Naturemind.ai and representatives of Lloyds Banking Group have emerged victorious in the Sustainable Finance.Live 2025 Hackathon.
The event, held in partnership with NayaOne, took place from October 31 to November 12. Participants competed in two categories: ‘emerging’ and ‘established,’ with eight minutes to present their solutions and demonstrations. Judging criteria included business ideas, technical execution, data usage, presentation, feasibility, scalability, and potential impact.
Teams were tasked with creating an infrastructure planning strategy themed around Resilient Infrastructure, utilizing data, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI to address one of three challenges: planning, nature, and financing.
Drawing from innovations in pension investments, carbon and biodiversity credits, Earth observation data, and agency AI, participants developed scalable solutions targeting issues within the sustainable finance sector.
Emerging Category Winners
Alok Singh, Hassan Aftab Sheikh, and Neetu Kushwaha from Naturemind.ai won the ‘emerging’ category. Their platform tackles the fragmentation of data and complex decision-making in climate-resilient infrastructure. Current practices rely heavily on historical data, heightening asset risk. Their multi-agent platform integrates geospatial, financial, and policy data to create maps, risk portfolios, and policy reports, helping corporations, local governments, and asset managers make informed financial decisions.
Sheikh expressed gratitude to the mentors and judges: “Thank you for trusting in the process over the past ten days. It was intense—we built our demo in just three to four days. We’re eager to connect with market players and potential incubators or investors.”
Established Category Winners
The ‘established’ category was won by Alina Hussain, Andrew Torr, Aritra Chakravarty, Chris Archibald, Nataliya Tkachenko, Yasmin Liverpool, Noel Helliwell, and Azahar Machwe from Lloyds Banking Group. Their solution employs geospatial agentic AI to create an analytical framework that leverages hydrologic data, producing finance-ready metrics and linking them to flood-exposed assets for regulators and financial institutions. They also proposed a nature risk resilience bond to fund natural assets that mitigate flood risks.
Torr commented, “Participating in this event has been incredibly beneficial. I’ve gained experience using data sets and tools I hadn’t worked with before. We plan to continue developing our solution and make it deployable.”
Richard Peers, host and founder of ResponsibleRisk, highlighted the importance of recognizing social, environmental, and commercial challenges. “Ideas are valuable, but action ignites innovation,” he stated when announcing the winners.
Karan Jain, CEO of NayaOne, congratulated all finalists and credited the event for uniting banks, academia, and innovators to push forward sustainable finance. He noted that NayaOne is proud to support teams in transforming ideas into actionable solutions, emphasizing the initiative’s progress each year towards data transparency and sustainable finance.
The hackathon was supported by a panel of judges and mentors, including:
- 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, Senior Director – Climate, Water and Nature, Arcadis
- Andy Bennet, Director of Sales and Partnerships, Growth Studio
- Priyank Patwa, Director, ESG Digital, 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, Salesforce Forward Deployment Engineering
The 2024 winners of the Sustainable Finance Live Hackathon, AfriGIS, developed the Resolve Water platform for climate and water intelligence, which is already being used by Coca-Cola in Africa for water resilience monitoring.