Forbes Indonesia - July 2019

JULY 2019 FORBES INDONESIA | 61

er, is already a Jupiter customer, as is Nephila, an insur-

ance-focused investment firm. Both are also investors who

have contributed 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 subscrip-

tions 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 pub-

licly available meteorological models, pump them up with

computing power and sell 30-day forecasts to energy com-

modities traders. But the forecasts were no better 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

includes talent from the federal government’s National

Before he studied engineering at Imperial College Lon-
don, he spent a year on the open water, including a stint
as a crew member on a yacht owned by the Italian tycoon
Gianni Agnelli. Two years into his degree, Jenkins started
building a contraption called a land yacht, with a tubular
carbon-fiber cockpit and three race-car wheels, topped
with a 40-foot sail. In March 2009, he zipped across a dry
lake in the Mojave Desert, hitting 126.2 mph and setting a
world record for wind-powered speed.
That experience incubated the idea of creating an ar-
mada of oceangoing robots with a design similar to his
land yacht. He formed Saildrone as a research project that
would produce a fleet of 23-foot-long, 15-foot-high un-
manned vessels, each equipped with up to 20 meteorologi-
cal and oceanographic sensors. At first, he says, his idea
was to collect data on ocean acidification, temperature and
salinity and use it for the “greater good.” His first custom-
ers were government agencies like NOAA and NASA.
By 2017, Jenkins realized that Saildrone’s robots were
gathering a unique and powerful data set that could factor
into superior weather forecasts. After all, most weather
forms over the oceans, where there are few weather sta-
tions to notice it. Though it only has 25 robots deployed,
he says Saildrone is already selling forecasts to sports
teams, insurance companies and hedge funds.
More than a half dozen investors, including the foun-
dation run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, are back-
ing 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 pre-
mium 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 AccuWeather 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
beyond forecasting. Two-year-old Jupiter Intelligence,
based in San Mateo, California, with offices in New York
and Boulder, Colorado, combines weather data with infor-
mation about an area’s environment and terrain to create
“climate risk assessments.” It sells two services, short-
term predictions 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 hurri-
canes, floods and fires, like Houston and Los Angeles, will
eventually become customers, but in the short run busi-
nesses affected by severe weather seem like surer sells.
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 in-
surer wants to know that too. QBE, a big Australian insur-

SAILDRONE

Founded: 2012 by CEO Richard Jenkins

Sensor data from oceangoing robots produces

unique forecasts

Number of employees: 100

Money raised: $90 million

“THE OCEAN IS DRIVING OUR WEATHER,

AND BOTH THE CLIMATE AND THE OCEANS

ARE CHANGING RAPIDLY. WE HAVE TO

UNDERSTAND THAT.”