Influunt

Flood risk assessments for conservation organizations and food & ag companies

The idea

Influunt provided a remote sensing tool to measure changes in surface water levels over time, so that our customers can compare current vs. historical levels to assess flooding risk. 

One of our key customers was the Nature Conservancy, where they wanted to determine whether certain bird habitats were at risk of flooding. Big food & ag companies were also interested in understanding potential disruptions to their supply chain due to flooding (e.g. cereal crop availability) to determine if they need to switch vendors. Most of our work was in California and N. America more broadly, and we also did some work in Brazil.

Our remote sensing tool leveraged existing data sources: we merged publicly-available satellite data from Sentinel-1 (a European space agency satellite) with SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data to develop an understanding of water presence on a certain land mass. This data is available every 10-15 days, so by collecting data over multiple years, we could create a stacked map showing water levels over time and estimate the future probability of flooding.

Influunt’s differentiating factors came from: 1) being able to operate in all weather conditions (important because a lot of tropical areas have cloud cover, so the optical satellites don’t work, whereas SAR is a radar satellite that can penetrate cloud cover), 2) having scientific expertise in processing SAR data, which not many people could do at the time.

Competitors / Substitutes

There were other startups with similar principles like ClimateX, though they focused on stress-testing climate risk for banks and forecasting future scenarios.  There were also larger enterprises like RMS (owned by Moody’s) and other climate risk modeling services that center around probabilistic modeling, whereas Influunt was more focused on historical data.

Amount raised

We initially received $120k from Techstars’ Sustainability accelerator. Before deciding to end operations, we were close to closing a $1M pre-seed round.

Duration

Aug 2020 - Sept 2022

Team size

3

What went well

We were proud of deploying a product in the field vs. just building the technology! We had paying customers for our product ($100k to 150K in revenues). We got into Techstars with both my co-founder and I being first-time founders.

Challenges and what you'd do differently

Value Proposition

I started with the hypothesis that customers care about and would pay to understand flood risk. The hypothesis was false. We had over 60 meetings with big food & ag companies (e.g. the likes of Mars, Cargill, Diageo, Coca Cola) and hedge funds that buy at-risk bonds, where we presented custom reports and demos. 4 of the 60 customers signed a contract for a pilot but did not continue conversations after. My insights:

1. Corporates did not want a standalone assessment of flood risk, they typically wanted an overall climate risk strategy or a broader water strategy (e.g. where to source water from -- a lot of beverage companies are looking to replenish watersheds)

2. The frequency, size and growth of the problem matter a lot. I initially thought larger companies would go through an annual compliance cycle and pay to prepare for flood risk, given how costly and disruptive a flood is to their supply chain. As it turns out, enterprises perceive flood risk to be a recurring problem, but not a growing one. Most do not have a budget or a person dedicated to solving this problem. The frequency of flooding is sporadic, and when there is a flood and a resulting supply chain disruption, our product cannot solve it immediately.

3. Given that most of the customers we spoke with did not hire someone else to do the assessment work we were pitching, my sense is that the status quo (minimal to no monitoring) is acceptable to most customers, and that a stated demand for better risk assessment is more an of an ESG or PR effort. 

As a product person by background, I think I could have been more ruthless about clarifying the value prop and customer demand. 

Business model

Seeing revenues come in gave us false hope initially. We were earning consulting-based revenues, which is not a revenue model I saw as being venture-backable. We could have tried to persuade customers to sign onto a software subscription vs. paying on a project basis. We also considered finding other customers in adjacent verticals (extending outside flood risk assessment) who would be more eager to pay for a software license. However, I felt that if we had to customize 50% of the product to meet the new customer’s needs, we would be reverting to a consulting services model again. 

Fundraising

Raising money as first-time founders was difficult. We found that European VCs (my co-founder is European and I am Indian) were more likely to invest in founders with investment banking and consulting backgrounds in B2C or B2B SAAS than founders with engineering and science backgrounds. 

Interview above with co-founder / CEO Chinmay Adhvaryu. Chinmay now leads the product team at Mitti labs where he helps rice farmers reduce methane emissions by changing their irrigation practices. Mitti labs uses remote sensing to detect emissions and issue carbon credits to farmers, which incentivizes farmers to continue sustainable farming practices.