Jupiter in the news

Jupiter Intelligence, a startup that sells climate change impact data to governments and private industry, raised $23 million in Series B funding led by Energize Ventures. Why it’s the BFD: Because our failure to effectively mitigate climate change means that we now must deal with its consequences. “Jupiter has aggressively hired top talent from government climate labs, both for its executive ranks and at the staff level, and is especially well-positioned to tackle systemic risk for the insurance sector. It’s no accident that insurance companies, especially the major reinsurers, have been advocating for climate action long before many politicians did; they’re afraid of sinking under a rising tide of natural disaster costs.”

Data analytics company Jupiter Intelligence works with public sector agencies and private companies in real estate, insurance, energy and infrastructure to help them assess and plan for climate-related risks. The company has secured $23 million in Series B funding backed by energy-focused investment firm Energize Ventures, impact investor SYSTEMIQ, and insurance firms QBE, Mitsui MS&AD and Nephila.

As natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, cities and the businesses that reside in them are mobilizing to understand how best to prepare for the climatological challenges they’re going to face — and increasingly they’re turning to companies like Jupiter Intelligence for information.

Rich Sorkin is the founder and CEO of Jupiter Intelligence, a startup delivering hyperlocal climate predictions using cloud computing.

Jupiter is a company staffed in part by climatologists and other scientists and provides climate change risk assessments for projects and government agencies.

“It joins the mounting evidence about the scope and magnitude of climate-change impacts,” says Jupiter Intelligence director Julie Pullen, an ocean scientist at Jupiter Intelligence who reviewed an earlier version of the report. And because the report drills down into the local-scale impacts, Pullen adds, it gives Americans a realistic view of exactly how climate change influences their day-to-day experiences.

Richard Sorkin, co-founder of Jupiter Intel, said politics and other factors can keep government-provided maps from being the most comprehensive flood maps available. Jupiter works to create flood maps using the latest in cloud-computing technology to account for all factors that lead to flooding. The company has a team of experts, including a Nobel Prize winner, that works with governments and companies to provide the most up-to-date information on property risks.

Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Brooklyn College and an extended team of academic and private institutions to study urban flooding in New York City and measures to improve resilience. Jupiter is leading the scientific modeling, essential to comprehending current and future rain and flood scenarios. The team has already completed its first milestone, a proof of concept, and is actively using Jupiter’s scientific models on our ClimateScore™ cloud computing platform.

“We live in a world designed for an environment that no longer exists,” says Rich Sorkin, the co-founder of Jupiter Intelligence, a company that models climate-induced risk. Accepting the reality of what future will look like, he says, is key to planning for it—and studies like this, he says, highlight just how quickly we’ll all have to adapt.

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.