Resilience AI Founders (L-R): Anshu Sharma, Samhita R, Sundeep Reddy Mallu
THE OPPORTUNITY
2023: A Year of Unprecedented Climate Disasters
The past year has underscored the escalating urgency of addressing climate resilience.
- Economic and Insured Losses: Climate-related disasters in 2023 caused a staggering $380B in economic damages, with only $118B covered by insurance—revealing a significant financial vulnerability.
- Disaster Frequency and Impact: With 398 major disaster events globally, millions of lives and critical infrastructure were severely affected.
- India’s Extreme Weather: Closer to home, India experienced extreme weather on 318 days out of 365, resulting in profound losses across agriculture, businesses, and infrastructure.
It is estimated that the total cost of not adopting an effective climate plan and continuing with ‘business-as-usual path’ could cost the world 18% of total global GDP by 2100.
The Climate Protection Gap
Despite these alarming statistics, a vast majority of climate-related damages remain uninsured or inadequately addressed—pointing to a growing climate protection gap. This gap reveals:
- Inadequate Risk Management: Traditional approaches fail to account for the complexity of climate risks.
- Limited Accessibility: Pre-emptive risk exposure tools and affordable financing solutions like insurance remain inaccessible to many.
- Reactive Adaptation Mechanisms: Manual, paper-based and reactive climate action plans hinder swift and effective responses at all levels of governance.
This gap presents a compelling opportunity to rethink and redefine how we approach climate resilience.
Introducing Resilience AI:
We are excited to announce our investment in Resilience AI, a pioneering climate risk and sustainability technology company, dedicated to empowering organizations with proactive solutions to manage and adapt to climate challenges. The company’s flagship product, Resilience360, is the world’s first climate enterprise software offering end-to-end climate risk management.
By integrating advanced machine learning, hyperlocal climate diagnostics, institutionalized climate reporting, and digitalized climate action plans, into an intelligent and unified platform acting as climate risk and sustainability compass, Resilience AI helps companies and governments to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of extreme climate events such as heatwaves, floods, cyclones, and earthquakes.
Resilience AI is addressing a rapidly growing $4B market for climate risk and resilience solutions. This market is projected to double by 2030, underscoring the urgent demand for innovative tools like theirs.
The Founding Team
- Samhita R, CEO: Samhita, an alumnus of Indian School of Business, Hyderabad has an illustrious career spanning over two decades across technology, sustainability and industrial and building technologies at top-tier companies including Microsoft, Honeywell, Ernst & Young, and General Electric. They bring a wealth of leadership and business-building experience. Their strategic vision for Resilience.AI is backed by their deep understanding of product innovation, markets and customers.
- Sundeep Reddy Mallu, CRO: Sundeep, an alumnus of Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, has vast technical experience across global technology firms with deep understanding of customer needs. He is a fifth-generation farmer, who brings in unique insights in climate lifecycle. His tenure at Gramener has been particularly influential, where he set-up and grew the Analytics and ESG vertical.
- Anshu Sharma, Research & Innovation: Dr. Anshu, an alumnus of School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, and Kyoto University, has been at the forefront of sustainable development since founding SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society). His expertise in sustainable architecture and environment planning, provides a strong foundation for leading research-based innovation.
The Unique Approach
Resilience AI’s innovation centres on its climate risk lifecycle management approach.
Imagine if an organization can proactively prepare (plan) its infrastructure, communities and investments for climate events using a simple-unified-software, without;
- Spending heavily on climate risk audit and assessment
- Worrying about multiple climate and sustainability standards
- Depending on hypothetical climate scenario models
- Waiting for 12-18 months for climate plans
The innovation is at the intersection of scientific evidence-based data, comprising geo-climatic, geo-spatial, and architectural datasets and advanced technologies, including AI/ML algorithms that meticulously analyze primary and secondary data to provide actionable climate risk intelligence. Unlike conventional models that often rely solely on generalized GIS data and hypothetical scenario models, Resilience AI integrates a broad spectrum of ground-truthed climate variables and built-environment data.
This method provides both private and public sector organizations with a detailed climate risk profile at more than 90% accuracy based on the magnitude of damage due to climate events, an easy-to-understand climate risk atlas (map) and risk diagnosis based on machine learning from 26 climate events, enables co-owned e-climate action plan based on knowledge of 28 climate action and disaster response plans, and institutionalizes monitoring (reporting) by integrating multiple sustainability and climate risk market standards.
This comprehensive and tailored analysis is further enhanced by Resilience’s commitment to continuous innovation, including developing a robust patent portfolio that secures its technological advances and aims to bolster climate resilience.
The Way Ahead
Resilience AI is poised to expand its impact significantly. The initial pilot in 20+ Indian cities with more than 400,000 building risk register (record) has proven successful, paving the way for the launch of new products, designed towards scalable deployment of climate risk and sustainability solutions across industries.
The next phase involves expanding market reach, refining product features, and building a stronger team to support these initiatives. We are happy to be leading their seed round with participation from Java Capital.
Explore more about Resilience AI’s impact and growth plans through this YouTube video. Don’t miss Trevor Noah discussing how Resilience AI is leveraging AI/ML to protect vulnerable communities from climate change.
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are a founder building an early-stage company, write to us at pitch@kalaari.com