Our Story
Terrafuse was founded by a group of ambitious scientists and business leaders as a spin out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
We started Terrafuse because we experienced firsthand the impacts of extreme weather in our state of California, where wildfire intensity potential worsened by 50% in the last few decades. We knew that, if equipped with the right intelligence, our government agencies, energy & insurance companies, and financial institutions could be doing more to adapt to climate risk.
Our vision is to embed climate risk, informed by artificial intelligence, into decision-making everywhere. By combining our expertise in climate science and machine learning with vast quantities of previously untapped Earth observation data, Terrafuse can more accurately, precisely, and efficiently model climate risk at any given location.
20M people displaced by climate change each year globally*
>4% of global GDP at stake by 2050 by conservative estimates**
And yet only 3% of Earth observation data is used today
Our Team
Hunter Connell
Co-founder and CEO
Hunter is passionate about deploying technology innovation to establish synergy between the planet and humanity and a healthy environment for all. Before Terrafuse AI, Hunter worked at Ajax Strategies, where she invested in early-stage climate technology companies, seven of which have since exited including three public offerings. Hunter was inspired by these entrepreneurs to start Terrafuse AI. She also served on the philanthropy team at Energy Innovation, a multi-family office supporting nonprofits focused on designing regulatory incentives to deploy clean energy technologies. An example of this work included a massively successful campaign to phase out all coal plants in the US and replace them with clean energy. Prior to that, Hunter designed solutions for climate change adaptation and habitat restoration as an environmental engineer. Hunter studied business at The Wharton School and Environmental Science at UCLA.
Stephen Marshall
Vice President of Engineering
Steve is a software engineer and physical scientist with over 20 years of experience and two successful exits. At Terrafuse, he manages the engineering team. Previously, he was an engineering executive for a geospatial intelligence startup with a SaaS photogrammetry product. In his prior role at The Weather Company (later acquired by IBM), he was in charge of the development of the systems behind several AI-based weather forecast products for the agriculture, solar, and wind energy markets, working extensively with data and meteorological scientists to bring products to market. Steve is an expert on weather data and building data management systems (he founded and led the Data Architecture group at WSI, later acquired by The Weather Company), for many weather data types serving industries including media, aviation, and energy. Steve holds an MS in Atmospheric Science from the University of Washington and a BA in Physics from Wesleyan.
Jing Li
Sr. Machine Learning Engineer
Jing is experienced with building physically-based climate system models. At Terrafuse, she works on developing end-to-end machine learning models for wildfire risk score prediction. She is passionate about bringing physics to machine learning techniques for climate science and leveraging these techniques to address the increasing risks of climate change. Jing holds a master's degree in Atmospheric Science and Computer Science from UC Davis.
Ashray Manepalli
Machine Learning Engineer
Ashray primarily focuses on machine learning and computational mathematics and statistics, and loves to think about innovative solutions to complex problems in the field of climate science, such as the groundbreaking Terrafuse wind downscaling and forecasting models. Ashray worked on Snow, Wind, and Fire models, using advanced techniques in machine learning, statistics, and physics to create powerful models for the estimation, nowcasting, prediction, and analysis of relevant climate variables. He has published papers and given talks in several climate change conferences, and received the ‘Honorable Mention’ award at the NeurIPS 2019 Climate Change workshop. Ashray’s efforts in High Performance Computing achieved over a 200x improvement in compute efficiency when running the massive LFP fire model, allowing for fast iteration and validation of the previously intractable job. In his free time, Ashray likes to experiment with electronic systems, using his experience in engineering and physics and his skills in 3D printing and design to build complex systems such as speakers and drones. Ashray holds degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley.
Jack Seagrist
Senior Product Manager
Jack Seagrist leads Product at Terrafuse, where he helps bring advanced climate intelligence solutions to life. He is passionate about creating products that propel us towards a climate resilient future.
Prior to Terrafuse, Jack was a Technology Consultant at Accenture Federal Services, where he built large-scale enterprise software systems that transformed some of the largest federal organizations and delivered breakthrough outcomes in medical research and agriculture. For example, he led the development of a grants management system that has funded $2.8 billion research projects to date, some of which have resulted in cancer screening methodologies that are five times more effective. Jack has spent thousands of hours with customers listening, learning, and empathizing with the challenges they face. As a result, Jack’s skills are not limited to just developing technology— he also knows how to build products that customers love.
