Naturemind.ai and representatives of Lloyds Banking Group have won the Sustainable Finance.Live 2025 Hackathon.
The hackathon, presented in partnership with NayaOne, ran from 31 October until November 12. The participants presented in ‘emerging’ and ‘established’ categories and had eight minutes to pitch their solution and demo their project. The teams were judged on their business ideas, technical implementation, use of data sets, presentation, feasibility, scalability, and impact potential.
Teams were required to build an infrastructure planning strategy under the theme of Resilient Infrastructure using data, LLMs, and agentic AI, to find solutions to one of three problem statements: planning, nature, and financing.
Drawing from innovations in pension investments, carbon and biodiversity credits, Earth observation data, geospatial and biodiversity data, open planning processes, and agency AI, the hackathon participants developed scalable cutting-edge solutions that applied to problems facing the sustainable finance industry.
Emerging category winners
Alok Singh, Hassan Aftab Sheikh, and Neetu Kushwaha and their Naturemind.ai won the ‘emerging’ class category.
Naturemind.ai addresses fragmented data and complex decision-making in climate-resilient infrastructure. Currently, climate infrastructure relies on historical data rather than future projections, which leads to further asset risk. The multi-agent platform taps into geospatial, financial, and policy data to power its agents to generate maps, risk portfolios, policy reports, and more to inform financial decision-making. The solution is targeted to corporations with assets exposed to climate-related risks, infrastructure developers, local government, and asset managers.
Sheikh commented on behalf of Naturemind.ai: “I'd like to thank the mentors and the judges for putting trust in the process that we went through over the past 10 days. It was hectic — we built the demo we showed in three to four days. We're looking forward to engaging further and connecting with market actors and potential incubators or investors who would be interested in helping us with our demo.”
Established category winners
Alina Hussain, Andrew Torr, Aritra Chakravarty, Chris Archibald, Nataliya Tkachenko, Yasmin Liverpool, Noel Helliwell, Azahar Machwe from Lloyds Banking Group won the ‘established’ class category.
Their solution used geospatial agentic AI, forming a catchment-scale analytical framework using hydrologic data to generate finance-ready metrics, produce indices, and link to flood-exposed assets to provide to regulators and financial institutions. The platform scores flood mitigation potential for Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs). The team also described the concept of a nature risk resilience bond that would fuel investment into funding natural assets that reduce flood risk.
“Thank you for putting this event on. It's been a really great thing for us to get involved in. We've gotten to use data sets and tools that I haven't used before, so I've learned a lot from doing it as well,” Torr commented on their win. “It's genuinely very interesting from a business perspective, and we are going to keep going with [the solution] and try and turn it into something real and deployable.”
Richard Peers, host and founder of ResponsibleRisk, said when announcing the winners: “What's more important in all of this, is that we recognise the social challenges, environmental challenges, and commercial challenges that are out there. Ideas are great, but action is where innovation begins.”
Karan Jain, CEO of NayaOne commented: “Congratulations to all the participating institutions and the Finextra Sustainable Finance team for bringing together banks, academia, and innovators to advance sustainable finance. At NayaOne, as platform and data partner, we are proud to provide the platform that enabled teams to turn ideas into solutions. It’s inspiring to see this initiative go from strength to strength each year, driving real progress in data transparency and sustainable finance.”
The judges and mentors of the hackathon:
- Nigel Greenhill, Director, Hill Stone Wood
- Richard Conway, CEO, Elastacloud
- David Gristwood, Freelance Technologist
- Sarah Sinclair, Founder and CEO, Co-Labs Global
- Darshna Shah, Solution Lead, Elastacloud
- Chryssi Chorafa, Director, TerraEvra
- Sadia Ahmed, Market Innovation Lead, Deloitte UK
- Anusha Shah, Global Senior Director – Climate Water and Nature, Arcadis
- Andy Bennet, Director of Sales and Partnerships, Growth Studio
- Priyank Patwa, Director, ESG Digital, Data and Analytics FS Lead, Risk Advisory, Deloitte UK
- Isabelle Chatel de Brancion, Business and Innovation Lead, Ordnance Survey Geovation
- Ana Raposo, Business Applications and Partnerships Officer, European Space Agency
- Jude Umeh, AI Business Strategy Director, SalesForce
- Priyanka Naik, Fintech Industry Expert
- Jiri Fejgl, EMEA Director Forward Deployment Engineering, SalesForce
The 2024 winners of the Sustainable Finance Live Hackathon AfriGIS developed a climate and water intelligence, Resolve Water, that has since been used by Coca-Cola in Africa for water resilience monitoring.