Specialist impact investor Bridges Fund Management has acquired a majority stake in real estate ESG consultant Evora Global.
The investment includes support from MSCI and Farview Equity which, along with Bridges, will each take a seat on the Evora board. Financial details were undisclosed.
Evora said the capital from the Bridges Fund-led funding round will help expand its offering to support clients globally, while further developing its tech platform.
Founded in 2011, Evora helps real estate companies with their ESG strategies, sustainable finance and climate risk management and disclosure, both through advisory services and the use of its software.
Evora’s software SIERA currently holds ESG data for over 8,000 major buildings globally. Its clients include Invesco Real Estate, Hines and M&G.
Chris Bennett, Evora co-founder, said: “Our client base is made up of leading asset managers and owners, and they have been asking us to support them globally. This funding enhances our ability to support them and to improve our technology and advisory services globally.
“We wanted investors who were aligned with our vision. We had a lot of options, but Bridges really stood out for its commitment to sustainability and impact investing, as well as being a B Corp.
“Working with MSCI will broaden our ability to drive positive impact, helping our clients with their sustainable development goals while widening our global reach. Farview’s experience of growing enterprise technology companies will transform our SIERA software and support its international growth.”
Emma Thorne, partner at Bridges Fund Management, said: “Real estate is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, so Evora’s tools and services can play an important role in reducing emissions and building a more sustainable economy.
“We think there’s a significant commercial and impact opportunity here. So we’re excited to partner with this excellent team and help the business scale, drawing on Bridges’s 20 years’ experience of helping ambitious companies to accelerate their growth and achieve more impact.”
René Veerman, the head of real assets at MSCI, said: “High-quality data is an essential part of commercial real asset investors’ ability to develop effective strategies, built upon the in-depth evaluation of portfolio and asset climate risk.
“The combination of Evora’s tools for climate data management and advisory services, together with MSCI’s robust climate risk models and indexes, will help to improve the flow of critical decision data and accelerate the adoption of climate standards and thereby to strengthen the global real asset investment process.
“MSCI is committed to providing critical decision support tools that help investment managers to build better portfolios and, in this collaboration with Evora, we will better serve the evolving needs of our shared and new clients.”
Guy Sochovsky, partner at Farview Equity, said: “We believe meeting the demands of climate change across global real estate portfolios will continue to need powerful software tools able to both track environmental impact and project future economic risks.
“SIERA has many of the right ingredients around data quality and deep industry understanding to enable these features within its software. We are excited to have the opportunity to partner with the team at the company to help realise that vision for the benefit of all stakeholders.”
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