Center for Atmospheric Research and NOAA. Like Zeus,
Jupiter uses government-issued weather data, but Sorkin
says artificial intelligence and detailed terrain-based infor-
mation are producing risk projections that customers are
willing to pay for. Without cloud computing, he says, Jupi-
ter wouldn’t exist.
Another challenger with huge ambitions: ClimaCell,
cofounded in 2015 by Shimon Elkabetz, 32, a former Israeli
air force pilot, while he was earning his M.B.A. at Harvard.
When he was in the military, he nearly lost control of his
plane after a forecast failed to warn him that he was about
to fly into a thick bank of clouds. At the time, he thought to
himself, “Someone has to come up with a new tool.”
Together with two cofounders, he developed what he
says are minute-by-minute, hyperlocal forecasts that he
claims are 60% more accurate than those of competitors.
ClimaCell’s edge, according to Elkabetz: In addition to the
government weather data all the private forecasters use, it
pulls weather inputs from new sources like cellphone sig-
nals and street cameras. “We call it the weather of things,”
he says. “We turn everything into a weather sensor.”
The company has raised $77 million in venture capital,
valuing it at a reported $217 million. In just the past year,
Elkabetz has opened offices in Tel Aviv and Boulder, Colo-
COMPANIES & PEOPLE
FORBES INDONESIA
ACCUWEATHERrado, to supplement his Boston headquarters. He is tak-
ing dead aim at many of the industries that AccuWeather
serves. “We’re going to be bigger than AccuWeather,” he
says. “We want to become the biggest weather technology
company in the world.”
Already ClimaCell is making ground-operation fore-
casts for airlines including JetBlue, which is also an inves-
tor, and game-day forecasts for the New England Patriots.
Via, a ride-sharing company, uses its forecasts in five cities
including London and Amsterdam. On a Sunday in mid-
May, Via got an alert from ClimaCell about heavy rain in
New York that would last from late morning to midday,
with varying intensity in different parts of the city. Know-
ing demand would spike, Via made sure it had enough
drivers in the wettest spots. “There is a significant mon-
etary value to us in using ClimaCell’s platform,” says Ari
Luks, Via’s director of global marketplace economics.
Can ClimaCell best the incumbents? Marshall Shep-
herd, director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric
sciences program and a past president of the American
Meteorological Society, says he’s yet to see robust statistics
proving the company’s claims, but adding lots of new data
inputs could help produce more accurate forecasts. “I’m
bullish on what they’re doing,” he says.PAPI PAKET E-PAPER PLUS ASURANSI
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