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FORBES.COM JUNE 30, 20 19THETRENDSaildrone is already selling forecasts to sports teams, insur-
ance companies and hedge funds.
More than a half dozen investors, including the founda-
tion run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, are backing
the company with $90 million in venture capital. Pitchbook
pegs its value at $260 million. Employee head count is at
100 and growing. In January, the company launched a free
weather app and plans to charge for a premium version
starting in June. Cheap computing power allows Saildrone
to quickly test powerful weather models. But its vast trove
of sensor data makes it a novel challenger to Accu Weather
and its ilk. “We have a unique data source that they don’t
have,” Jenkins says.
Other startups take weather data and go several steps be-
yond forecasting. Two-year-old Jupiter Intelligence, based
in San Mateo, California, with offices in New York and Boul-
der, Colorado, combines weather data with information
about an area’s environment and terrain to create “climate
risk assessments.” It sells two services, short-term predic-
tions of one hour to five days and long-range projections
that look up to 50 years into the future.
Jupiter hopes that major cities planning for hurricanes,
floods and fires, like Houston and Los Angeles, will eventu-
ally become customers, but in the short run businesses af-
fected by severe weather seem like surer sells. Any company
with a warehouse in a low-lying area wants to know howmany square feet it might lose to sea-level rise and when
that loss might happen. The company’s insurer wants to
know that too. QBE, a big Australian insurer, is already a
Jupiter customer, as is Nephila, an insurance-focused in-
vestment firm. Both are also investors who have contrib-
uted to the company’s $33 million in backing.
“IBM and AccuWeather predict the weather,” says Jupiter
founder and CEO Rich Sorkin, 57. “We predict the impact of
that weather.” Jupiter charges $200,000 to $500,000 to run
a pilot for new clients. Yearly subscriptions cost $1 million
and up. Revenue to date is in the single-digit millions he
says, but he projects ten times that for 2019.
A Yale grad with an M.B.A. from Stanford who started
his career as a management consultant, Sorkin ran Elon
Musk’s first breakout venture, Zip2, which developed on-
line city guides, before it sold to Compaq for $300 million
in 1999. In 2008 he made a first attempt at a startup to
sell weather forecasts to businesses. His idea was to take
publicly available meteorological models, pump them up
with computing power and sell 30-day forecasts to en-
ergy commodities traders. But the forecasts were no bet-
ter than the competition’s. He raised only $1 million for
the company, Zeus Analytics, and it went out of business
in 2011.
Jupiter looks more promising. The 50-person team in-
cludes talent from the federal government’s National Cen-
ter for Atmospheric Research and NOAA. Like Zeus, Jupiter
uses government-issued weather data, but Sorkin says ar-
tificial intelligence and detailed terrain-based information
are producing risk projections that customers are willing to
pay for. Without cloud computing, he says, Jupiter wouldn’t
exist.
Another challenger with huge ambitions: ClimaCell, co-
founded 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-
rado, 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 forecasts
for airlines including JetBlue, which is also an investor, and
game-day forecasts for the New England Patriots. Via, aJupiter Intelligence
Founded: 2017 by CEO Rich Sorkin
Combines weather, climate and terrain data to create
geographically-specific risk profiles
Number of employees: 50
Money raised: $33 million“UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE
RISK IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST
CHALLENGES FOR THE PLANET.”