Tellus AI, a Montpellier start-up that predicts climate risks
|Léo Lemordant, co-founder of the start-up Tellus AI. DR – DR
Tellus AI, a start-up from Montpellier, predicts climate risks using artificial intelligence models. It targets the finance and insurance sectors, predicting conditions conducive to flooding. Already active in the United States, it is targeting Europe by the end of the year, and plans to raise funds to expand.
The start-up Tellus AI, founded in March 2023 and rapidly incubated in Montpellier, develops tools for anticipating risks related to climate phenomena such as droughts, floods, heat waves and cold spells.
Léo Lemordant, co-founder, explains that the company specializes in the time period between short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate analyses by the IPCC, thus filling a gap with high-performance tools, which traditionally cover the period "between 10 days and several decades".
To do this, the company uses proprietary models based on “machine learning” (machine learning, an artificial intelligence (AI) method focused on building computer systems that learn from data), based on historical weather statistics, to offer probabilistic predictions of risks.
Lemordant specifies that “the results will not ensure that three months, there will be a flood”, but rather that it is an “estimation of risk statistics”. This information is mainly aimed at the finance and insurance sectors, allowing potential losses to be anticipated.
Europe and its development in sight
By focusing on the terrestrial water cycle, Tellus AI does not predict hurricanes themselves, but assesses the ground conditions conducive to flooding due to intense rainfall. Lemordant adds that the company's expertise “concerns the terrestrial water cycle", including soil-atmosphere-vegetation interaction.
The start-up quickly signed a contract with an insurer in the United States, facilitating its launch, and plans to expand its model to Europe. The goal is to expand geographically and temporally, with research underway to cover a horizon of one to ten years. This expansion is crucial to meet economic needs, because, according to Lemordant, “the five-year horizon is very useful for economic decision-making”.
Currently self-financed, the company is considering raising funds to accelerate its technological and commercial development. Despite its youth, it attracts the attention of many European insurers, with prospects in France, Italy and Germany. Lemordant emphasizes that “the company has had an international objective since its creation”, which reflects its strategy of openness.
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