Exclusive Interview: Matthew Eby, Founder & CEO, First Street

Interview:  Matthew Eby, Founder and CEO of First Street

By: Megan Kuczynski, CEO, ClimateTech Connect & Author, Risk2Resilience

Megan: Looking back, how has your strategy evolved over those ten years, and how have you seen the market catch up to the vision you had from the beginning?

Matt: When we started, the strategy was almost the opposite of a go-to-market plan. We spent the first several years just trying to get the science right, because nobody else was modeling physical climate risk at the property level with the resolution we thought the problem deserved. The bet was simple. If we built the most defensible, peer-reviewed view of physical risk in the world, the market would eventually need it. We just did not know if it meant three years or thirty.

The early work was deliberately public facing. Putting flood, fire, wind, and heat risk on hundreds of millions of individual properties, and making it free to homeowners, was partly a mission decision and partly a strategy decision. It forced us to model everything, everywhere, at a level of detail most commercial models skipped, and it built a kind of trust and scrutiny you cannot buy. When 35 PhDs and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers sit behind a number, the conversation changes.

What evolved over the decade was who we were talking to. We started with individuals and moved steadily up the capital stack. First to the government, then to the people making real capital decisions on real assets: real estate investors doing due diligence on the properties in their portfolios, asset managers weighing exposure across entire funds, and banks making massive credit decisions on the back of it. The science stayed the same. The application changed. And somewhere in the last few years the market caught up to a thing we had been saying from the beginning, which is that climate risk is not a reporting exercise or a values statement. It is financial risk. Once a capital allocator sees it that way, they do not need convincing that it matters. They just need the numbers to be rigorous, and that is the part we had spent ten years building.

Megan: Why now? What made this the right time to sell the company, and what made MSCI the right home for what you have built?

Matt: For a long time the answer to whether we would ever sell was simply not yet, because the mission was not far enough along. What changed is that the market crossed a line. Climate risk stopped being a topic people studied and became an input people price. Once that happens, the constraint is no longer whether the science is good enough. The constraint is distribution: getting rigorous, physics-based risk into the actual systems where capital decisions get made every day.

That is exactly what MSCI brings. They are already inside the workflows of the world's largest asset owners and managers, and they have spent decades earning trust as independent financial infrastructure. We spent a decade building the standard for climate risk financial modeling. They have the reach to put it in front of the people who need it, at a scale that would have taken us many more years to build on our own.

So this was less about selling a company and more about finding the fastest credible path to the mission. The work does not slow down inside MSCI. It compounds.

Megan: Where do you believe organizations are still underestimating the financial consequences of physical climate risk?

Matt: The biggest gap is that a lot of organizations are still measuring tomorrow's risk with yesterday's data. They rely on historical loss experience and on designated hazard zones, like FEMA flood maps, that were never built to describe forward-looking, climate-adjusted risk. If your property sits just outside a mapped flood zone, the old approach tells you that you are safe. Physics tell you something very different.

The second gap is that people stop at the physical event and miss everything that follows from it. It is not just whether a building floods. It is what happens to the cost and even the availability of insurance, to the income the asset produces, to what a lender is willing to put against it, and to what the asset is ultimately worth. The financial hit usually arrives long before any water does, and most models still stop at the hazard itself.

The third, and maybe the most expensive, is that resilience is rarely given the credit it deserves. Organizations tend to either ignore adaptation entirely or wave it away, when the truth sits in between and can actually be measured. A levee, a floodwall, a stronger roof, all of it changes the risk in a real and quantifiable way. When you cannot show the payoff from resilience, you cannot make the case for the money it takes to build it, and that is where a lot of value quietly gets left on the table.

Megan: Will the next generation of climate intelligence platforms be judged less by how well they quantify risk and more by how effectively they help organizations make better decisions and allocate capital?

Matt: I think that is probably right. Quantifying risk well is becoming table stakes rather than a differentiator, and the harder question is whether the number actually helps someone make a better decision and put their capital in a smarter place. We do not see ourselves as making those decisions for anyone. What we can try to be is a reliable input into them, and that only holds up if we stay rigorous about the underlying science. A decision is only as good as what goes into it. So the way we think about our role is fairly modest: get the risk right, be transparent about how we got there, and help organizations act on it. That is the part we are confident about. Get those things right and the better decisions follow. 

