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.

Despite the impact of the global pandemic, Jupiter added several new marquee customers in the past year and looks forward to the Biden Administration’s investments and policies in science, greenhouse gas reduction, and resilience.

The 100 companies on the list represent the private, independent, and for-profit companies best positioned to contribute to a more digitized, de-carbonized and resource-efficient future. Jupiter’s climate change risk analytics were selected among winners from 15 countries and various industries.

Zurich’s Global Innovation team chose Jupiter from among more than 1,300 submissions from companies in 43 countries around the world.

“2020 has proven beyond a doubt that the private sector has much work to do to prepare for future disruptions, and this is especially true regarding the risks that climate change presents to the stability of financial markets,” Keenan said. “I’m excited to join Jupiter on their mission to not only help organizations adapt to the shocks and stresses of climate change, but to also take advantage of the opportunities for sustainable investment.”

ClimateScore Global™ is a next-generation climate risk analytics tool that provides physical risk assessment designed to support decision-making across a wide range of industries—for any point on the land surface of the planet through the year 2100.

“With the support of industry leaders including Liberty Mutual and MS&AD, Jupiter will continue to deepen our analytics to help customers make complex financial decisions as they emerge from a global economic crisis,” said Rich Sorkin, CEO and Co-Founder.

The $1M grant will go towards the deployment of Jupiter’s FireScore™ Operations service, a wildfire threat and intelligence platform, to accelerate readiness for the 2020 wildfire season.

Jupiter today announced an agreement with the Hawaiian Electric Companies to provide ongoing climate risk analytics services for generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure across five major islands of Hawaii. Jupiter also recently announced a capital investment from Elemental Excelerator (Elemental), a global infrastructure innovation accelerator. The funding, as part of Elemental’s Demonstration Track, will enable Jupiter to accelerate deployment of its flood and wind risk analytics services in the Pacific, beginning in Hawaii.