Jupiter Press

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.”

Jupiter is the start-up to keep an eye on, especially if you believe in Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Jupiter Intelligence uses human and artificial intelligence to help companies look into the future and see the potential impact of climate change on their businesses. “The world needs that kind of information,” says CEO Rich Sorkin. “The world is not moving fast enough to reduce climate change. The impact of climate change is getting worse every year.”

Jupiter, a climate advisory group, recently showed me the type of modeling it is performing for banks and insurance companies in the US. Using a synthetic portfolio of 100,000 residential mortgages in southern Florida — based on the exposure of a real bank — Jupiter forecasts a tripling of losses from flood damage in the next couple of decades.

Here is the crucial question: do homeowners understand this looming shock? Does the mortgage industry? Or insurance world? Or the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Jupiter thinks the answer is no. “Almost none of this is reflected in prices anywhere in the world,” said chief executive Rich Sorkin, who argues that “most of this dynamic is not yet understood or implemented into the decision-making of financial institutions”.

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.

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.

View Rich Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter, testifying at a hearing entitled: “The Future of Forecasting: Building a Stronger U.S. Weather Enterprise.” Mr. Sorkin discusses the use of new technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence to address weather and climate risks and the growing need among all sectors of American society for these services as severe weather events cause ever increasing death and destruction due to climate change.

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. In March, Jupiter announced it completed a $23 million Series B funding round to expand, and that it was partnering with Australian insurer QBE Insurance Group Ltd. and the Bermuda-based insurance-linked securities firm Nephila Capital Ltd. “With each passing year, it becomes clearer that the insurance industry must factor climate change into its underwriting and pricing practices,” David McMillan, group chief operations officer at QBE, said in a statement. “Climate change affects everything we do as a company.”

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.”

Weather-focused software company Jupiter Intelligence raised $23 million in Series B funding, announced on March 4. The round’s investors were led by Energize Ventures. From the company’s Crunchbase profile, “Led by a team of world-renowned scientists and executives, Jupiter provides data and analytics services to better predict and manage risks from weather and sea-level rise, storm intensification and rising temperatures caused by medium- to long-term climate change. Jupiter’s ClimateScore Intelligence Platform provides sophisticated, dynamic, hyper-local, current to 50+ year predicted risks from weather in a changing climate. The company’s FloodScore and HeatScore services are currently focused on climate-related risk assessment and management in New York City, South Florida and the Atlantic Coast with global expansion underway.”

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.

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 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.

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.

Jupiter Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Alan Blumberg has co-authored The Urban Ocean. This book introduces the new discipline of urban oceanography, providing a deeper understanding of the physics of the coastal ocean in an urban setting. The authors explore how the coastal ocean impacts with the humans who live, work and play along its shores; and in turn how human activities impact the health and dynamics of the coastal ocean.

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.

The Disrupt 100 is an annual index celebrating the businesses with the most potential to influence, change or create new global markets. The report tracks the world’s most disruptive businesses, compiled and curated by the world’s leading entrepreneurs, investors and business people. Each Disrupt 100 venture was sourced from over 5M global startups and corporate ventures, has been scored against a specific criteria measuring the potential it has to affect an existing market or geography, introduce new customers into an existing market and/or creating a new market with significant customer demand. The ventures were then judged by global brands including Google, Uber, Oracle, Silicon Valley Bank and Virgin StartUp, tech accelerators Microsoft Ventures, Accelerated Digital Ventures and Whitespace Ventures and entrepreneurs Emma Sinclair, Tom Goodwin and Bill Liao.

Jupiter Intel’s models, satellite data and sensors help community planners, developers and city officials anticipate challenges such as sea level rise, erosion and impermeable pavement. The company, which has raised $10 million in venture capital funding so far, can predict flood risks down to specific properties, for the near future and years out.

It is what could be defined as the “resilience issue”, the understanding and predicting of the risks related to climate change and their impacts on the horizon of the public and private sector. Jupiter is a startup, which offers services, predictions, and analyses to city officials, insurance companies, businesses, and any other actor in the public arena who deals with urban planning in coastal areas.

Doug Parsons of America Adapts talks with Rich Sorkin, CEO and Co-Founder of Jupiter Intel, about the company’s history and Rich’s short- and long-term goals in this emerging field. Doug and Rich discuss developing businesses in the adaptation sector and how businesses can use smart climate planning to avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown.

Jupiter Intelligence provides climate change and weather event risk-prediction services. The company’s solution is built on a cloud-based platform designed specifically for the rigors of climate analysis. The Jupiter ClimateScore Intelligence Platform links data, probabilistic and scenario-based models and advanced validation in an integrated environment.

A San Mateo startup, Jupiter, is hoping to reduce future devastation caused by floods and severe weather by helping developers and cities predict where the problem areas could be. “The world has been very slow to respond to the science and the events of the last few years that make it crystal clear that in certain parts of the world, risks are getting worse,” said CEO Rick Sorkin.

Predicting how climate change will alter the weather is becoming a flourishing business. The consumers are property owners and businesses that fear a rise in extreme weather — hurricanes, floods or heat waves, for example. Last year set a record for U.S. losses at over $300 billion. Rich Sorkin is seeking them out. Sorkin is CEO of a new company called Jupiter. “Our approach is, look, we’re in the risk business,” he says. What Jupiter sells is risk assessment. How you can dodge the climate bullet? Sorkin’s pitch is blunt: “Hugely important, globally significant, gigantic economic problem, not currently being addressed.”

Where the Trump administration sees waste, the small but rapidly expanding Silicon Valley climate services firm Jupiter Intel sees opportunity.

New Silicon Valley startup Jupiter — boosted by $10 million in venture capital funds — will soon arrive on the South Florida scene to test its climate change calculating software.

Jupiter uses predictive cloud computing models to inform business owners how climate change will affect their operations in the future.

Jupiter, a startup based in Silicon Valley, is working on combining data and predictive modeling using cloud-based supercomputers to show businesses the potential impacts of climate change.

As floods, heat waves, and other damaging natural phenomena increase, it’s important for developers and city planners to understand the effects. Jupiter offers incredibly detailed maps of a post-climate change world.

As companies around the world grow concerned about the risks of climate change, they have started looking for clarity on how warming might disrupt their operations in the future. But governments in the United States and Europe have been slow to translate academic research on global warming into practical, timely advice for businesses or local city planners. Now some private companies, like Jupiter, are trying to fill the gap.

This week, a high-powered, well-funded start-up company has barged onto the scene to help businesses and governments confront their increasing vulnerability to climate change and weather disasters.