ClimateAi, a San Francisco-based startup utilizing long-range forecasting tools to help food and ag firms adapt to a changing climate, has ceased operations, two years after ag intelligence platform Gro Intelligence called it quits.
The firm, which has raised $38 million from backers including Robert Downey Jr’s Footprint Coalition, announced the “wind down of our operations” on LinkedIn on Friday and directed people to a post from cofounder and CEO Himanshu Gupta.
In a short article thanking his colleagues and customers, Gupta said: “Eight years ago, we set out to make the world a better and more resilient place. Today, we’ve decided to shut down ClimateAi and return the capital to our investors.”
Blaming unspecified “geopolitical and climate headwinds” that “made it hard to continue our mission,” Gupta added: “While this is not the outcome we wanted, I find myself walking away with more pride than disappointment. When we started, climate adaptation wasn’t a category. Today, it’s a real market with real companies in it.”
In a separate post, COO Will Kletter said: “As we’ve rolled out this news to customers, we’ve received countless messages describing how we helped elevate climate science to the board room and got executive teams to think about climate resilience as a meaningful business variable.”
Neither party provided any further details on what precipitated the decision or whether the firm had explored strategic buyers or combinations with other weather/climate intelligence companies.
AgFunderNews has reached out to Gupta and Kletter for further comment.
Climate adaptation tools
Best-known for its long-range weather forecasting, ClimateAi’s ClimateLens platform applies AI and patented models to climate and weather data points from multiple sources from oceanic buoys to satellite sensors, radar stations, and weather stations, to generate actionable insights.
Over the years, it has built a suite of tools assisting clients with demand planning and procurement, originally targeting big seed and ag chem companies but more recently gaining traction from CPG firms including Dole, Suntory, Oatly and McCain.
Speaking to AgFunderNews in January about a new tool combining visualization, forecasting, and agentic AI to help customers plan harvest windows, Kletter described a “steady organizational shift” within the food industry, whereby procurement and sustainability teams have started to merge.
This, he claimed, “defines a real shift in the thinking around how climate has become a core business variable in operational and strategic planning. The key question now is how does this become deeply integrated into our customers’ day-to-day workflows?”
Asked whether the firm was profitable, he said: “Investing in our technical team to stay competitive on AI has become more important than being immediately profitable, and we’re OK with that as long as the unit economics of the business remain favorable.”
This is a developing story…
Further reading:
ClimateAi targets key ag pain point with new GDD tool, embeds AI into workflows
