Insider Brief
- Excarta, specializing in AI-driven weather forecasting, has completed its seed investment round to commercialize its platform, offering businesses highly accurate, high-resolution weather forecasts tailored to their specific needs.
- The platform extends beyond the limitations of traditional weather models by providing detailed hourly forecasts for up to 14 days, using AI models for ensemble forecasting and incorporating various data types for specific tasks like solar irradiance or electrical grid load forecasting.
- Excarta’s technology is already being used in sectors such as energy, AgTech, and supply chains for optimizing operations, enhancing crop yields, route planning, and reducing losses due to weather.
PRESS RELEASE — SAN MATEO, Calif./ December 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Excarta, pioneers of commercializing AI for business-targeted weather forecasting, today announced that it has completed its seed round of investment to commercialize its AI-driven weather forecasting platform. The platform — already functional and “real world” proven — enables businesses to easily, quickly and inexpensively access or produce highly accurate, high-resolution weather forecasts for the parameters they care about. These AI-driven weather forecasts can dramatically enhance situational awareness for businesses that currently rely on conventional weather models.
“We are leveraging breakthroughs in the use of AI for weather modeling that mirrors the impact of using large language models like GPT in other fields,” said Vivek Ramavajjala, founder and chief executive officer, Excarta. “We’re harnessing these cutting edge developments in AI to solve real business issues with speedy, actionable weather forecasts of higher accuracy than conventional forecasts.”
To gain greater efficiencies and resiliency while mitigating disasters, businesses can benefit from more precise weather intelligence, but traditional models may be limited in the amount of data they can analyze, and the resolution they can provide over an extended period. The current weather “data stack” is also difficult to engage with, hampered by data stored in hard-to-access formats and in different locations.
While conventional models typically offer hourly forecasts only for the first three to five days, Excarta exploits the lower cost and higher speed of AI models to provide hourly forecasts for up to 14 days. Excarta uses its AI models to produce ensemble forecasts to provide not just the most likely forecast, but estimate the uncertainty in forecasts as well. Excarta is also able to extend the AI models to consume other types of data for better performance on specific tasks, such as forecasting solar irradiance or electrical load on the grid.
Rather than being limited to numerical analysis with physical models, Excarta learns how to emulate the same physics as conventional weather models, at a fraction of the time and cost and enables interaction to produce needed insights. Customers can use such models to cheaply produce tailor-made forecasts, or directly access the forecasts through Excarta’s platform without the need for weather expertise. Pilot customers are already using the Excarta cloud platform for business value, including:
- Energy (utilities and traders) — optimization of energy sources, better energy trading, load planning and safe operation of electrical grids
- AgTech — planning of operations, such as fertilizer spraying, increasing crop yield and reducing losses using pest prediction
- Supply chains — optimization of routes and resources, contingency planning, better delivery certainty and lower insurance claims from weather damage
“Excarta makes weather forecasts better, faster, and cheaper with AI, and enables businesses to improve operations, pricing, purchasing, and more with those forecasts via APIs”, said Anne Dwane, Co-founder & Partner at Village Global, the venture firm backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. “Excarta has moved AI weather forecasting from pure research into commercial applications with measurable ROI.”
Excarta’s founding team brings over 15 years of combined experience in AI and climate modeling from Google Research, DeepMind, and Xerox PARC, forming Excarta to use AI to make businesses more resilient to volatile weather. Excarta’s $2.5 million seed round was led by Village Global and joined by Ubiquity Ventures, Converge VC and angel investors. A $500,000 inception-stage SAFE round preceded the seed round. Funding has enabled the successful creation and validation of the Excarta platform.
About Excarta
Founded in 2022, Excarta was formed to commercialize the power of AI for business-targeted weather forecasting. Excarta enables businesses to easily, quickly and inexpensively produce highly accurate, high-resolution weather forecasts for the parameters they care about to gain greater efficiencies and resiliency while mitigating disasters. Excarta offers a cloud-based platform that can utilize unlimited amounts of weather data to study and forecast weather for geographies a fraction of traditional size with great accuracy and covering greater time spans. Learn more about Excarta or request a demo through the company website.