Jack holds an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and a Certificate in commercializing new ventures from the Graduate School of Business, where he worked with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment to produce breakthrough sustainability solutions. Specifically, he led a Department of Energy sponsored initiative to show the value of aggregating water-related data for improved basin scale decision-making, which have resulted in better collaboration among the hydropower industry, environmental community, and tribal nations. His training at the world’s premier business, engineering, and environmental institutions sparked his desire to join Terrafuse and develop customer-centric products that solve the most pressing societal-scale challenges of today and tomorrow.
Elaine Yang
Data Engineer
Elaine is a meteorologist by trade and with over 10 years of experience is also a seasoned data and software engineer. At Terrafuse, she works closely with machine learning engineers as a data engineer. Previously, she was the lead engineer designing and developing the forecast system for the Weather Underground and worked as a principal engineer for the Weather Company and IBM.
Advisory Board
Go-to-market Advisor
Bret is terrafuse's go to market advisor. Bret is an exited insurance executive and has worked in insurance for over 20 years. He is currently VP of Data & Analytics at RLI Insurance Company. Before RLI, Bret led SpatialKey (a geospatial analytics solution provider) from its infancy, to adolescence, to a successful exit. Prior to that he held senior leadership roles at RMS and Willis Re. He is passionate in his cause to empower decision making in insurance through innovative analytic and data solutions.
Advisor
Peter is an exited founder and Wharton Professor of Marketing. Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018 and currently runs another venture. Professor Fader's expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer lifetime value. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, and pharmaceuticals. Professor Fader has a PhD in Marketing from MIT.
Advisor
Andrea is an exited founder of a publicly traded company. He has over 30 years of experience. He is co-founder and former CTO of ION, where he designed and developed ION's popular platform for electronic trading. In his 20 years at ION, Andrea helped the company grow from a start-up to a $1bn revenue multinational in the financial technology sector. Andrea's expertise lies in the design and development of distributed, low-latency architectures, and in building and scaling organizations to deliver modular, enterprise solutions. Andrea is currently advising startups and collaborating with the Multilanguage Cognition Lab at University College London.
Dr. Mustafa Mustafa
Advisor
Mustafa is a physicist by training, and his research focuses on adapting and advancing state-of-the-art deep learning to solve applied problems, with a focus on physical sciences domains. His current research interests include: generative models, self-supervised learning, deep learning at (HPC) scale. He currently works in Software Engineering at Waymo. Mustafa holds a BS in Physics from the University of Jordan and a PhD in Physics from Purdue University.
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Dr. Gireesh Shrimali
Advisor
Gireesh is the Head of Transition Finance Research at Oxford University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Stanford University and a Director at Climate Policy Initiative. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University as well as the Indian School of Business. His research is on the catalytic role of finance in getting to the 2C climate target. He also focuses on ESG issues, such as climate risk and net zero transitions. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from the University of Minnesota, and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology. Prior to his academic career, he has over nine years of industry experience.
Dr. Daniel Feldman
Advisor
Dan is an atmospheric scientist by training. His research focuses on remote sensing, mountainous hydrology, and atmospheric modeling and forecasting. He leads research projects for the U.S. Dept. of Energy, for NASA, and for the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. Dan works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering Science from MIT and a Master's and PhD in Environmental Science & Engineering from Caltech.
Board of Directors
Hunter Connell
Board Member
Before Terrafuse AI, Hunter worked at Ajax Strategies, where she invested in early stage climate technology companies, seven of which have since exited including three public offerings. She also served on the philanthropy team at Energy Innovation supporting nonprofits focused on decarbonization. Prior to that, Hunter designed solutions for climate change adaptation and habitat restoration as an environmental engineer. Hunter studied business at The Wharton School and Environmental Science at UCLA.
Chrysanthe Gussis
Board Member
Chrysanthe is an investor and advisor to early stage climate tech companies. She has extensive experience in finance, structuring, legal, operational and business strategy, and scaling of high volume, high growth businesses. She also has deep relationships in the banking and clean economy sectors. She was previously an executive at SolarCity for 8 years, where she helped make solar energy accessible by developing scalable, lower-cost financing during a period of consistent year-over-year doubling in growth. Chrysanthe holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from the University of Michigan.
Eugene Kirpichov
Board Member
Eugene is an expert in large-scale data processing and machine learning infrastructure, as well as catalyzing big-tech talent en-masse to the climate technology space. He founded Work on Climate for this purpose- the first dedicated movement of its kind. Eugene was previously a Staff Software Engineer working on Google's cloud technologies, data processing and machine learning infrastructure, before leaving to focus full-time on the urgent climate crisis. He founded and runs Work On Climate, a non-profit focused on making climate work mainstream among professionals, with 7,500+ members and growing.
Our Investors and Partners
In addition to venture backing, we are proud to be supported by these incredible organizations: