Salient - Forecast Further
Climate change has been shifting the weather faster than our forecasts can keep up - until now
About three years ago I got an email asking me to do some unpaid work. I was scheduled to start at First Star in a month when Drew (Co-Founding GP here) sent me this note:
A lot’s happened since then. Today, we’re beyond excited to announce the close of a $5m seed round for Salient - a company that predicts the future by forecasting weather further ahead and more accurately than ever before. Built on the groundbreaking research of co-founders Dr. Ray Schmitt and Dr. Sam Levang, the technology empowers industry and humanity to better adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. The team - led by co-founder and CEO Matt Stein (formerly the first hire at Jupiter Intelligence) - is the best in the world at what they do, and they’ve proven it by repeatably and substantially beating all other forecasts and growing that gap. Global customers in energy, agriculture and insurance are already using Salient to drive us all toward a more resilient future. Wireframe Ventures led the round, and they’re joined by Powerhouse Ventures, Munich Re Ventures, Endeavor8 and Blindspot Ventures.
Ray’s original kernel of insight that led to the technology behind Salient seems obvious on its face but requires deep scientific and technological expertise to actually prove and make useful. Typically, forecasts’ ability to predict the weather more than about two weeks ahead has been no better than a coin flip - it’s too difficult to accurately model the chaotic atmosphere over those longer timescales, usually running a cluster of supercomputers to simulate the volatile fluid dynamics aloft. One day, Ray had a hunch when he noticed that a period of heavy rainfall and flooding in the US Midwest corresponded to a major regional deviation in sea surface salinity, temperature and other variables that indicated a powerful teleconnection between ocean and land surface conditions and atmospheric weather. What if we could cut out the supercomputers and gain forecast skill? He then chased down that hunch, turning it into peer-reviewed research proving that he could use global water cycle data to better forecast weather over longer timescales (despite repeatedly being turned down for grant funding to explore the idea in more depth).
Above: Salient (left) foresaw a month ahead of time the cold anomaly that drove the February 2021 Texas freeze that devastated the ERCOT power grid. Traditional forecasts from NOAA (center) and The Weather Company (right) had forecast a hotter-than-normal month.
Determined to bring his idea to the world, Ray found that as an oceanographer arguing for more statistical models over traditional numerical (physics-based) models, his research was somewhat anathema to the atmospherically-focused meteorological community. Left to tinker with his discovery, Ray and his twin sons took matters into their own hands and hacked together a basic forecast tool that they entered into a US Bureau of Reclamation seasonal rainfall forecast rodeo - which they dominated. Now, Ray’s original hunch has become hard data and research that underpins a global predictive model using novel ML architecture to forecast the weather 2-52 weeks ahead with unprecedented accuracy.
Above: Salient (middle) accurately predicted heavy rainfall leading to major flooding that hit Europe in July 2021, while again traditional forecasts (right) weren’t even directionally correct.
Since 2019, we’ve grown the company with Ray and Sam as the team has worked hard to turn frontier science into a high-powered forecast engine with applications across every sector on the planet. In January 2020, we wrote the team a pre-seed check and dove in alongside them, pinpointing the right applications for the tech, helping hire, and selling early customers. We met with dozens of potential customers across markets to refine what problems the tech could solve and what the product needed to be, and came away invigorated by the opportunities uncovered. I love this part of the job most - helping deep tech startups turn their core research into a business that can reshape the world. And I believe this team has immensely important, valuable work ahead of them for years to come. I’m deeply grateful to the Salient team - it’s been one of the great joys of my professional life to have played a small part in the journey so far. Today’s news means that they get to keep doing the critical work they love, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.