Today we announced Earthmover’s seed round fundraise, led by the amazing folks at Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Costanoa Ventures (our pre-seed investor) and Preston-Werner Ventures (GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner). Between Lowercarbon’s deep understanding of our target customers and use cases, Costanoa’s Data and SaaS expertise, and PWV’s open-source pedigree, we couldn’t imagine a better set of partners to help Earthmover grow into the world-changing company we know it can be.
Joe and I started Earthmover because we recognized that the planet had a major problem: teams working on some of the most important problems in the world–from adapting the energy system to climate change to predicting and curing disease–were moving slowly. They were getting stuck on data plumbing, building clunky bespoke data management systems around obscure scientific file formats not designed for the cloud and AI era. Or they were trying to cram petabytes of weather and climate data into Snowflake and Databricks, racking up massive bills and wondering why it was so slow. We understood their pain, and, thanks to years spent building open-source software like Xarray, we knew how to fix it…
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Lowercarbon, one of the top climate-tech VC firms, got it immediately. They talked to their portfolio companies and learned that many were hungry for the solution we were building: a cloud-native data platform with tensors, rather than tables, as the core data model. A platform built for data about the physical world.
Here’s what we’ve learned since founding the company three years ago: our technology is a dovetail fit for the AI revolution currently sweeping weather, climate, Earth observation, and computational science more broadly. Here are some highlights from our current customers:
- The RWE AI Research Laboratory is building customized weather prediction models for renewable energy forecasting.
- Kettle is building AI-powered wildfire forecast models to enable property insurance underwriting in a changing climate.
- Sylvera is using AI and remote sensing to provide better, faster carbon credit ratings.
By building on Earthmover, these teams are keeping their GPUs humming and their data scientists focused on innovation rather than data munging. This makes us incredibly proud.
Our platform is not an add-on; it’s foundational data infrastructure. Consequently, our biggest challenge so far has been finding an architecture that allows our customers (especially the enterprise ones!) to feel safe and aligned in partnering with us. Open source is essential in this. Our seed funding has given us time to iterate towards a platform architecture that is friendly to both startups and enterprises, with Icechunk, our high-performance, cloud-native tensor storage engine at the core. Icechunk was a significant pivot from our original design and represents a renewal of our commitment to open source and the open-science community.
Recently it feels like we’ve cracked the code; we are onboarding new startup customers on a weekly basis while successfully navigating enterprise and government procurement. We’re also thrilled to see Icechunk being implemented at major public-sector agencies such as NASA (see our case study), NOAA, UK National Oceanography Center, and MeteoSwiss. We’re moving steadily towards our vision of enabling scientific data to flow effortlessly between data producers and end users.
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