Recently, the climate change issue was discussed at the U.N., and the climate change activist, Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. assembly. These atmospheric changes affect the operations of different governments and businesses. The increase in climate volatility leads to increasing pressure on Enterprises and cause food supply problems. The climatic changes also put pressure on financial institutions. The main problem is that, although there is data about this, it is too complex and too vast to process it with the tools of today.
Moreover, when climate changes, the data changes completely. This makes it difficult to give a proper analysis. However, a new startup, Cervest, aims to solve these problems.
Cervest has developed an AI platform that informs different governments and businesses of increasing climate volatility. The startup is building an AI to monitor and predict how the natural resources of the planet will respond to extreme and unusual situations, on a global scale. The platform is also designed to detect the disruption within the earth quickly. In this way, people know about the issue beforehand, and then they can plan accordingly.
Now, Cervest has closed a $4.8 million funding round to fund and launch its platform. Future Positive Capital, along with co-investor Astanor Ventures, led the funding round. This seed-stage funding brings the total amount raised by the company to $5.8 million.
The company has been built by three years of research by a team of scientists and developers. Cervest claims that it is quite advanced in its AI platform. According to the company, its Earth Science AI platform can sort out billions of data points and predict how climate changes will affect different countries. The AI can pinpoint the location down to the individual landscapes.
Now the question that arises is how the AI does all this? It does this by merging the research and modeling techniques from Earth sciences with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics. The team at Cervest gets information from different Earth Sciences, like agronomy, hydrology, atmospheric science, and meteorology.
The platform uses collections of probability theory and satellite imagery. In this way, it can identify the different signals or warning signs and predict events, like winds, fires, and floods. Moreover, it can also identify the water risk and changes in the soil.
Cervest states that the platform could help in revealing new information; for example, it could tell the ideal location for opening a new factory; it could also help insurers to set premiums. Moreover, the platform could also warn wheat growers that their crop isn’t up to the mark.
The team consists of over 30 universities, including Imperial College, Cambridge, Harvard, UCL, The Alan Turing Institute, and Oxford. Moreover, its staff has published over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers. The beta version of the platform is going to launch in 2020.
The founder and CEO of the company, Iggy Bassi, said in a statement, “Our main goal is to help people make informed decisions which would help with the longevity of the Earth. Currently, the decision-makers struggle with climate uncertainty and extreme events, like floods and hurricanes. The sudden climate changes are also affecting the businesses and policy choices.”
The founder of Future Positive Capital, Sofia Hmich, said, “There are reports which suggest that we have around 50 years of farming left if we don’t take measures now. Thus, there is a great need for science-backed decisions. The main key to change is policymakers and businesses. Thus, Cervest’s AI technology is there to facilitate the change at a low cost.”
The main inspiration behind Cervest was Bassi’s experience when he was building a farm-to-market agribusiness while confronting the impact of climate change.
The team at Cervest includes four PhDs. They have published over 60 scientific papers with 3,000 citations in high-profile titles, like The Royal Statistics Society, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
