A company was set up in Turin that gathers together multiple skills. Today,
the start-up employs the latest technologies to better understand the
consequences of climate change on people, organizations and society by doing
something unprecedented. For FARE INSIEME STARTUP, Giampaolo Colletti
interviews Roberto Carnicelli, co-founder and CEO of Eoliann
FARE INSIEME STARTUP is the spin-off of the FARE
INSIEME project dedicated to presenting some businesses that form part of the
Primo Ventures portfolio, a company that manages funds specializing in the
digital sector and new space economy Confindustria Emilia has started up a
partnership with Primo Ventures with the objective of providing its associates
with new opportunities for growth thanks to the presentation of the most
innovative start-ups on the market. Here are some of their stories,
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Finding
each other almost by chance. And, from a fortuitous occasion, giving birth to
an idea and a company that is scaling interest and turnover. This story began
in Turin in December 2021, when three young talents met during the selection
process at Vento, a Venture Builder in Turin. They had all applied to take part
in the first edition and, once again by chance, they were assigned to the same
group during the last selection phase, which consisted in five days at the
Turin OGRs to simulate the four-month programme. During that occasion, they
discovered they could combine their skills to complement one another. This is
the story of Roberto Carnicelli, Chiara Mugnai and Giovanni Luddeni, plus
Emidio Granito. All of them under 30 and establishing their first start-up
coming from different environments: aerospace engineering, corporate strategic
consultancy, data science and engineering management. Roberto has trained and
worked with businesses and specializes in strategic consulting for the
financial sector. Chiara is a data scientist and deals with machine learning
solutions, plus she boasts several years of experience both in Italy and the
UK. Giovanni is an aerospace engineer specializing in the development of AI
solutions for industrial control systems. Emidio is a management engineer
specializing in the application of AI solutions for the industry 4.0. His
arrival sped up the development of the POC prototype, launched in June 2023.
How the start-up was born. Combining
skills and making the difference. The four currently explore the market of
downstream data, a field that is attracting the interest of the European Space
Agency. “After analysing various market segments, we
decided to focus on the natural disaster sector as every year these phenomena
destroy buildings, homes, companies and the financial sector is not able to
guarantee protection against these events due to their high unpredictability.
We conducted a detailed research on the issue, reading scientific papers and
reports and talking to experts including players from the insurance and bank
sectors. Once the problem was verified and validated, we came up with various
possibilities to employ satellite data to forecast the probability and impact
of natural disasters,”
reports Roberto Carnicelli, co-founder & CEO of Eoliann. If “our house is
on fire” - which everyone can see by now - it is necessary to ask ourselves
some questions. Even more, actually. It is necessary to calculate the economic
impact of the damage caused by catastrophic natural events using technology,
especially satellite data and AI algorithms. This the story of Eoliann, a
start-up dedicated to climate change established in 2022. It is currently
developing an API which, thanks to satellite data and proprietary machine
learning algorithms, should forecast the probability and impact of natural
disasters for financial institutes, taking into consideration the effects of
climate change. The team features 11 people. The objective is to launch the
product by the end of 2023. “Today, the company is
focusing on attracting talent from all over the world and with different
backgrounds so as to create an environment where everyone can grow and maximise
the value generated. This objective is motivated by the desire to solve a very
complex problem for which we need exceptionally brilliant people, free to
express their own talent. The objective is to use the latest technology to
better understand the consequences of climate
change on people, organizations and society by doing something
unprecedented. To verify the technological feasibility of the project, we
carried out a scientific review of all the main papers published over the past
five years, a period during which research in the machine learning sector
applied to climate has developed tremendously. We then drew up a business plan
and started talking with investors to test the financial feasibility of the
project. A few months later, we started negotiations for the first round of
funding, which ended in November 2022,” says Carnicelli.
How to make the start-up grow. Innovation equals research and development.
Because growth depends on these investments in data for the aggregation and
analysis of multiple sources, including satellite, to develop a beta version of
our API. “We are also investing in state-of-the-art
machine learning algorithms to forecast the probability and impact of natural
disasters. To sum up, our investments in R&D focus on data engineering and
data science and aim at improving our ability to process large quantities of
data in an efficient and precise manner. Our current clients operate in the
financial sector and include banks and insurance companies in particular.
However, the product has a wider applicability and we believe that it could be
used in other sectors as well such as infrastructure, the public sector, the
energy sector and the agrifood sector,” stresses Carnicelli. But there is even more. The start-up has
created an infrastructure that can connect to the main public satellite sources
of the European Space Agency and NASA, and can then process, clean and define
data. Once again, it is the data - collected and processed in the best manner
possible - that can guide our choices just like a compass in bad weather.
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