The human and financial tolls of natural disasters are being supercharged by a combination of population growth and more extreme weather. For example, according to NOAA's "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Tracker," which tracks weather disaster events resulting in over $1B in losses, the US averaged 23 such events per year between 2020-2024, with an average total annual cost of $149B. Compare that to the 1980's when the US averaged just three "Billion-Dollar Disasters" per year, with an average annual cost of $22B (adjusted for inflation). In addition to direct losses, a more extreme climate is leading to productivity losses, supply chain disruptions, and increasing insurance premiums.

But organizations looking to invest in making themselves more resilient lack scalable tools to guide their decisions. An ever-growing number of climate hazard models offer predictions on how severe and frequent a natural disaster might be. Some offer a high level, generic risk score. However, none provide granular answers to a decision maker’s most important questions: “How will a disaster impact my organization?” and “What are the highest ROI steps I can take to protect my people, property, and business?”

Class 3 Technologies’ provides asset owners and operators, investors, and insurers a pathway to make cost-effective resilience and adaptation investments across diverse asset portfolios with hundreds or thousands of buildings. Having recently spun out of the renowned built environment consulting and engineering firm Arup, Class 3 Technologies’ platform, Iris, combines building-specific engineering and commercial data with climate hazard models to calculate the financial impact of climate hazards across a portfolio of assets. It then goes a step further, generating cost-effective resilience options, including both operational changes and capital investments. 

As economic costs of climate disasters rise, adaptation becomes an imperative

• The McKinsey report Climate resilience technology: An inflection point for new investment finds an increased focus among corporations on building resilience and managing physical climate risks. 

• For example, their analysis across 200 earnings calls, analyst and investor days, and press releases of S&P 500 and STOXX Europe 600 companies found a 55% increase in mentions of climate-resilience related terms from 2021 to 2025. 

• The report estimates that climate resilience could represent addressable markets worth between $600 billion and $1 trillion by 2030. 

Translating climate risk into dollars and decisions

• Class 3 Technologies’ platform, Iris, integrates building-specific engineering models with global climate hazard datasets to calculate financial risk and identify the most cost-effective resilience and adaptation measures.

• Notably, Class 3 Technologies doesn’t create its own hazard models, but instead integrates best-in-class hazard models into their proprietary platform which simulates physical impacts, quantifies structural vulnerability, and tests resilience measures with precision and clarity.

• This approach allows Class 3 Technologies to support across a wide range of geographies and hazard types, including non-weather hazards like earthquakes. 

Four levels of analysis to go from rapid screening to deep modeling

• The name Class 3 Technologies comes from the tiered framework for risk assessment which has recently gained traction in the climate risk industry. Each “class” represents a deeper level of precision and data sophistication:

  • Class 0 - Basic Hazard Screening: Basic hazard exposure screening for a high-level view.

  • Class 1 - Basic Risk Screening: Archetype-based qualitative risk rating.

  • Class 2 - Enhanced Risk Screening: Building-specific quantitative modeling with actionable recommendations for measures likely to address the quantified risks..

  • Class 3 - Advanced Risk Modeling: Component-level probabilistic modeling with financial loss projections and recommendations for cost-effective adaptation measures.

• This tiered approach lets organizations quickly screen thousands of buildings, then focus detailed analysis on their most valuable or vulnerable assets.

Powerhouse Ventures is proud to lead Class 3 Technologies’ $3.5M Seed round with participation from Sustainable Future Ventures and Tailwind Ventures. We look forward to working with CEO Ibbi Almufti, COO Rebecca Birmingham, CTO Sean Merrifield, and CPO Hedi Smida as they help asset owners worldwide make smarter, faster, and more financially sound adaptation decisions.