Megan: Looking ahead, where do you see the next major breakthroughs occurring, higher-resolution modeling, real-time analytics, AI, behavioral insights, or something else entirely?

Matt: All of them matter, but I would group them. The first frontier is resolution and physical realism: moving from coarse, statistical approximations to true modeling of how water, wind, and fire actually behave on the landscape. We recently moved our flood modeling onto a full hydrodynamic engine for exactly this reason. It matters because real decisions happen at the level of a single asset, not a grid cell.

The second is systemic and cascading risk. A single building might be fine, but the substation it depends on floods, or the one road in and out washes away, or the port your supply chain runs through goes offline. Modeling those dependencies, the way risk propagates through infrastructure and portfolios, is where a lot of hidden financial exposure lives.

People often ask whether our models are AI models, and the answer is no, by design. Physics sits at the core because physics does not hallucinate or underestimate an extreme event the way a pure pattern-matching approach can, and that matters when the number is being used to weigh real money. AI earns its place around that core, making the inputs and outputs sharper: high-resolution terrain models, a digital twin of nearly every building on the planet, spotting levees from imagery, generating far more synthetic weather than our short record holds. So the breakthrough I am most excited about is less any single technology and more the connective tissue: linking high-resolution physical risk, to systemic effects, to the financial and adaptation decisions that follow. That full chain, done rigorously, is what actually changes outcomes. 

Megan: Now that First Street is part of the MSCI family, what changes should current or prospective clients anticipate, and how does it change your competitive positioning?

Matt: The first thing clients should hear is what does not change: the science, the methodology, the peer-reviewed rigor, and the team all continue. Independence and transparency were the whole point of what we built, and that carries forward.

What gets better is reach and depth. Our physical risk analytics now sit inside the MSCI environment clients already use, alongside transition risk, nature, and geospatial intelligence, so instead of a standalone data set they get a fuller view of total climate exposure in one place. Competitively, that changes our category. We had the most rigorous independent view of physical climate risk, and now it is embedded in one of the core platforms the financial system runs on, sitting alongside the risk factors every investment and credit decision already depends on.

Megan: As you reflect on that journey, what lessons stand out most, and what advice would you leave for founders building the next generation of climate risk and resilience companies?

Matt: The honest lesson is that being early and being wrong look identical for a very long time. For years, the feedback was some version of interesting, but nobody is buying this yet. The only thing that gets you through that stretch is genuine conviction about the problem, not the product. We believed physical climate risk was going to become financial risk whether the market was ready or not, and we were willing to be early and patient about it.

The second lesson is that rigor is the only durable moat. Anyone can produce a scary map. Very few people can defend a number in front of a skeptical CFO, a regulator, and a room of PhDs at the same time. We chose peer review and transparency even when it was slower and harder, and that is ultimately what let institutions build on top of us.

For founders building the next generation of climate companies, I would say two things. First, anchor to a real financial or operational decision, not to a narrative. The companies that endure solve a problem someone would pay to solve even if the word climate never came up. Second, respect the gap between building and demand, and fund yourself to survive it. The market catches up faster than you fear and slower than you hope. If you have the conviction and the runway to still be standing when it does, the reward for being right early is enormous. That is the whole game.

Investment Highlights

First Street, a leading provider of property-level climate risk data and analytics, announced their pending acquisition by financial information services firm, MCSI. Post-acquisition, First Street will be part of MSCI's Sustainability & Climate reporting segment. In 2025, the Sustainability & Climate unit reported $346.4 million in revenue and adjusted EBITDA of $128.5 million.

Valuation:  $120 million cash consideration plus revenue-based earnouts

Acquirer:  MSCI (NYSE: MSCI)

Announcement Date:  24 June 2026

Target Close Date: 3rd Quarter, 2026

Investors:   

• Congruent Ventures
• Galvanize
• General Catalyst
• Innovation Endeavors
• Nuveen
• SE Ventures

Transaction Advisors:

• Cooley LLP - First Street
• Davis Polk -- MSCI

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