EVORA Put a Climate Accountant Inside the Building

In the beginning there was a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet was full. EVORA Global had been alive for barely a year when its founders discovered that advising property investors on sustainability produced more data than Excel wanted to swallow. Energy bills arrived in odd formats. Meters went missing. Floor areas were attached to the wrong consumption figures. A fund-level target could look handsome while a boiler ran all weekend in one of the buildings beneath it.

The London firm had been founded in 2011 by Chris Bennett, Ed Gabbitas and Paul Sutcliffe. They were specialists in a field that barely had a name investors cared to use. Bennett later recalled that getting a meeting about climate risk was a battle. Their first instinct was sensible: buy software. Their chosen supplier went bust before the relationship had properly started. The second attempt produced something impressive but awkward, including the memorable discovery that nobody had specified a PDF print button.

So the consultants became software builders. They called the system SIERA. By 2020, Bennett said EVORA had spent several million pounds on it, all self-funded. It was not born as a frictionless app for the casual user. He compared it with the cockpit of an Airbus: powerful, complicated and best flown by a pilot. That accidental metaphor still explains the company. EVORA sells the cockpit and keeps pilots nearby.

The boring work is the valuable work

EVORA sits in an unfashionably useful corner of climate technology. Its customers are not people checking the thermostat at home. They are institutional investors, fund managers, sustainability teams, asset managers and property operators responsible for offices, warehouses, homes, hotels and infrastructure across countries. EVORA says it supports more than 400 clients, including 15 of the world's top 20 global investors. Publicly named customers include Hines, Invesco Real Estate, M&G, UBS, The Crown Estate, Generali Real Estate and JLL.

Their problem is not a shortage of pledges. It is the gap between a portfolio promise and 45,000 individual assets, each with its own meters, managers, leases and maintenance habits. SIERA gathers energy, water, waste and emissions records through utility portals, invoices, energy hubs, building-management systems, submeters and manual readings. It validates the data, estimates gaps, maps performance against targets and prepares disclosure outputs such as GRESB. Its net-zero tools compare assets with CRREM pathways and estimate when a building may become misaligned, or “stranded,” without intervention.

This sounds like reporting software because reporting is the part that buyers can see. The sharper use is capital allocation. A fund manager wants to know which property needs insulation, a heat pump or a closer look before acquisition. An asset manager needs evidence to justify the spend. A sustainability lead needs to explain progress to investors without rebuilding a workbook at midnight. The output matters only if somebody can trace the number back to a meter, an invoice or a defensible estimate.

A consultancy wearing software boots

Competitors tend to enter from one of two doors. Software businesses such as Measurabl, BuildingMinds and, before the deal, Deepki sell portfolio-wide data and analytics. Property advisers and sustainability consultancies sell expertise and delivery. EVORA's distinction was to keep both under one roof, plus managed data services in the middle. Its engineers and analysts could see where the software failed in practice; its product team could encode the fixes. The model costs more attention than pure SaaS, but it deals with the ambiguity that a dashboard politely hands back to the customer.

The company's case studies are strongest when the work gets specific. For five JLL-managed properties, EVORA used half-hourly automatic meter readings, monthly calls and adjustments to building-management systems. Reported annual results were an 8 percent energy saving, £58,000 in lower costs and 705 tonnes of avoided carbon dioxide equivalent. No moonshot technology was required. The first failure was often a schedule, a set point or an anomaly nobody had been asked to inspect.

For Global Logistic Properties, EVORA's challenge was different: build a decarbonisation plan across a $113 billion logistics portfolio spanning China, Japan, Brazil, Vietnam, Europe and the United States. The team mapped data sources and stakeholders, modelled Scopes 1, 2 and 3, included embodied carbon where life-cycle data existed, then proposed a regional rollout tied to CRREM and science-based pathways. The deliverable connected reductions to timing and capital expenditure. In other words, it translated “net zero” into a shopping list with a calendar.

When we founded this business, people didn't want to talk about climate risk. It was a real battle to even get a meeting.Chris Bennett, co-founder

GRESB is the deadline. Performance is the point.

GRESB, the benchmark used by real-asset investors, gave EVORA a recurring and deadline-driven wedge. In 2025 the company supported more than 180 fund submissions covering over $390 billion in assets - roughly 15 percent of submissions in Europe and 7 percent worldwide, by its count. SIERA can prepare the required energy, water, waste and emissions data and submit it through an API. Consultants check the awkward parts: missing coverage, strange variances, evidence quality and numbers that pass a portal's validation while still making little physical sense.

The tension is productive. A higher score can help fundraising and satisfy investors, but a perfect form does not turn down an air-handling unit. EVORA's better pitch is that the same organised data should survive the reporting deadline and return to daily asset management. Canada Life Asset Management, for example, paired an ISO 14001-aligned management system with property-manager requirements, audits, training and quarterly monitoring. Its GRESB score rose 102 percent from 2018. The process, not the badge, is the replicable bit.

Buying the pipes, then joining the platform

In 2022, the bootstrapped chapter ended. Bridges Fund Management led a majority investment alongside MSCI and Farview Equity. The amount was not disclosed. EVORA's founders said clients were asking for global support; the investors offered growth capital, climate models and market access. Bridges later described investing heavily in SIERA, opening New York and recruiting a technology-focused CEO. The appointment of Carl Allen in 2025, after a previous leadership transition, made the intended blend explicit: SaaS, professional services and managed services.

EVORA had already made its own decisive purchase. In January 2024 it acquired Gothenburg-based Metry, a service that connects directly to fiscal meters and national energy hubs. The logic was blunt. Analytics-ready data cannot begin with somebody chasing a spreadsheet attachment. Metry reduced gaps at the source and gave its customers access to EVORA's climate and carbon expertise. What changed EVORA's mind about owning data collection was the same thing that had pushed it into software years earlier: dependence on a fragile layer it could not control.

Then the consolidator was consolidated. In August 2026, Paris-based Deepki acquired EVORA and Metry for an undisclosed sum. The announced structure keeps EVORA's consulting team operating alongside Deepki under a co-sold model, folds Metry into the data infrastructure and integrates SIERA into Deepki's platform. Deepki gains advisory depth and North American reach. EVORA's clients gain a broader AI and SaaS stack. The combined group says it monitors more than €4 trillion in assets for over 600 clients across 95 countries.

There is a neat industrial logic to the sequence. Metry collects at the source. EVORA's specialists make the information usable and know how buildings behave. SIERA organises the portfolio. Deepki adds scale and decision tools. There is also integration risk: overlapping products can distract teams, and a consultancy's hard-earned judgment does not merge as neatly as a database. Deepki says it created a dedicated integration team so client-facing employees can keep working. Sensible, if less thrilling than an AI announcement.

The lesson hiding in the plant room

EVORA's story is useful because its failures are ordinary. A supplier disappeared. A print function was forgotten. Spreadsheets burst. Building data arrived late and wrong. The response was not a single revelation but a steady expansion of control: internal software, managed data, automated collection, capital and finally a larger platform owner.

The company fits between climate consultancy, proptech and financial infrastructure. Calling it ESG software undersells the humans; calling it a consultant ignores the 90,000 automated connections. Its real product is a chain of custody from the utility meter to the investment committee. That chain works when clients have portfolios large enough to justify it, reporting pressure sharp enough to maintain it, and people empowered to act. Without those conditions, even immaculate data becomes expensive decoration.