Earthmover Secures $7.2M: Revolutionizing Climate Data for AI Futures
September 26, 2025, 9:40 pm
Earthmover, an NYC-based software firm, secured $7.2 million in seed funding. This capital accelerates their mission: revolutionizing climate, weather, and complex scientific data management. Their innovative cloud-native platform, composed of Icechunk, Arraylake, and Flux, empowers organizations. It drives sophisticated AI/ML model development. It streamlines data product delivery. The aim: deeply understand and accurately predict the physical world. This directly addresses escalating climate change impacts, offering critical solutions for energy, agriculture, and insurance. The investment enhances data exploration, boosts R&D, and cuts operational costs. Earthmover leverages its strong open-source heritage.
A new force emerges in critical data management. Earthmover, a New York City-based software innovator, just closed a significant $7.2 million seed funding round. This investment marks a pivotal moment. It fuels their ambitious push to transform how organizations handle complex climate, weather, and scientific data. Investors like Lowercarbon Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and Preston-Werner Ventures signal strong confidence. They back Earthmover’s vision.
The world faces unprecedented challenges. Climate change accelerates global shifts. Instability and unpredictability impact vital sectors. Energy, commodities, agriculture, insurance, and real estate all feel the strain. Extreme weather events cause staggering financial damage. A recent report highlighted $402 billion in damages from twenty-seven such events in 2024. This figure represents a twenty percent increase. It underscores a growing crisis. Businesses and governments need better tools. They increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for solutions.
Current technologies often fall short. Outdated systems hinder progress. They struggle with vast quantities of high-velocity Earth-system data. Organizations cannot fully leverage AI. Earthmover directly addresses this critical need. They make physical-world data readily available. They optimize it for AI in the cloud. Teams can effectively train and deploy advanced models. They work with petabyte-scale datasets. This includes weather, climate, and geoscience information. Earthmover enables more informed decision-making. Their goal: model the physical world in real time.
Earthmover’s platform is built on three core components. Each plays a crucial role. First is Icechunk. This is an open-source, cloud-optimized array storage format. It is specifically designed for multidimensional array data. Icechunk allows for high-performance analytics. It supports demanding AI workloads. It stores data in cloud object storage. This ensures compatibility across all major cloud platforms. It is inspired by the widely adopted Apache Iceberg table format. Icechunk acts as a cloud-native transactional storage engine.
Second is Arraylake. This component serves as a dedicated data management layer for teams. It offers a robust, version-controlled data catalog. Arraylake provides essential management tools. It includes a comprehensive data governance layer. This is vital for analytics and AI teams. It ensures data integrity and compliance.
Finally, Flux completes the platform. Flux delivers a suite of high-performance API access methods. Its geospatial query APIs are particularly impactful. They significantly accelerate the delivery of critical data to downstream applications. This speeds up insights. Together, these integrated features dramatically reduce development time. Teams can establish, execute, and deliver machine learning or AI models faster. A process once taking months now takes mere days. This efficiency preserves data provenance. It simultaneously cuts costly computational expenses.
The minds behind Earthmover bring unparalleled expertise. CEO Ryan Abernathey and CTO Joe Hamman are recognized leaders. They are pioneers within the open-source software and data ecosystem. Their contributions to the Python stack for scientific data analysis are substantial. Abernathey previously served as a distinguished professor at Columbia University. His research focused on ocean circulation and climate. Hamman contributed scientific expertise at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He also co-founded CarbonPlan, a prominent data-driven climate think tank.
Their paths converged through collaborative work. They developed Xarray. This is a fundamental open-source software package. It is crucial for analyzing weather, climate, and geospatial data. Xarray boasts over six million downloads. Renowned organizations like NASA, ESA, Google, NVIDIA, and Planet actively employ it. The Earthmover team also stands as a primary contributor to Zarr. Zarr is another impactful open-source data format. It is designed for compressed, chunked array storage. They were instrumental in launching Icechunk itself as an open-source project. This deep open-source heritage underpins Earthmover’s innovation.
Earthmover’s aspirations extend far beyond geospatial data. The team’s extensive experience within the Scientific Python community reveals a crucial insight. The same core data structures, known as tensors, appear consistently across virtually all scientific and computational disciplines. For example, the Zarr format is widely adopted. Its uses span bioinformatics, microscopy, neuroscience, and even fusion research. This demonstrates the broad applicability of Earthmover’s underlying technology.
The demand for scalable, cloud-native tensor data infrastructure is set to grow exponentially. Autonomous multi-modal sensor platforms are on the rise. Self-driving vehicles and advanced ocean-going robots continuously gather increasing volumes of physical world data. Earthmover provides the foundation for managing this influx. Its platform is poised to become an essential tool. It supports research. It drives innovation across diverse scientific fields.
Recent achievements underscore Earthmover’s momentum. The public release of Icechunk 1.0 showcased their commitment to open standards. The launch of Flux further expanded their commercial offerings. An ongoing partnership with NASA has already yielded remarkable results. It achieved a hundredfold improvement in Earth observation data retrieval. These milestones demonstrate real-world impact. They validate Earthmover’s technological prowess.
