Risk modeling has been around for years in certain industries in which taking calculated risk is an integral part of the business, such as financial services and energy. Only recently have companies started looking at the risks to the public and private sector caused by the climate crisis.
There was no commonly accepted method for quantifying that risk and its potential economic impact. Companies and corporations had to rely on data from historical events – leaving a big gap in the models being generated. However, climate change and extreme weather events have put more than $100 trillion dollars in global real estate assets at risk.
At the same time, the climate crisis opened the door to a new breed of startups – using the latest in computer modeling and artificial intelligence algorithms, these firms can measure the risks to real estate posed by climate change, from an hour to decades into the future.
Jupiter Intelligence
Silicon Valley-based Jupiter Intel was founded about three years ago and already has over $40 million in investor capital from firms including Energize Ventures, Ignition Partners and Data Collective. It also receives funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA for work in cloud computing and satellite observations.
In February 2018, Jupiter launched a climate data, analytics, and technology platform to predict and manage weather and climate change risks.
Jupiter incorporates climate impact data on flood, fire, heat, drought, cold, wind and hail events into risk modeling for real estate assets. Jupiter’s cloud platform ingests and makes physics-based and AI-powered decisions on petabytes of data from millions of ground-based and orbital sensors.
“We’re essentially physically modeling what’s happening with the atmosphere and the water or the fire at a very specific level of detail, and typically at the asset level, which is now only possible because computers have gotten so powerful and relatively inexpensive,” said Rich Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter.
Amazingly, with Jupiter’s ClimateScore platform, asset managers can see a complete picture of climate and weather risks, right down to a street-by-street or building-by-building level. Jupiter also factors in expectations of a changing climate, which adjusts dynamically based on the most current data.
More importantly, the company doesn’t really on one-time climate studies. Instead, they use the latest data from satellites and sensors, allowing their experts to adjust input assumptions or variables to create up-to-date models that provide the best possible predictions with known information.
