Benchmark Labs, an AI-driven weather forecasting startup, is proving that impactful technology can transcend industries to drive sustainability. Founded by CEO Carlos Gaitan, the company initially focused on providing microclimate forecasts for agriculture, addressing the limitations of traditional weather services that offer information too broad for precise farm management. “We benchmark against the national weather services. We need to know if we're better. We didn't create the technology for the sake of creating it—the technology has to be better than the alternative to provide real value to our users.”

Benchmark Labs' AI-powered solution corrects biases in existing weather models and creates personalized, location-specific forecasts by analyzing data from sensors already installed on farms. This eliminates the need for expensive proprietary hardware and allows farmers to leverage their existing infrastructure. The AI continuously retrains itself with new data, ensuring accurate and dynamic predictions in the face of ever-changing weather patterns.

The company also uses Gemini internally for business intelligence and data collection and analysis. Carlos tells us that using advanced models prototyped using GCP, their AI trained more than 1500 models per week tailored to specific locations to “create a data simulation pipeline that ingests data at the location of the customer. That’s why the AI is so powerful, because it allows us to analyze the customer specific locations and develop personalization.”

Early adopters, like avocado farmers in California, have seen significant benefits, including reduced water usage and increased yields. By providing seven-day microclimate forecasts, Benchmark Labs enables proactive planning and resource allocation, unlike traditional services that offer shorter, less precise predictions.

Beyond agriculture, Benchmark Labs is expanding into the renewable energy sector, partnering with the Offshore Wind Innovation Hub to optimize wind farm operations. Their AI-powered solution improves the accuracy and predictability of wind forecasting, crucial for maximizing energy production and preventing power outages.

Carlos is very clear that artificial intelligence is central to the company’s identity: “We are an AI company. We exist because our forecasts are AI-driven. We are not only using AI for marginal complimentary tasks—we exist because AI enables us to correct global climate models and improve biases in data simulation of weather forecasting agencies.” Gemini has been instrumental in helping Benchmark Labs to identify target customers in specific regions and optimize marketing. The company also uses Gemini internally for business intelligence and data collection and analysis. Carlos tells us that using advanced models prototyped using GCP, their AI trained more than 1500 models per week tailored to specific locations to “create a data simulation pipeline that ingests data at the location of the customer. That’s why the AI is so powerful, because it allows us to analyze the customer specific locations and develop personalization.” The AI is automated to retrain itself hourly: “One of the advantages of our processes is that our models are not static. Sometimes in machine learning, a very big static model is good enough for applications—but the weather is dynamic. So we keep assimilating data that informs the previous model, and then they compete to make it better as we adjust parameters of the neural networks every week for each specific location which all have different models.”

The AI has enabled Benchmark Labs to leverage existing internet of things solutions already used by land owners. Rather than building proprietary hardware with built-in analytics, which would require farmers to invest up to $1 million to replace their sensors, Benchmark Labs partnered with the manufacturers that “do hardware very well [but] don't have the resources to understand technology or machine learning, and be that an analytic leader for them,” says Carlos. The resulting solution integrates sensor data, collected with AI, with machine learning to refine forecasts from meteorological agencies and provide forward-looking, microclimate-specific forecasts that enable land managers to make better-informed decisions for their assets.

The company’s focus on leveraging AI for sustainability helped Benchmark Labs secure support from the 2023 Latino Founders Fund. “We have been in many accelerators before but without a doubt the value that startup owners get from Google for Startups community is unparalleled,” says Carlos. “You could see that this is because of the magnitude of the resources that Google puts into the program.” Carlos says that they were “one click away from mentors in any area that we wanted,” including marketing, branding, go-to-market strategy, hardware, software, or AI. ” Carlos also speaks to the statistical inequity of minority founder funding, saying that the Latino Founders Fund and Sales Academy were impactful in circumventing systemic barriers to provide his team access to training resources and opportunities. Carlos says that practices like the Sales Academy’s accountability huddle, which involved writing a report on goals and wins, created a cadence of reflecting on the company’s progress that is instrumental to their growth. He also experienced the impact of being in daily community with other founders building their businesses: “to understand that many other people like you are trying to build something from zero, that not every day is a sunny day—there are ups and downs but you have people there that can help you.” Carlos and his team continue to collaborate and exchange resources with companies in their cohort and grow their community.

Benchmark Labs continues to grow as they discover new use cases for their tech. “I couldn't have foreseen it, but I knew that we were in the right time at the right place. We were just early enough that nobody was doing it right, and that if some market forces aligned in our favor, we would be positioned to scale globally. After we created the company and evaluated the proof of concept there were very important signals that allowed us to think about this as a global solution.”

As Carlos and his team discovered, tech that solves global problems can be iterated across sectors; an opportunity arose when Benchmark Labs was approached by the New York-based Offshore Wind Innovation Hub, an initiative leveraging startup talent to support the growth of offshore wind farming. While being one of the most efficient renewable power sources and expected to be a $2.15 trillion industry by 2025, wind farming is entirely dependent on the weather. Offshore wind farms rely on visibility to ensure that operations are not shut down by unforeseen adverse conditions, effectively leading to major power outages. Benchmark Labs mitigates the volatility of wind patterns, which continue to shift due to climate change, by pairing of IoT (internet of things) and machine learning to improve accuracy and predictability in wind forecasting. Traditional forecasting measures are positioned close to the ground, which is ineffective for turbines that are, according to Carlos, taller than the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower; Benchmark Labs’ sensors, by contrast, can be positioned at turbine height for accurate forecasting and data collection.

Today, Benchmark Labs is the leading provider of AI-driven weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and land management sectors. As a creator of AI with a global impact, Carlos takes the company’s social responsibility seriously; the company has signed the one percent pledge to give back to communities, and Carlos also believes in creating visibility through advocacy: “[AI] is instrumental to our generation, and the important policymakers understand that AI is not necessarily always Big Tech. We do weather forecasting—we help water savings and energy and create better working conditions. So I think that it's important for us to have a voice at the table.”