figures to guide our recruiting process. That is why, now, Eoliann is made of very talented people that have a common way of living and a common set of values, that are willing to work and put their passion in what they do.

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