Announcing ClimateAi’s $22M Series B Funding to Accelerate Climate Resilience Globally

Himanshu Gupta • April 13th, 2023.

Today, we’re excited to announce a significant achievement for ClimateAi: the successful closing of our Series B fundraising round. This milestone takes us one step closer to achieving our mission of climate-proofing the world’s economy while improving lives and livelihoods.

Just 18 months after our Series A, we’ve seen a growing appetite for both artificial intelligence and climate solutions from investors and the market, as we have grown 5x in terms of ARR and 4x in terms of the number of our customers.

We have been fortunate to have the support of an incredible team, a group of dedicated customers, and investors who believe in our vision. We are excited to welcome new investors, Four Rivers Group; participating investors, Neotribe Ventures’ Ignite fund and Yaletown Partners. We are also grateful to existing investors, Radical Ventures, Neotribe Seed Fund, and Academy Investor Network, for their continued support and confidence in our mission. I’m also thankful every day for the drive and passion of the team, a group of 60 incredibly smart, talented people around the world who inspire me every day.

What resilience means to us at ClimateAi: Put your heads down and execute

When we talk about resilience, it is important to note that this word has two distinct meanings here at ClimateAi. The first is, of course, climate resilience, which is critical in the fight against climate change.

At ClimateAi, we believe that investing in climate resilience means investing in our collective sustainable future — and present. Climate change is not a problem in the faraway future. It’s a now problem. The world is facing unprecedented warming, extreme weather events, and sea level rise, leading to rising food insecurity, worsening public health outcomes, and more widespread poverty and geopolitical turmoil today.

Taking action on climate risks creates not only a more resilient world and population, but also more resilient balance sheets for businesses. Building resilience can have a near-term impact on market share: We have shown that in our close work with amazing customers, with teams across major companies such as Dole, Driscoll’s, Advanta Seeds (UPL subsidiary), Nuveen Natural Capital, among 25+ others. We have seen that our technology has provided millions of dollars in value already. One customer, Advanta, saw a 5-10% increase in capturing new sales because of forecasted extreme weather conditions and increased demand, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

Companies that act on climate change also build better overall resilience in the communities they’re working in. One of our food and agriculture customers that provided our technology to farmers in India that they buy from enabled these farmers to double their yields — some had been thinking of quitting their family farms and moving to cities, but with the improved production, they chose to stay and continue farming, as BBC World Service reported. (This is crucial as in many low-income counties, agriculture can account for more than 25% of GDP).

We are starting to see a similar playbook across other supply chains, such as our customer Growmark in energy. They are leading resilience efforts in the industry and in the communities that they work with.

We were also proud to be selected as TIME Best Invention of the Year for 2022 in the sustainability category, next to innovators such as OpenAi and NASA’s Hubble Telescope.

However, resilience is not just a concept that applies to the environment. The concept of personal resilience has also been crucial to the building of our company and has been the trait of every single colleague of mine. My co-founder, Maximilian Evans, and I have both been able to employ resilience to adapt to change, cope with setbacks, and overcome challenges.

I grew up in a small town in northern India in a lower-income family, with a father whose education never went beyond high school, in a multigenerational 13-person household. I have vivid memories of challenges due to the lack of water availability and cost-of-living inflation for my joint family — things we now take for granted. I came to California — a place I had never heard of before the age of 20 — to attend Stanford University, where I founded ClimateAi from my dorm room with my then-roommate, Max, who grew up in Ecuador, the son of a pineapple farmer. He grew up helping his father harvest crops for the very companies that are now customers of the tech platform he built that allows them to boost profits and sustainability.

In December 2017, when Max and I first decided to start this company, President Trump was sworn into office as the U.S. president, and my immigration visa was in jeopardy. So, we put our heads down and focused on executing.

As we presented our startup to investors, their first questions were always, “Are you a nonprofit?” They were innocent questions, and this is not to knock climate nonprofits — it’s simply that people at the time never realized climate could be a lucrative investment from a venture standpoint.

Still, we continued on our journey — we put our heads down and kept executing. We signed on new customers, raised $3.5M million for our Seed round, and grew our team to over 50 people.

At the end of last year, as we went out to fundraise again, the markets flipped. Again, we put our heads down and continued executing. We raised $22 million in this round, have over 35 customers, and are continuing to expand our team.

Resilience, for us, starts from within — at ClimateAi, we put our heads down and continue executing to build resilience for our customers and for communities. Plus, the ClimateAi team has demonstrated significant resilience throughout our entire growth. This new round brings ClimateAi’s total funding to date to $38 million.

We’re still driving impact post-Series B — come join us on our mission

Above all, we’re most proud of our impact. We’ve deployed our technology across millions of acres, protecting livelihoods, saving emissions, and building critical climate resilience.

At ClimateAi, we are committed to building both types of resilience and creating a better, more sustainable future for all. We will use these Series B funds to accelerate our expansion into new territories, including India and Japan, as well as low-income countries in the Global South where climate adaptation is of the highest urgency. We are also continuing to invest in artificial intelligence research, at a time when such actionable breakthroughs are much-needed. Additionally, we are still growing our team and looking for more passionate experts in product development, partnerships, software frontend, backend, and full-stack engineering, data analysis, sales development, and government relations.

And on that note, if you’re also driven by the work that we do, I invite you to look through our openings, tell your company about ClimateAi and come work with us — and generally join the conversation about how important climate resilience is.

Every action we take to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change matters, for today and for decades down the line. You can read more about how we aim to expand our impact with this new round of funding here.

This is what’s required to meet this moment — climate change is not waiting for markets to correct. It doesn’t care who the president is. Join us on our mission as we put our heads down and execute.