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Ventus Technologies GmbH

Hyperlocal weather intelligence. By the minute, for the moments that matter.

Ventus creates realistic physics-based AI-native forecasts that dramatically improve timeliness and accuracy.
Hero-Image – Ventus Technologies GmbH
Ausgründung aus dem
Fraunhofer Venture

Unternehmensprofil

AgTech & Ernährungswirtschaft
AI & Big Data
Energie
Mobilität & Logistik
#weather forecasting
#ai
#energy
Gründung: 02.02.2022
Geschäftszweck: Wettervorhersage
Unternehmenssitz: Stuttgart, Deutschland
Kontakt: rafael.abel@ventus-tech.de
Gründer:
https://www.ventus-tech.de/
Problem – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Problem

Short range precipitation forecasting is inherently unreliable and imprecise, which costs a bevy of industries billions of euros in lost income or damages. These include the transportation, insurance, agriculture, defense, and aviation sectors. The operational design domain (ODD) of any autonomous ground vehicle is constrained by the environmental conditions, mainly by rainfall. Lack of reliable forecasts forces conservative operational strategies or excessive handovers between autonomous and human drivers.
The same applies to aviation, and to modern precision agriculture using drone-based spraying. Highly localized and short term weather effects impact operation and create delays, groundings, lost income or accidents. For insurances, inaccurate forecasts limit their ability to conduct reliable risk assessments.
Lösung – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Lösung

We build next-generation AI-powered weather models with updates every ten minutes and a resolution of 250 m. This is in contrast to conventional weather forecasting services with a refresh rate between 1 to 6 hours, rendering them unsuitable for real-time use cases. Our nowcasting service will be capable of to capturing rapidly evolving weather conditions and deliver them efficiently.
Customers will receive bespoke and actionable weather forecasts and data derived from them. High accuracy and reliability of the received data will enable precise and fine-grained control of automotive vehicle ODDs, adding significant value to such vehicles. Precise forecasts will help aviation customers reduce delays with a high degree of reliability, and enable agricultural customers to reduce waste and increase uptime of their spraying operations.
Our solution enables safer autonomous driving, reduces aviation delays, smarter risk assessment, and greater transportation efficiency.
Produkt – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Produkt

We build and operate weather forecasting systems for B2B customers, providing access to various types of forecasts. We already operate high resolution wind forecasting services for road networks for consumption by electric vehicles in the context of range estimation. These are based on our physics-based near-ground weather prediction systems, which attain spatial resolutions of down to 30 meters leveraging Fraunhofer technology.
We are currently building an AI-based precipitation forecasting engine based on the combination of disparate data sources including forecast data, ground-based radar and earth observation satellite imagery. Local forecast refinement based on sensors in customer vehicles or on ground observation stations drive further improvements in forecast quality. These AI based forecasting innovations will rely on the existing technological foundations at Ventus and deliver unprecedented short-range rainfall forecasts.
Alleinstellung – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Alleinstellung

The technology stack is made unique by the combination of our existing high resolution physics-based models with innovative AI approaches. Competing nowcasting approaches for short-range rainfall prediction rely on simple algorithms, whereas we combine multiple data sources to enable our AI models to learn near-ground atmospheric physics and to attain superior forecast quality.
We leverage our unique experience with meterological and geospatial datasets, continuously integrating new data to improve our model training. One such example is our early integration of the Meteosat Third Generation satellite data.
Further, we build upon our track record in delivery of weather forecasts to corporate customers. We tune our models to have top performance on the KPIs that really matter to each specific customer type. On top of the models, we have a patented approach for further refinement of forecasts based on sensor data fed back by edge devices in vehicles or in other customer-side hardware
Geschäftsmodell – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Geschäftsmodell

We are a weather forecasting company specialized in delivering best-in-class forecast of environmental conditions to business users. We focus on B2B operation and serve our forecast data from cloud-based infrastructure to customers in the mobility space. This can include, but is not limited to, automotive, insurance/finance, agriculture, defence, aviation, and many more.

Our existing customers in the automotive space use our live forecast road weather API for electric vehicle range forecasting. Other types of customers query our cloud services to obtain historical environment data for R&D purposes. Access is enabled by licence agreements with annual fees based on fleet size or number of requests.

With a view to the complexity of each use case, we have been involved not only as a pure provider of raw data. Our vision is to deliver actionable information, tailored to each customer type. We have been successfully implementing this approach in our past pilot projects.

Traction / Highlights

  • 6-figure € in commercial revenue with pilot projects and licence fees
  • 6-figure € raised in 2023 via Campus Founders and D11Z
  • 6-figure € non-dilute funding through research grants and similar
  • Projects with Mercedes-Benz Cars, Toyota Motor Europe, Hyundai, Dynamic Map Platform
  • Startup AUTOBAHN award 2022
  • Operational road weather wind forecast service in test use by automotive OEMs

Kunde / Markt

Everybody operating a physical object is impacted by weather. The weather forecasting market is a 3 billion $ market growing at 7% CAGR. Imperfect knowledge of future conditions requires inefficient and conservative planning, or inhibits some types of usage altogether. The current and potential users are many:
Our automotive customers have been using our API-based road weather forecasting services for range estimation purposes. Reliable estimation drives the acceptance of road vehicle electrification. We have also made inroads with logistics companies with interest in real-world consumption for fleet optimization or truck electrification.
Autonomous vehicle developers and fleet operators require reliable rainfall forecasts to be avoid exceeding operating limits of the autonomous systems. Precision agriculture companies employing drone spraying are interested in hyperlocal data for optimum operation. So to insurance companies aiming smart risk assessment to improve their products.
Team – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Team

We are a three-person founding team: Rafael Abel (PhD meteorology, industry experience in as project lead in automotive and data engineering), Lutz Pegel (environmental engineer, software dev with automotive background), Andreas Waldmann (PhD in aerospace engineering, aerodynamics and simulation tech background). We have been working together on automotive projects and recognized the need for superior weather data for the mobility sector, leading to the founding of Ventus. We have since grown to include more diverse people, with software engineering, meteorology and business development backgrounds.
Our employees come from a wide range of professional backgrounds and experiences, with a spectrum as wide ranging as from Formula 1 race weather analysis and to bleeding-edge AI weather model development. This interdisciplinary nature of our team and our continued ability to attract smart and motivated people is key to our success.
Join the Ventus pre-seed round and make reliable weather forecasting a reality – Ventus Technologies GmbH

Join the Ventus pre-seed round and make reliable weather forecasting a reality

We are looking for strong partners to shape the future with us, by helping us acquire more experts on AI and meteorology to achieve our vision faster.
150k € from Fraunhofer Ventures are already committed. Get on board!
Book a call with Rafael to learn more