Excarta raises $2.5m seed investment round to commercialize AI for business-targeted weather forecasting

Excarta, the pioneer of commercializing AI for business-targeted weather forecasting, 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.

Vivek Ramavajjala, Founder and CEO, Excarta: "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. 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

Anne Dwane, Co-founder and Partner, Village Global: "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. 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.

www.excarta.io