Earthmover is building the future of physical world AI. They provide the infrastructure. It is faster, cheaper, and more advanced. Their cloud-native platform manages climate and weather data. This is an increasingly essential asset. It supports critical industries. It aids efforts in climate change adaptation and mitigation. The company’s vision is clear: unlock the full value of Earth System data. They empower teams. They help them get answers from data in seconds, not days. This accelerates progress. It drives innovation. It provides essential tools for a rapidly changing planet.
A new force emerges in critical data management. Earthmover, a New York City-based software innovator, just closed a significant $7.2 million seed funding round. This investment marks a pivotal moment. It fuels their ambitious push to transform how organizations handle complex climate, weather, and scientific data. Investors like Lowercarbon Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and Preston-Werner Ventures signal strong confidence. They back Earthmover’s vision.
The world faces unprecedented challenges. Climate change accelerates global shifts. Instability and unpredictability impact vital sectors. Energy, commodities, agriculture, insurance, and real estate all feel the strain. Extreme weather events cause staggering financial damage. A recent report highlighted $402 billion in damages from twenty-seven such events in 2024. This figure represents a twenty percent increase. It underscores a growing crisis. Businesses and governments need better tools. They increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for solutions.
Current technologies often fall short. Outdated systems hinder progress. They struggle with vast quantities of high-velocity Earth-system data. Organizations cannot fully leverage AI. Earthmover directly addresses this critical need. They make physical-world data readily available. They optimize it for AI in the cloud. Teams can effectively train and deploy advanced models. They work with petabyte-scale datasets. This includes weather, climate, and geoscience information. Earthmover enables more informed decision-making. Their goal: model the physical world in real time.
Earthmover’s platform is built on three core components. Each plays a crucial role. First is Icechunk. This is an open-source, cloud-optimized array storage format. It is specifically designed for multidimensional array data. Icechunk allows for high-performance analytics. It supports demanding AI workloads. It stores data in cloud object storage. This ensures compatibility across all major cloud platforms. It is inspired by the widely adopted Apache Iceberg table format. Icechunk acts as a cloud-native transactional storage engine.
Second is Arraylake. This component serves as a dedicated data management layer for teams. It offers a robust, version-controlled data catalog. Arraylake provides essential management tools. It includes a comprehensive data governance layer. This is vital for analytics and AI teams. It ensures data integrity and compliance.
Finally, Flux completes the platform. Flux delivers a suite of high-performance API access methods. Its geospatial query APIs are particularly impactful. They significantly accelerate the delivery of critical data to downstream applications. This speeds up insights. Together, these integrated features dramatically reduce development time. Teams can establish, execute, and deliver machine learning or AI models faster. A process once taking months now takes mere days. This efficiency preserves data provenance. It simultaneously cuts costly computational expenses.
The minds behind Earthmover bring unparalleled expertise. CEO Ryan Abernathey and CTO Joe Hamman are recognized leaders. They are pioneers within the open-source software and data ecosystem. Their contributions to the Python stack for scientific data analysis are substantial. Abernathey previously served as a distinguished professor at Columbia University. His research focused on ocean circulation and climate. Hamman contributed scientific expertise at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He also co-founded CarbonPlan, a prominent data-driven climate think tank.
Their paths converged through collaborative work. They developed Xarray. This is a fundamental open-source software package. It is crucial for analyzing weather, climate, and geospatial data. Xarray boasts over six million downloads. Renowned organizations like NASA, ESA, Google, NVIDIA, and Planet actively employ it. The Earthmover team also stands as a primary contributor to Zarr. Zarr is another impactful open-source data format. It is designed for compressed, chunked array storage. They were instrumental in launching Icechunk itself as an open-source project. This deep open-source heritage underpins Earthmover’s innovation.
Earthmover’s aspirations extend far beyond geospatial data. The team’s extensive experience within the Scientific Python community reveals a crucial insight. The same core data structures, known as tensors, appear consistently across virtually all scientific and computational disciplines. For example, the Zarr format is widely adopted. Its uses span bioinformatics, microscopy, neuroscience, and even fusion research. This demonstrates the broad applicability of Earthmover’s underlying technology.
The demand for scalable, cloud-native tensor data infrastructure is set to grow exponentially. Autonomous multi-modal sensor platforms are on the rise. Self-driving vehicles and advanced ocean-going robots continuously gather increasing volumes of physical world data. Earthmover provides the foundation for managing this influx. Its platform is poised to become an essential tool. It supports research. It drives innovation across diverse scientific fields.
Recent achievements underscore Earthmover’s momentum. The public release of Icechunk 1.0 showcased their commitment to open standards. The launch of Flux further expanded their commercial offerings. An ongoing partnership with NASA has already yielded remarkable results. It achieved a hundredfold improvement in Earth observation data retrieval. These milestones demonstrate real-world impact. They validate Earthmover’s technological prowess.
Earthmover is building the future of physical world AI. They provide the infrastructure. It is faster, cheaper, and more advanced. Their cloud-native platform manages climate and weather data. This is an increasingly essential asset. It supports critical industries. It aids efforts in climate change adaptation and mitigation. The company’s vision is clear: unlock the full value of Earth System data. They empower teams. They help them get answers from data in seconds, not days. This accelerates progress. It drives innovation. It provides essential tools for a rapidly changing planet.