Climate X: case study
Boosting POC development through HPC tech support and valuable ethics guidance
Climate X quantifies how different climate change pathways could result in extreme weather events – such as flood, subsidence, heat stress, and storms – up to the year 2100. They translate the exposure of these events to assets at various levels (individual/portfolio/company-wide) and calculate how much such events could cost.
To develop their proof of concept, the Climate X team needed processing and machine learning modelling capacity for the synthetic aperture radar and remote sensing that powers their geospatial models.
Participating in Digital Catapult’s AI/ML accelerator, Machine Intelligence Garage, gave Climate X the additional compute power needed, with access to NVIDIA DGX and valuable AWS credits.
Startup bills for a cloud-first infrastructure can easily spin out of control for start-ups. Digital Catapult saved us between £20,000 and £50,000 in fees, plus invaluable setup time.
Kamil Kluza CPO and Co-founder, Climate X
“The ethics consultation was definitely a bonus!”
One of the unexpected programme benefits for Climate X was having a detailed AI ethics consultation with specialists from Digital Catapult’s Ethics Committee. Such sessions enable businesses to understand the practicalities of working to ethical principles and applying an AI Ethics Framework.
As well as offering technical support and introductions to other high performance compute (HPC) partners, the acceleration programme provided business development and investment guidance.
Get in early. Start the conversation and attend the webinars – this will help you shape your idea better. [Digital Catapult is a] very approachable, knowledgeable, and professional group of people.
Kamil Kluza CPO and Co-founder, Climate X
£4.1 million in seed funding
Climate X initially raised £1.1 million in a pre-seed round in July 2021, followed by a further £4.1 million in their seed round in March 2022.
This round was led by VCs CommerzVentures and A/O PropTech, joined by the VOYAGERS Climate-Tech Fund, Blue Impact Ventures, and Deloitte LLP. Angel investors included David Rowan (founding Editor-in-Chief at WIRED), Kat Borlongan (former director at La French Tech) and Renaud Visage (co-founder and former CTO at Eventbrite).
This funding will be used to expand the Climate X product offering and meet customer demand.
About the programme
Supporting early-stage startups through access to high performance compute resources and computational power required for AI/ML product development. Digital Catapult’s Machine Intelligence Garage, is an acceleration programme that addresses the challenges today’s AI and ML startups face, providing technical, ethics, business and investment support.
Discover more Digital Catapult acceleration programmes at FutureScope.