Zurich-based Jua, an artificial intelligence for climate startup, has launched a platform that will enable the meteorological industry to produce customised high-resolution weather models that outperform all existing approaches, including numerical models and machine learning enhanced numerical models.
$2.5M investment
As a part of the launch, Jua has raised a pre-seed investment of $2.5M led by Promus Ventures, which has backed the Finnish satellite imaging startup ICEYE).
Participants in the round include prominent investors Siraj Khaliq (Co-Founder of the Climate Corporation & former Partner at Atomico), Mehdi Ghissassi (Head of Product at Alphabet-acquired Deepmind), and Swiss based Session.vc (founded by seasoned entrepreneurs and first check investors of companies like On Running, Bexio or Nutmeg).
In addition to the investment, Promus Ventures Partner Pierre Festal joined the Jua board.
Pierre Festal, Partner at Promus Ventures, added, “The team at Jua have built one of the most ambitious AI applications that provides accuracy far beyond what the weather industry has to-date considered feasible. We are delighted to back them and to help support the launch of this category-defining technology.”
World’s first AI-driven weather prediction model
Co-founded in 2022 in Zurich by serial entrepreneurs Andreas Brenner and Marvin Gabler, Jua has hubs in Zurich, Berlin and Cape Town. It has launched the world’s first global high-resolution weather prediction model.
Jua plans to provide startups, companies, government institutions and researchers the ability to create purpose-built weather models in a matter of hours. The new platform contains one of the largest weather and geospatial data sets available and includes a training infrastructure that enables even non-technical users to customise their models with proprietary data.
Jua’s weather model provides up to 25 times higher spatial resolution and ten times higher temporal resolution than conventional alternatives. This massive resolution increase is achieved via an end-to-end deep learning approach and tens-of-millions of sensors, in comparison to the hundreds-of-thousands of sensors used by current standard models. An additional benefit of the new deep learning powered model is its energy efficiency, with it requiring over a thousand-times less computing power than any other numerical weather model.
Jua’s platform is currently being offered to a select number of customers, on request, and is set to be released to a wider audience in early 2023
Andreas Brenner, Co-founder and CEO of Jua, commented, “We are going to change perceptions of weather prediction forever. In terms of geospatial resolution, temporal resolution and update frequency, our first model already outperforms all existing numerical models by several orders of magnitude. We now enable everyone from small startups to large companies to get access to much better weather data than they have ever seen before.”
Marvin Gabler, Co-Founder and CTO, added, “It is important to understand that we took the risk of completely rethinking the technical approach to weather forecasting and built a new technology from the ground up. Besides accuracy, our approach also brings completely new capabilities to the market. To the energy sector, it brings the first probabilistic short-term forecast which can significantly improve their profitability. We won’t stop here. This is our first platform to be released and we can’t wait to announce all the things we are working on over the coming months and years.”
