Jupiter in the news

The Weather Channel talks to our CEO about how merging climate models, high definition mapping, and cloud computing can help businesses add climate change predictions to their investment decisions.

One company that specializes in Earth observation is Jupiter Intelligence. It provides services to help customers understand how they will be affected by changes in the Earth system such as climate change. We spoke to Rich Sorkin, Jupiter’s CEO, to learn more about the firm.

CNBC spotlights Jupiter in an interview with CEO Rich Sorkin for its Rising Risk series on climate change. “If you were a major corporation 10 years ago and somebody said ‘cyber risk,’ chances were a lot of people would say, ‘What’s that?’ Now every large entity on the planet, business, financial services, governments, they are managing to cyber risks. It’s just a fundamental part of their business,” Sorkin said. “And the same thing will be true with risk from severe weather, accounting for the climate change that’s already occurred and is inevitably coming over the next several years as well.”

Two-year-old Jupiter Intelligence…combines weather data with information about an area’s environment and terrain to create “climate risk assessments.” Any company with a warehouse in a low-lying area wants to know how many square feet it might lose to sea-level rise and when that loss might happen. The company’s insurer wants to know that too.

If you run a business, or maintain a city, or plan power plants or highways or bridges, you’d like to know how bad things are, and how bad they’re going to get. That’s what Jupiter and other “climate services” companies sell. Jupiter explicitly incorporates climate change into its models for catastrophe risk, both proprietary and public, and then offers that knowledge to the kind of people who might lose money when the floods, fires, storms, and heat waves really kick in.

AI and supercomputing are rapidly shifting the way disaster planners, regulators and insurers gauge climate hazards. “I would say the last two years have represented dramatic change that vastly exceeded even our expectations about how things would evolve,” said Rich Sorkin, chief executive officer of Jupiter Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based firm staffed by senior scientists and engineers from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NOAA, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Rich Sorkin, chief executive officer for the analytics firm Jupiter Intelligence saw the writing on the wall 10 years ago. That’s when he founded a company he named Zeus to do 30-day forecasts for the power sector and commodity traders, using the then-nascent trend in enterprise computing. “For a variety of reasons we were a bit too early,” Sorkin said. But the effort served as a “warm-up” for what’s now Jupiter, born in 2017. Since then, Sorkin has assembled a roster of climate science all-stars including Josh Hacker from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Elizabeth Weatherhead, a specialist in arctic climate, and Alan Blumberg, a researcher in how coastal cities and their oceans get along. The goal: Provide clients with local weather projections on time scales ranging from hours to decades.

Jupiter recently raised a $23 million Series B funding round in which Nephila Capital participated, alongside other insurance and reinsurance industry stalwarts including Mitsui MS&AD, QBE, as well as private equity specialists and venture funds. “These investments from leaders in the energy, infrastructure, insurance, financial services and consulting industries underscore the urgent need to regularly quantify and assess climate-related physical risk using forward-looking analytics,” explained Rich Sorkin, CEO and Co-Founder of Jupiter. “Influential investors from the U.S, EU, Asia and Australia highlight the global nature of Jupiter’s business and the rapidly growing demand for Jupiter’s broad portfolio of high-resolution, AI-enabled climate risk applications. Jupiter’s elastic exascale computing provides unlimited capacity, enabling hyper-local risk analyses for the entire planet.”

This week brought one early example, in the form of Jupiter Intelligence, which raised a $23 million funding led by Energize Ventures. Headed by an impressive team that includes a Nobel Prize recipient and two members of the C-suite with ties to Google, Jupiter is a provider of AI-powered weather prediction data designed to help its customers—such as insurance companies and governments—know when and where climate disasters might strike. Hurricanes and massive floods can cause billions of dollars in damage, and Jupiter offers a chance to mitigate some of that risk.

Jupiter announced the launch of the Jupiter Promise—a program to make Jupiter’s services available at little to no cost to underserved countries and communities suffering most from the effects of climate change. In this far-reaching initiative, Jupiter plans to reach more than 20% of the world’s population, partnering with at least 20 additional NGOs by the end of 2023.

The Series C Financing is co-led by Clearvision Ventures and MPower Partners. Jupiter now provides analytics to 30 companies in the Global 2000, U.S. Department of Defense and FEMA to understand the impact of climate change on their physical infrastructure and supply chains, risks to financial portfolios, and vulnerabilities to human health and safety, and to protect over ten billion dollars of physical assets and more than a trillion dollars of financial assets.

Jupiter will join insurance and utility industry leaders along with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others in a program at San Jose State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center (WIRC).

Jupiter announced a major expansion of its work in Japan—adding an industry leading Japan-based venture investor MPower Partners. MPower is Japan’s first ESG-focused global venture capital firm and the first female-led VC firm in Japan.

The Columbia Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Applied Physics, and Applied Mathematics, author, and podcast host further strengthens Jupiter’s unmatched scientific expertise. “We are excited that Adam will bring his knowledge and enthusiasm to continue our efforts at providing the economy with the best science possible,” said Josh Hacker, Jupiter’s Chief Scientist and Co-founder.

Leavitt is a legal pioneer on emerging standards of care in the construction and engineering design resiliency of structures that are threatened by extreme weather from climate change as well as the legal ramifications of failing to adapt to climate change.

In collaboration with MS&AD InterRisk Research & Consulting, the goal of the enhancement is to resolve the lack of scientific data and completeness in terms of subject regions, and other issues regarding climate change scenario analysis.

The alliance combines Guidehouse’s utility industry expertise with Jupiter’s global-scale analytics platform to provide clients with a comprehensive and transparent climate change risk assessment as a key part of an advanced integrated planning strategy.

As the Biden-Harris administration renews its commitment to addressing climate change, Jupiter also announced its support for greater federal coordination of climate information services, emphasizing the need for better governance and the formation of a new Federal Climate Service (FCS). Jupiter’s public sector work has accelerated under the new administration, with risk planning and resilience projects underway or complete with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and multiple other entities within the Executive Branch as well as grant funded work with the National Science Foundation and NASA.