Few fields generate as much information as observing Earth from above. But founders Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman soon realized that raw data alone wasn’t enough to sustain their startup. To gain traction, their climate-focused data company, Earthmover, needed to adjust its approach.
Rather than moving away from climate tech entirely, the team shifted its focus from long-term climate projections to shorter timeframes — essentially, weather and fast-changing geospatial events.
“What makes a compelling use case for our platform? Data that change frequently,” said Abernathey, Earthmover’s co-founder and CEO. “That’s where urgency comes in — weather, wildfires, new observations.”
While climate models are important, Abernathey noted they tend to be “static,” with updates arriving only every few years. Weather and disaster-related data, on the other hand, demand immediate solutions.
At the core of Earthmover’s platform is a data structure designed for massive, complex datasets — what geospatial scientists call a raster, AI researchers call a tensor, and Fortran programmers would recognize as an array. On top of this foundation, the company is building tools that help customers derive insights from their data.
The pivot has already paid off. Earthmover now counts more than 10 paying customers and recently closed a $7.2 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital, with additional backing from Costanoa Ventures and Preston-Werner Ventures. The new funding will support further development of tools atop its data storage platform.
Built on open-source software like Xarray, Pangeo, and Icechunk, Earthmover can run on Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or even on-premise servers. Both Abernathey and Hamman, now the company’s CTO, have long been active in the open-source community, having contributed to Pangeo and Xarray.
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