The Inevitable Investment Opportunity

Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar

• Antonio Machado

🌊 Is a Super El Niño on its way?

Climate models agree that El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is highly likely to develop in the second half of 2026. NOAA already places its probability above 90% from August onward, and there's a 25% chance the event reaches "Super El Niño" status, defined as anomalies of +2°C or higher in the equatorial Pacific. Only three events have crossed that threshold since 1950 (1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16), and each one rewrote global maps of rainfall, drought, and hurricane activity.

For Latin America, the impacts are asymmetric and often play out within a single country. Argentina's Pampas and Litoral provinces typically see above-average precipitation during El Niño years, raising flood and waterlogging risk for soy, corn, and wheat at critical growth stages. Peru gets hit on two fronts: heavy rainfall on the northern coast raises flood risk for agriculture and coastal infrastructure, while warmer surface waters disrupt the cold Humboldt Current upwelling that anchovy populations depend on, threatening one of the world's largest fisheries. The same ocean warming that floods coastal towns can collapse the fishing economy on the same coastline.

This is the kind of spatially variable, probabilistic risk that parametric insurance is built to address, and it's a key input to Suyana's trigger design and exposure assessments for the 2026/27 agricultural season. We're currently in the middle of the spring predictability barrier, so the picture will sharpen considerably from June onward. The next key NOAA update arrives on May 14th.

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🤝 First insurance contract as a calculation agent

The first insurance program with Suyana’s structure and technology has been signed. The program will initiate with up to $2.5M of underwriting capacity for this first season, backed by the Natural Disaster Fund, fronted by Hannover Re, with Suyana formally appointed as calculation agent alongside Bisa Seguros as insurer. This builds on the Natural Disaster Fund approval we shared last year.

The calculation agent role is the technical core of any parametric structure: the function that turns satellite data into binding financial outcomes, telling all parties when a payout is due and how much. The support of the NDF, acting on the advice of the Global Parametrics team, one of the most experienced parametric risk transfer specialists in the market, is a strong validation of the science and engineering behind Suyana.

We're in active conversations with banks and input providers across Bolivia's soybean producing region, with first policies targeted in the coming weeks. The same structure becomes our template for the rest of Latin America.

The Natural Disaster Fund is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the German development bank KfW. It is supported by Hannover Re and managed by personnel of Global Parametrics, a CelsiusPro company.

🇦🇷 Suyana joins the Innventure portfolio

Last month, Suyana joined the Innventure Portfolio Summit in Lobos, Buenos Aires Province. Innventure is one of Argentina's leading agri-foodtech venture funds, with an unusual profile: it was born out of AAPRESID, the producers association that pioneered no-till farming in Argentina, and its LPs are themselves producers and ag-industry veterans. Presenting to that room means presenting to the actual end-users of climate risk products, not just their financial backers.

We walked through Suyana's parametric insurance and early warning systems for agricultural climate risk, and heard directly from producers about how climate volatility is showing up across their operations. Extreme events are arriving more frequently, and existing protection tools haven't kept pace with the new normal.

Argentina plants 42M hectares of cereals every year but less than 1% is insured against floods and droughts, the most catastrophic risks. The drought of 2023 cut soybean yields by half and cost Argentina $20B in exports. We left Lobos with new connections and a sharper read on what Argentine producers need from the next generation of climate risk tools. Demand for parametric coverage in agriculture is real and growing.

🇨🇴 Working Sessions in Colombia

Last month, Rodrigo García (CEO) was in Bogotá for in-person sessions with Banco Davivienda and Seguros Bolívar, both part of Grupo Bolívar, to advance our parametric cover for rice farmers in Colombia. The work focused on refining product structure and trigger design for the country's rice growing regions, with embedded distribution through the bank's existing channels.

While in the Colombia, Rodrigo also took part in StartCo 2026 in Medellín on Banco Davivienda's invitation. StartCo is Latin America's largest live startup auction, with 350 startups, 80+ international funds, and 16,000 attendees from 25 countries. The event was a useful platform to put Suyana's parametric climate solutions in front of a wider Colombian and regional audience.

📢 Events

🌍 GARI Annual Summit: We were in New York for the GARI Annual Summit (Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment), where Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC presented climate adaptation as a formal investment thesis they call "The Inevitable Investment Opportunity." (link) Their forecast: $2 trillion of current public and private adaptation capital growing to $9 trillion by 2050, with nearly half of that growth driven specifically by global warming. GIC's thesis quantifies the demand. The harder problem in emerging markets, where individual purchase is priced out, is turning that demand into paid premium. That conversion is exactly what Suyana's embedded distribution model is built for.

👉 Read the full LinkedIn post

🎓 AI for Finance at NYU Stern: Suyana served as a jury member in the MBA course AI for Finance, where students pitched startup ideas using AI, with several seeking funding. The course is led by Arpit Gupta, a mentor of Endless Frontier Labs, the NYU accelerator we participated in last year. A useful window into how the next cohort of finance and AI builders is approaching real-world problems, and a chance to share how we're applying AI to climate risk transfer.

⚾️ Boston Climate Week at Greentown Labs: Fernando (CTO) attended the session "Why Climate Innovators Choose Massachusetts" at Greentown Labs during Boston's Climate Week. The evening opened with remarks from Greentown's new CEO Georgina Campbell Flatter, whose previous chapter co-founding TomorrowNow.org parallels Suyana's mission closely: putting AI-driven climate intelligence in the hands of smallholder farmers, in their case across Africa. The panel that followed featured Eric Paley, Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development, on why the Commonwealth continues to attract and retain climate innovators. The takeaway: Boston runs on curiosity, and there is something about curiosity that money can't buy.

👉 Read the full LinkedIn post

Closing

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