Few things generate as much data as observing the Earth from above, but for Earthmover, that data still wasn’t enough to thrive. The climate tech startup, co-founded by Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman, has pivoted to focus on weather data, and it’s paying off.
“What makes a compelling use case for our platform? Data that changes frequently,” said Abernathey, Earthmover’s CEO. “That goes to weather, fire, and new observations being generated.” Climate outputs, he explained, are critical but “kind of static,” with updates arriving only every few years.
Earthmover’s core remains a powerful data structure designed to handle massive, complex datasets, or “rasters,” “tensors,” or simply “arrays,” depending on the field. On top of this foundation, the company has built tools that help businesses extract insights. Customers now include insurance startup Kettle, which uses Earthmover to model wildfire risk, and energy giant RWE, which applies the platform to forecast supply and demand.
The pivot has attracted paying clients, over 10 so far, and fueled a $7.2 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Costanoa Ventures and Preston-Werner Ventures. The fresh funding will be used to build more tools on top of the platform.
Built on open-source projects like Xarray, Pangeo, and Icechunk, Earthmover runs on cloud providers including Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure, as well as on-prem servers. Both Abernathey and Hamman have deep ties to open source, having contributed to Pangeo and Xarray.
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That open-source approach, Abernathey said, helps reduce customer risk: “If we pivot or go out of business, they’ve still got all their own data in their own storage.”
With weather and geospatial data becoming increasingly vital, Earthmover aims to make insights more accessible. “If you’re a trading desk, you want to see the map of the latest forecast on a dashboard,” Hamman said. “You don’t want to run a Python script.”
