
Kepler Labs develops an AI-powered physical risk intelligence platform for institutional investors.
Kepler Labs raised a pre-seed round on a SAFE at an $8M post-money valuation cap, led by Looking Glass Capital with a $600k check and joined by Stepchange VC and Underdog Labs. The founding team pairs a Berkeley PhD in economics focused on climate risk and capital markets with eight years of product leadership at Apple.
The first product launched in January 2026 with BlackRock as the first paying customer on a roughly $20k pilot, and a second pilot with KKR is underway for private credit underwriting. A pipeline of over twenty-five institutions representing more than $30 trillion in combined AUM is scoping pilots, supporting a path toward $500k in annual recurring revenue by end of 2026 and $2M by end of 2027.
Kepler Labs offers a facility-level physical risk intelligence platform that turns climate, nature, and hazard data into asset-specific financial metrics for institutional investors. It replaces high-level proxies and black-box climate scores with bottoms-up analysis tied to individual facilities and their revenue contribution.
The product follows a three-step workflow of asset identification, revenue mapping, and physical risk modeling, covering chronic stressors like extreme heat and water stress, acute shocks such as flooding and wildfires, and nature dependencies. Outputs map to disclosure frameworks including TCFD, CSRD, ISSB, and TNFD so they can feed investor memos and risk models directly.
Physical risk is becoming a material driver of valuations as long-term climate shifts, hazards, and sudden shocks disrupt business operations and asset cash flows. Investors increasingly need to identify and price these risks at the facility level rather than through portfolio averages.
Regulatory momentum around TCFD, CSRD, ISSB, and TNFD disclosure is pushing capital markets toward defensible, source-traceable climate analysis. Kepler Labs sees demand from asset managers and banks seeking deal-speed physical risk intelligence that withstands investment committee and regulatory review.
Kepler Labs differentiates on transparency and defensibility, tracing every output back to source data and physics models rather than opaque climate scores. This lets institutional users defend conclusions in investment committee memos and regulatory filings.
Its bottoms-up, asset-level granularity replaces the high-level proxies most climate-data vendors rely on, quantifying risk in real units at deal speed instead of months-long engagements. The platform screens tickers and runs diligence in minutes, fitting existing analyst workflows rather than forcing a separate process.