ZURICH, Oct. 17, 2022 — Jua today launched a platform that will enable the meteorological industry to produce customized high-resolution weather models which outperform all existing approaches, including numerical models and machine learning enhanced numerical models. As part of its launch, the company is also announcing a pre-seed investment of $2.5M led by Promus Ventures and with Mehdi Ghissassi (Head of Product at Alphabet-acquired Deepmind) contributing.

Co-founded in 2022 in Zurich by entrepreneurs Andreas Brenner (CEO) and Marvin Gabler (CTO), with hubs in Zurich, Berlin and Cape Town, the team has invested more than three years of research and development into creating its proprietary data platform and, among others, training the world’s first global high resolution weather prediction model.

“In terms of geospatial resolution, temporal resolution and update frequency, our first model already outperforms all existing numerical models by several orders of magnitude,” stated Brenner. “We now enable everyone from small startups to large companies to get access to much better weather data than they have ever seen before.”

According to a recent global survey by the World Economic Forum, over half of the adults in the world say that climate change has had a severe impact on their lives, and a third are worried they might be forced from their homes. These world-wide weather-based events, such as the severe flooding in Pakistan or the recent extreme heat wave across Europe, will impact businesses and societies in both the short-term and the long-term. There is currently no global observation or comprehensive model of the Earth’s atmosphere that would allow meteorologists to truly understand the interplay between weather patterns and natural disasters in an accurate way.

Jua plans to provide startups, companies, government institutions and researchers the ability to create purpose-built weather models in a matter of hours. The new platform contains one of the largest weather and geospatial data sets available and includes a training infrastructure that enables even non-technical users to customize their models with proprietary data.

Running on a 48-hour timescale, Jua’s weather prediction model will provide a global one kilometer square’s worth of coverage for every five minutes, and can predict more than fifteen different weather-based parameters, including precipitation, air pressure, wind speed and wind direction. Some regions are covered in up to two hundred and fifty meters squared resolution, and the model is updated every fifteen minutes, enabling significant improvements in forecasting extreme events.

Jua’s weather model provides up to 25-times higher spatial resolution and ten-times higher temporal resolution than conventional alternatives. This massive resolution increase is achieved via an end-to-end deep learning approach and tens-of-millions of sensors, in comparison to the hundreds-of-thousands of sensors used by current standard models. An additional benefit of the new deep learning powered model is its energy efficiency, with it requiring over a thousand-times less computing power than any other numerical weather model.

Marvin Gabler, Co-Founder and CTO, added: “It is important to understand that we took the risk of completely rethinking the technical approach to weather forecasting and built a new technology from the ground up. Besides accuracy, our approach also brings completely new capabilities to the market. To the energy sector, it brings the first global probabilistic short-term forecast which can significantly improve their profitability. We won’t stop here. This is our first platform to be released and we can’t wait to announce all the things we are working on over the coming months and years.”

Jua has raised a $2.5M Series Pre-seed round led by Promus Ventures, a VC firm that invests in deep-tech and spacetech companies, including Spire, Mapbox, ICEYE and Rocket Lab. Participants in the round included prominent investors Siraj Khaliq (Co-Founder of the Climate Corporation & former Partner at Atomico), Mehdi Ghissassi (Head of Product at Alphabet-acquired Deepmind), and Swiss based Session.vc (founded by seasoned entrepreneurs and first check investors of companies like On Running, Bexio or Nutmeg). Promus Ventures Partner Pierre Festal is also joining the Jua board.

Pierre Festal, Partner at Promus Ventures, stated: “The team at Jua have built one of the most ambitious AI applications that provides accuracy far beyond what the weather industry has to-date considered feasible. We are delighted to back them and to help support the launch of this category-defining technology.”

Jua’s platform is currently being offered to a select number of customers, on request, and is set to be released to a wider audience in early 2023.

About Jua

Zurich-based Jua is an artificial intelligence for climate startup that aims to advance humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneurs Andreas Brenner (CEO) and Marvin Gabler (CTO), Jua has built a team of ten, based in their Zurich office as well as hubs in Berlin and Cape Town, with the aim of growing to 15 by the end of the year. Jua has raised $2.5M to-date from Promus Ventures, a VC firm that invests in deep-tech and geospatial analytics companies, and investors Siraj Khaliq (Co-Founder of the Climate Corporation & former Partner at Atomico), Mehdi Ghisassi (Head of Product at Alphabet-acquired Deepmind), and Session.vc (founded by early backers of sports giant On Running).

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Source: Jua