When Iron Man backed an agri start-up to fight climate change
The Stanford University dorm has incubated some of the tech giants of the world — Google, Cisco, Yahoo!, among others. Himanshu Gupta has joined this list, and is now the co-founder and CEO of a $16-million company working on the next disruption in the tech space — climate change.
This week, Climateai, his company, secured $12 million from three funds, including Footprint Coalition, started by Iron Man himself — Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr. Footprint Coalition is a venture capital (VC) fund that invests in “sustainability focused companies” and gives grants to support environment technology.
The two other VCS that have invested in Climateai in this Series A fundraising are Radical Ventures, which focuses on AI businesses, and Finistere Ventures, which works in agriculture and food technology.
Climateai was co-founded in 2015 by Gupta, a former climate and energy expert with the Niti Aayog (erstwhile Planning Commission), along with Max Evans, a machine learning expert with a farming lineage. Putting their diverse interests in climate and agriculture together, the two set up a platform that analyses climaterelated impact on agriculture, food, supply chain companies and allied businesses. The company also provides business scenarios based on climate forecasts.
Climateai has clients across the US, Europe, New Zealand, Japan and Australia. Speaking with Business Standard, Gupta said they have the world’s top two food input companies and two of the top potato processors as their clients.
A first-generation college graduate from his family from Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, Gupta said it was his stint at the Niti Aayog that changed his career course. He led the first “India Energy Security Scenario-2047” (IESS), under the mentorship of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.
Gupta was part of a group of young professionals hired by Ahluwalia.
“I worked with energy experts like Anil Jain (current secretary, ministry of coal) and got a chance to lead the IESS project. That project allowed me to get a global view of the energy sector and challenges of climate change,” he said.
Thereafter, Gupta worked with Al Gore, former vice-president of the US and a climate change advocate. The dialogue on climate entrepreneurship had begun by the time Gupta began his MBA course at Stanford in 2016. “Climate change is causing trillions of dollars of losses to varied sectors. Extreme weather conditions also cause human fatality,” he said. “Funds and programmes from the government and multilateral agencies are not enough for a challenge of this scale. We thought there is a market for adaptation technologies, and that is how Climateai got started.”
Climateai started as a concept paper that Gupta wrote with his professor Hau Lee and thereafter incubated it with Evans. “A major technology breakthrough that we had while establishing Climateai was that we could provide a climate forecast beyond two weeks. Weather forecasts become unreliable after 7-10 days. But supply chain businesses have to make decisions beyond that timeframe,” he said. The company has patented its technology.
Climateai received its first round of funding as a grant from Stanford University, along with some professors and angel investors. The initial set of ten Climateai investors includes another IIT alumni Kittu Kolluri of Neotribe Ventures, Jerry Yang of AME Cloud Ventures and John Nelsen, a seed industry expert advisor.
With the latest round of funding, Gupta is now planning to scale up with an eye on India. “We want to move into new areas such as energy. We will double our revenue and workforce and build a stronger AI science team. Four of our clients, which are large-scale players in the food processing business, want us to study their Indian market. We will soon be starting an office in India,” Gupta said.
Having worked in public policy, Gupta added technology disruption in Indian agriculture sector is difficult.
“I do not mind working for free with the state governments to introduce climate change scenarios in policy making.”
Ex-niti Aayog researcher’s start-up gets $12 mn from three funds, including Robert Downey Jr’s Footprint Coalition