Earthmover

About Earthmover

Earthmover operates a cloud-native data platform specifically engineered for scientific data analytics, with a focus on addressing significant global issues like climate change. The company was established in 2022 by Dr. Ryan Abernathey and Dr. Joe Hamman, both of whom have extensive backgrounds in climate science, remote sensing, and cloud-native data analytics. The idea for the company originated in 2020, inspired by the rapid scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing adoption of open-source tools developed by the Pangeo project, a community the founders were instrumental in creating. Their work on key open-source Python packages such as Xarray, Zarr, and Dask, which are used by institutions like NASA and Microsoft, laid the groundwork for Earthmover's technology.

The company's business model is centered on providing a managed cloud service analogous to the "Modern Data Stack" (like Snowflake) but tailored for multidimensional array data, or tensors, which are common in scientific fields but not well-handled by traditional table-based data platforms. Earthmover targets a range of clients, from startups to large consulting firms working with geospatial, weather, and climate data. Revenue is generated by offering a platform that reduces the significant in-house engineering effort companies expend on managing large-scale scientific datasets, allowing them to focus on core tasks like AI-based climate forecasting.

Earthmover's platform consists of two main products: Arraylake and Flux. Arraylake serves as a unified data management layer, providing a central catalog for array-based data assets, high-performance data loading from formats like NetCDF and HDF5, and robust governance features. It is built on the open-source Icechunk storage engine, which provides transactional safety and efficient versioning for Zarr data, ensuring data integrity and enabling git-style version control. Flux acts as an API gateway that allows users to deliver data from Arraylake via standard protocols like WMS, EDR, and OPeNDAP, facilitating seamless integration with GIS applications and other downstream tools. This architecture allows clients to manage data in their own cloud storage while using Earthmover's services, thereby avoiding vendor lock-in. The company secured $1.7 million in a pre-seed funding round in October 2022, led by Costanoa Ventures.