Jupiter Press

The February 2021 Texas power outages brought the world’s largest petrochemical complex to a standstill, forcing more plants in the Gulf of Mexico region to shut down than during Hurricane Harvey. Jupiter has been monitoring the risks to Texas’s industries for some time. Now, The Wall Street Journal speaks with CEO Rich Sorkin for Jupiter’s insight into the existing and evolving challenges the Gulf region faces.

Jupiter would like to congratulate Rick Spinard on his new role as head of NOAA. “His exemplary record previously leading NOAA Research and the National Ocean Service will prove important in NOAA’s forward progress and leadership in both oceanographic and atmospheric endeavors as well as any responsibility NOAA may have for a National Climate Service, which Jupiter also strongly supports,” CEO Rich Sorkin told the Washington Post.

Jupiter is excited to have been selected to join Cohort 6 of the exclusive Lloyd’s Lab accelerator. Our selection as one of eleven companies out of almost 200 applicants makes a strong statement about the important role of climate analytics in the insurance sector more broadly, and specifically at Lloyd’s—the insurance capital of the world.

“As somebody who has a passion for using big data to better understand our changing earth, it’s incredibly exciting to work with a company that’s helping companies not only understand climate change, but also prepare for it,” Dr. Barnes said. In her new role, Dr. Barnes will help Jupiter’s science team further refine their physics-informed machine learning and explainable AI for atmospheric science and climate risk.

Reinsurance News, which publishes global reinsurance industry trends, has coverage of Jupiter’s appointment of Marc Lehmann as Head of Business Development and Partnerships, UK & Europe.

Lehmann previously served as Director within the Climate Risk and Decarbonization Strategy group at KPMG in London, following several senior level roles within the insurance sector including Head of Client Service Development at AIG, and Global Head of Catastrophe Risk Management for corporate clients at Willis Towers Watson. “Marc’s deep expertise in insurance and cat risk in European markets and track record of growing new businesses make him the ideal person to guide Jupiter’s first wave of geographic expansion outside of the United States, building on our existing relationships with BP and several others across the continent,” said Jupiter CEO, Rich Sorkin.

“Out-of-date assumptions need to be updated. Severe events are happening more frequently and with greater impact already, and continuing to get worse at an accelerating rate.” Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin speaks with Risk Management Magazine about the lessons learned from the 2021 Texas blackouts.

Failing to plan is planning to fail. POWERGRID International has published Mr. Sorkin’s thought piece on the February 2021 Texas blackouts.

Climate & Capital Media highlights Jupiter’s report on flood risks in Miami-Dade County and the benefits of the “high-definition” climate risk modeling that Jupiter provides.

Four years ago, almost no large companies were thinking about the impact of climate change on their businesses. Finally, many are. Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin shares his thoughts on climate planning and recovery in the wake of the 2021 Texas blackouts.

“Without that planning and investment, a hellscape will be upon us,” says Rich Sorkin, as the Washington Post turns to Jupiter for insights into power grid climate resilience after the devastating winter blackouts in Texas.

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.

Jupiter Intelligence CEO Rich Sorkin said banks are using his firm’s services to “understand the safety of a mortgage asset over the mortgage’s expected life cycle.” Sorkin added that his company has seen “a huge uptick in interest” from insurance, asset management and real estate companies.

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

“As Rich Sorkin, head of Jupiter Intelligence, a consultancy, argues: ‘In ten years there won’t be a large entity anywhere on the planet that does not have a handle on its climate risk. Consumers, shareholders and employees won’t stand for it.’”

“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.”

“Currently, the world overall is repeating the mistakes of the COVID pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis – it is too slow to recognize and respond to enormous and imminent impacts on citizens and corporations,” says Rich Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter.

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.

Zurich North America Insurance has selected Jupiter as one of two finalists to represent North America in the Zurich Innovation Championship. The global competition is designed to create collaborations between Zurich and insurtechs and bring new ideas and energy to the forefront.

Jupiter will use its technology to help the insurance group predict the financial effect of natural disasters such as floods.

A new report warns three Houston-area petrochemical facilities are “highly vulnerable” to costly impacts from climate change. Jupiter estimated the plants would see three to eight times more damage from “extreme” flood events within the next 10 years.

In the report, Jupiter notes that the “very functionality” of the properties could be threatened in the coming decades if designs are not upgraded to prepare for climate change and could result in millions of dollars in equipment damages.

Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin discusses climate change, adaptation & resiliency, and more with Jason Jacobs on this episode of the My Climate Journey podcast.

“What’s as alarming is the real possibility, if not probability, that utility operators who rely on FEMA data are either ignoring or badly underestimating the scope of the actual flood risk they face,” Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin said.

Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin writes in POWER Magazine about how climate effects are expected to have outsized impacts on the infrastructure and operations of major public utilities in the coming decades.

As Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin sees it, the reality of what the real estate market is in for if climate change continues unabated has yet to sink in.

Jupiter’s projections for Miami-Dade County feature prominently in the Associated Press’s report. Several major news outlets picked up the news wire, including the New York Times, Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, ABC News, Beaumont Enterprise, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and Sacramento Bee.

Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin sat down with E&E News in Houston last week to discuss the intersection of energy, politics and climate change. Sorkin said the majority of companies Jupiter speaks with don’t question whether climate change is happening, but some still aren’t ready to act.

In a Miami-Dade-focused report from Jupiter Intelligence, researchers found that moderate flooding of about a foot will affect nearly double the number of homes by 2050.

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.

The organizers of the Amsterdam International Water Week asked Jupiter CEO Rich Sorkin to share his views on the AIWW Conference 2019 themes and topics. This year’s theme is the “Implementation of integrated solutions by cities, industries, utilities and financiers: from cases to bankable projects.”

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.