EarthMover wants to be a snowflake for weather and geospatial data

Not only does it look at the Earth from above, it produces much data. However, Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman realized very quickly that all of that data is not yet enough for the startup to flourish. Data-centric climate technology startup Earthmober needs to pivot.

However, pivots aren’t completely separate from climate technology. Instead, the company has reduced its timescale and focused on how climate affects daily life: the weather.

“What makes a platform attractive use case? Data that changes frequently,” EarthMover co-founder and CEO Abernathey told TechCrunch. “That’s where there’s more urgency around the solution. [data] Go to the weather, go to the fire, go to the new observations that are being produced. ”

He said the climate outcomes are “important, but kind of static,” with new data emerging every few years.

EarthMover’s core products remain data structures built to handle large, complex data sets. “In geospatial, they call it a raster. In AI, they call it a tensor. In old school, they call it an array,” Abernathy said. In addition to that, startups have built a variety of tools to help customers extract insights from their data.

Pivot has helped EarthMover find more than 10 paid customers so far per Abernathey, landing a $7.2 million seed round, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The round was led by Low Carbon Capital with participation from Costano Aventure and Preston Warner Ventures. The company is using cash to build new tools on top of its data storage platform.

EarthMover is built on open source software such as Xarray, Pangeo, and Icechunk and runs on leading cloud providers such as Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and on-premises servers. Earthmober CTOs Abarnathy and Hamman have a deep connection to the open source world they’ve worked on Pangyo and XARRAY.

Some decisions to use these tools can be motivated by facilities using earth observation data and may promptly require terabytes or petabytes of storage. Abernathey said typical EarthMover customers have dozens to hundreds of terabytes.

However, the decision to move on to open source was also motivated by the business reality. It helps you build tools that are on top of open source projects, Abernathey said.

“If you’re a serious multinational company, you’re dependent on startups,” he said. But using open source tools “in a way, the risk to our customers is mitigated because when we pivot or go out of business, they still have all their own data in their own storage.”

EarthMover’s customers include insurance startup Kettle, which uses the platform to evaluate Wildfire Risk, and RWE, a German multinational energy company. Abernathey said renewable companies exposed to the whims of the weather will use EarthMover’s tools to predict supply and demand.

The goal is to make weather and geospatial data accessible to more users. “If you’re a trading desk, you want to see the latest forecast map, and you want it on the dashboard,” Hanman said. “I don’t want to run Python scripts or anything.”