• Swindon & Wiltshire M&A, deals
• Monday March 17 2025
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Bristol tech firm lands £250,000 funding boost to help companies meet environmental commitments

Bristol tech firm Map Impact has received a £250,000 loan boost from SWIG Finance in a bid to take its environmental mission global.

The funding will create ten new jobs as the business grows and extends its services to a global market.

The company develops Earth Observation products to meet the ever-increasing worldwide demand for statutory and regulatory environmental compliance reporting, addressing a range of environmental assessment needs including biodiversity, climate change, and water catchment quality.

It was recently deployed to the Lake District, where the team combined time series satellite imagery with mobile phone data to prove that sewage-related algal blooms in Lake Windemere coincided with periods of mass tourism.

The company also helped a housing association assess a portfolio of 10,000 dwellings for susceptibility to increasingly frequent heatwaves and inform a mitigation strategy for investing in strategically located green spaces.

The company was launched in 2023 by four industry colleagues – CEO Rich Flemmings, COO Chris Burnett, CCO Steve Keohane and CFO Paul Ryder – in response to legislation, which since February 2024 has mandated the monitoring of biodiversity on new housing developments over a 30-year period.

Map Impact’s off-the-peg solutions also enable companies to build in resistance to climate challenges including flood, drought and wildfires.

“We have to protect and improve the environment by law,” said Paul, “but it’s costly, time-consuming and impractical to measure UK-wide environmental factors using only onsite methods – specialists on the ground can only cover a limited area in any given period of time, and there aren’t enough ecologists available to conduct large-scale landscape assessments.

“Using satellite technology and combining other data sources, we can look across an unlimited area of land and highlight which parts to bring an ecologist in to provide a micro-analysis.

“The kind of solutions our clients might be considering are positive and preventative: for example, building in firebreaks such as scrubland, green spaces or tree planting. They need data to do this: we supply that, and there is a clear demand for it.”

Expansion funding was secured by South West finance provider SWIG Finance.

“For us to achieve growth there was a missing link which the traditional commercial banking institutions do not provide, and only SWIG came up with the solution,” said Paul.

SWIG Finance also conducted a strenuous forensic analysis and due diligence on the business, which provides credibility and significant reassurance to new investors as we approach the next round of funding: venture capital.

“It’s fair to say that without SWIG Finance, we wouldn’t be able to progress to the next stage.”

Nicola Parker, senior business manager at SWIG Finance, said: “This business is relatively new but has nonetheless been successful in developing its offer and securing key partnerships, largely on the back of an innovative product and being reactive to changes in the market.

“Consequently, Map Impact has a great opportunity to develop its position in the marketplace and to continue to expand its offer at a time when the global climate and its relationship with the human lifestyle is at the forefront of discussion.”

Pictured: The Map Impact team – Chris Burnett (COO), Richard Flemmings (CEO), Paul Ryder (CFO), Steve Keohane (CCO)