The Kerala Landslides Prove Why AI-Based Climate Tech is Vital

The recent Wayanad landslides stand testament to how poor planning can cause major climate tragedies, leading to the loss of life and property. 

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In an interview, geoscientist CP Rajendran from National Institute of Advanced Studies attributed the floods to deforestation, unscientific construction practices and quarrying, among other things. “The agencies involved in landslide susceptibility maps like the State Disaster Management should be involved in updating the existing maps.

"The satellite observations and digital elevation models are now widely used to map the landslide risk mapping. The government must frame clear policies on land management based on such zoning maps by taking the people into confidence,” he said.

Similarly, spurred by the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire in California, three IIT alumni Rahul Saxena, Abhishek Singh and Nitin Das co-founded AiDash, an AI-first vertical SaaS company, in 2019. According to them, the wildfire highlighted the need for disaster prevention and vegetation management, especially when it came to infrastructure building, something that is sorely lacking in India.

Poorly researched plans to build infrastructure in the country have long contributed to several issues. Besides climate disasters, issues like traffic surges are directly caused by a lack of research and analysis during the planning phase for large projects.

To prevent this, companies like AiDash have cornered the market by offering geospatial analysis and remote sensing services, making use of AI to help clients make informed decisions on their current and proposed building projects. This is to help companies looking to build climate-resilient and sustainable critical infrastructure.

Why is Monitoring so Important?

In cornering a very specific market, AiDash has managed to remain virtually peerless when it comes to what they’re offering.

This is evidenced by the fact that the company, despite being founded only five years ago, has managed to raise a funding of $91.5 million. This includes closing off its Series C funding round in April this year at $58.5 million led by Lightrock.

“We are the world's first satellite-powered vegetation management provider. Vegetation management is an interesting use case where the power utilities have to manage the vegetation around the power lines. If they don't, the vegetation gets closer to the wire and can cause an outage by falling on it.

“Even worse, over the past five to ten years, there have been a lot of wildfires caused because the vegetation was too close to the wire. So it's like a double-edged sword for companies. A large utility company in California, for instance, almost went bankrupt because of the wildfire,” Saxena told AIM.

In terms of competitors, they remain a key player in the industry, alongside companies like LiveEO, Vibrant Planet and Green PRAXIS, and even SatSure. Currently, the company has six of the largest utility companies in the US and two of the largest water companies in the UK as their clients.

In terms of their data centres, the company makes use of AWS but also has internal data centres, which they use to train their models and host their own GPUs. Additionally, Saxena said the company is planning on incorporating generative AI into its offerings, allowing clients to directly ask questions on the data gathered through the platform. 

Vegetation Monitoring in India

With much of its clientele largely based in the US and UK and as many as a million miles of coverage in North America, the company has plans to increase its clientele in India.

Despite being headquartered in San Jose, the company largely operates in India. The Lightrock-backed climate tech startup recently opened an AI centre of excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru. 

AiDash already has two established offices in Bengaluru and Gurugram, with the CoE adding to their bases in India. Additionally, Saxena said that the company plans to double its team in India. “The vision is a cleaner, safer, greener Earth. We want to work towards climate and sustainability. So we are open to doing whatever we can in India to achieve that.

“Currently, we’re building in India for the world. Meanwhile, many companies start up somewhere else and come to India to sell their product,” Saxena pointed out.