Planette Awarded NSF SBIR Phase I Grant to Advance AI-Powered Earth System Intelligence Tech

As the planet warms and weather patterns grow more volatile, environmental intelligence is becoming essential for building climate resilience. From agriculture and insurance to infrastructure and energy, the ability to anticipate extreme events, weeks or even months in advance, can make the difference between proactive planning and costly disruption. 

At Planette, we believe that access to advanced environmental intelligence shouldn’t be limited to specialized institutions. Today, we’re proud to share that we’ve won a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the development of a breakthrough Earth system foundation model powered by AI—a significant step in our journey to put powerful environmental data in everyone’s hands.

The Planette AI team. From left: Dr. Aodhan Sweeney (Geospatial Data Engineer & Earth System Scientist), Ms. Anisha Pal (Scientific Machine Learning Engineer), Dr. Kalai Ramea (Co-founder & CTO; NSF SBIR Principal Investigator), Dr. Hansi Singh (Co-founder & CEO), and Dr. Kyle Heyblom (Senior Earth System Scientist).

Introducing NIVA: An AI Model for the Earth

This award will fund research and development of NIVA, Planette’s forthcoming AI foundation model of the Earth system. With R&D led by Planette co-founder and CTO, Dr. Kalai Ramea, NIVA will use state-of-the-art AI techniques to learn how Earth’s components, like the atmosphere, oceans, ice, and land, interact with each other. Trained on millions of years of simulated Earth system data, NIVA will recognize complex patterns in our planet's climate and weather systems. It will serve as a robust backbone for a range of environmental applications: predicting weather patterns, detecting unusual climate events, producing localized forecasts, and improving the way observational data is incorporated into Earth system models.

“NSF accelerates the translation of emerging technologies into transformative new products and services,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “We take great pride in funding deep-technology startups and small businesses that will shape science and engineering results into meaningful solutions for today and tomorrow.”

A Public-Purpose Platform

What sets NIVA apart is its adaptability. The model is being developed to support applications across sub-seasonal-to-seasonal forecasting (S2S), climate risk assessments, extreme weather prediction, and climate change attribution. These forecasting capabilities are critical for sectors on the front lines of environmental volatility, such as agriculture, natural resource management, (re)insurance, energy, outdoor recreation, transportation, infrastructure, and logistics.

“Too many communities are caught off guard by climate volatility, not because the science isn’t there, but because the intelligence isn’t reaching them,” said Dr. Hansi Singh, Planette CEO and co-founder. “NIVA is designed to detect early signals across the Earth’s interconnected systems, giving sectors impacted by fluctuating weather the lead time they need to act. This funding brings us closer to making proactive, flexible environmental planning possible for everyone.”