Exclusive: AI climate risk firm secures $6.4 million

Zoom in: The round was led by Buoyant Ventures along with Constellation Technology Ventures and MassMutual Ventures' Climate Tech Fund.

• It brings Sunairio's total external funding to $8.8 million.
• The company's software can help utilities and energy traders manage increasing grid volatility due to growing amounts of intermittent renewable energy sources, along with rising electricity demand from data centers and elsewhere, according to CEO Rob Cirincione.
• Sunairio is also geared toward helping the energy industry anticipate and minimize disruptions from more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

The intrigue: Sunairio developed a high-resolution, probability-based climate model system tailored for managing energy supply and demand.

• Its projections span from 15 days to 15 years. They aim to capture so-called "black swan" events that might not show up if projections were mainly based on historical data.
• According to Cirincione, Sunairio produces asset-level climate simulations down to the wind turbine level that can support commercial decision-making, unlike existing modeling tools from its private sector competitors and public weather and climate agencies.
• "What we need is high-resolution data that's going to predict or provide insights for weather right on top of a wind farm, or right where a solar panel is," Cirincione said.

The intrigue: The company's research into using generative AI for climate simulation earned a National Science Foundation grant earlier this year.

• Among other projects, Constellation is using its platform to manage its renewables portfolio, Sunairio said in a statement.
• Cirincione said current computer models from NOAA, climate risk management firms and even the promising AI models from big tech firms don't yet meet energy companies' needs.

• This leaves many utilities having to base future supply and demand for increasingly complicated and strained grids mostly on historical data, which fails to reflect climate change.

The big picture: Buoyant Ventures looked at multiple companies in the AI weather and climate forecasting space before deciding to fund Sunairio, said Alex Behar, a principal investor at Buoyant.

• "The main reason we like Sunairio is that it can be used today to address challenges that exist today, and they're meeting this unmet need for the longer term," Behar told Axios.
• AI modeling is revolutionizing weather and climate modeling, with new advances showing that highly accurate forecasts can be made using a fraction of the computing power and time of traditional physics-based models.

News of a significant advance in weather modeling from Google broke early this month, and Nvidia, Microsoft and others have each been working on training models using past weather data for forecasts.

• However, these models aren't yet tailored for specific industry uses.