Fig. 1 - The wordmark of a company that decided the weather report was too short. ClimateAi has spent since 2017 arguing that a forecast should run two seasons, not two weeks - and getting Dole and Suntory to pay for the difference.
The San Francisco startup selling something most weather apps won't: a look two seasons ahead.
"The first climate resilience platform, pioneering the application of AI to mitigate the impact of climate change and uncover new opportunities."
Here is a thing about the weather forecast: it is very good for about ten days and then it stops. This is fine if you are deciding whether to bring an umbrella. It is less fine if you are Dole, and you are deciding what to plant, where, and whether the field you are counting on in Guatemala will get rain in March. The gap between "ten-day forecast" and "planting decision" is where a lot of money quietly lives, and ClimateAi's entire business is the wager that you can shrink that gap with machine learning.
The company was started in 2017 by Himanshu Gupta and Max Evans, two MBA students at Stanford, reportedly out of a dorm room. Gupta had an unusual resume for a dorm-room founder: he had worked as a lead emission modeler for India and had been in the room with Al Gore and Lord Nicholas Stern. He could have kept doing climate policy, which is important and slow. He chose to build software instead, which is a specific bet - that you can have more impact shipping a product on a sales cycle than filing a recommendation on a legislative one.
What they built is called ClimateLens. The pitch, stripped of adjectives, is this: take climate and weather data from many sources, run it through patented models that blend physics with machine learning, and produce forecasts that go out further than the standard two-week window - down to resolutions as fine as one kilometer, which is roughly the size of a single field. Then translate all of that into something a procurement manager can actually use: not "it will be hot," but "your yield in this region is at risk, and here is what to do about it."
That last translation step is the whole trick. Climate risk is a phrase that makes executives nod and then change nothing, because it is abstract and the timeline is 2050. ClimateAi's insight was to make it concrete and near-term - a number you can put in a spreadsheet next to a planting date. Adaptation, not just mitigation. The climate is already changing; the supply chain does not care about your net-zero pledge; it cares about next season.
Tracks short-term weather and climate conditions affecting operations and crops - the near-in view that keeps day-to-day decisions grounded.
Long-horizon risk analytics for multi-year strategy - site selection, sourcing shifts, and where a business should and shouldn't bet on a changing climate.
AI-driven seasonal commodity yield forecasts that feed procurement and trading desks earlier information than the market usually has.
Pushes forecasts and risk data straight into the systems a company already runs - because a forecast nobody opens is worth nothing.
ClimateAi's buyers are companies whose profits are grown outdoors and are therefore exposed to a climate that has stopped behaving. The customer list reads like a grocery aisle: Dole uses the forecasts to adapt produce sourcing; Suntory applies them to beverage and water risk; Oatly, Driscoll's, and The Wonderful Company are in the mix; McCain had ClimateAi map climate risk across the potato-growing regions behind its french fries; and Advanta Seeds, by its own account, avoided real financial losses because the model saw a drought coming.
The company reports 30-plus customers operating across more than 50 countries, and says its "biophysics-driven AI" now informs planting, procurement, and logistics for roughly a quarter of the top 200 food and beverage companies. Investors on real-asset side use it too - Nuveen Natural Capital applies ClimateAi to weigh climate risk on farmland investments. The through-line: if your balance sheet depends on land and weather, earlier information is a competitive edge.
| Round | Amount | Year | Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $4M | 2019 | Blackhorn Ventures, NeoTribe, Jerry Yang |
| Series A | $12M | 2021 | Radical Ventures, Finistere, FootPrint Coalition |
| Series B | $22M | 2023 | Four Rivers Group, Neotribe Ignite, Yaletown, PSP |
Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Robert Downey Jr.'s FootPrint Coalition backed the same company. When the co-founder of Yahoo and Iron Man agree the risk is real, it is worth a second look.
Himanshu Gupta and Max Evans start ClimateAi while completing their MBAs.
Blackhorn Ventures, NeoTribe, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang back the company.
Radical Ventures leads, with FootPrint Coalition and Finistere participating.
ClimateAi's platform is named to TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2022.
An oversubscribed round led by Four Rivers Group pushes total funding past $38M.
Listed on TIME's America's Top 250 GreenTech Companies and profiled by Fortune.
Former lead emission modeler for India who worked alongside Al Gore and Lord Nicholas Stern before trading climate policy for climate software.
Co-started ClimateAi with Gupta at Stanford in 2017, helping turn a research-grade idea about seasonal forecasting into a shipping product.
The team ClimateAi has assembled is a deliberate three-way mix: climate scientists who understand the physics, machine-learning engineers who can make the physics scale, and supply-chain people who know which decisions the forecast is actually supposed to change. That blend is the hard part - plenty of models are academically impressive and commercially useless because no one translated them into a decision.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed, remote-friendly team of roughly 40 to 50 people. Its stated mission is unusually blunt for the genre: climate-proof the global economy with, in its words, "zero loss of lives and livelihoods." It is the kind of line that could be marketing, but the customer list - McCain's potatoes, Advanta's seeds - suggests the livelihoods part is fairly literal.
Recognized for its climate resilience platform.
Named #74 on TIME's America's Top 250 GreenTech Companies, 2024.
Featured across major business and climate outlets.
ClimateAi sits in an emerging category - climate risk analytics - alongside names like Jupiter Intelligence, Cervest, One Concern, and Sust Global, plus incumbent agricultural-weather providers. Its distinguishing bet is the vertical focus: rather than generic physical-risk scores, it goes deep on food, agriculture, and water, where the forecast maps directly to a planting or sourcing decision. In a market where many climate-data startups have struggled to convert impressive models into revenue, that specificity is the differentiator.
Founder interviews and talks on adaptation and AI (YouTube search).
▶ PRODUCT DEMOWalkthroughs of the forecasting and risk platform (YouTube search).
▶ PODCASTHarvard Business School Business & Environment podcast feature.
It builds an AI-powered climate resilience platform, ClimateLens, that forecasts weather and climate risk from weeks to decades ahead so companies can protect their supply chains, crops, and operations.
It was co-founded in 2017 by Himanshu Gupta (CEO) and Max Evans while they were MBA students at Stanford University.
Global food, beverage, and agriculture companies including Dole, Suntory, Oatly, McCain, Driscoll's, and Advanta Seeds, along with asset owners like Nuveen Natural Capital.
More than $38M across a 2019 seed round, a 2021 Series A, and a $22M Series B in 2023 led by Four Rivers Group.
It forecasts far beyond the standard two-week window using patented AI and physics-based models at up to 1km resolution, translating climate signals into business-specific risk for decisions like planting, sourcing, and procurement.