Info "at" Project-Athena.com ArcGIS Group Athena Voice of the Acre on LinkedIn " On Linked In: Athena Intelligence
The conventional wisdom among investors is to bet on a management team, not just the product.
Athena offers a case study in pivoting while growing the firm’s capabilities. This summary was written on December 14, 2023 and includes links to some of the older public work to demonstrate the focus at the time.
Quick History of Athena Intelligence
Prior to the Plug and Play Press Release February 3, 2021 – David Sypnieski had extensive experience working with big data in agriculture and ESG tracking. He been working with Cambell’s on optimizing logistics of tomato harvests across multiple counties in California. This work started back in 2015 with CA Groundwater analysis. It expanded into Drought Analysis, and a desire to fingerprint the world, so that businesses could access the earth’s data as easily as consumer data.
Athena had a successful trial in 2019, but lost funding in2020, which led to a pivot into wildfire prediction. Not surprisingly, the initial application was focused on farms with wildfire risk, such as those in Sonoma or Napa, in the wake of the San Francisco North Bay Fires that occured in 2020.
A conditional, geospatial model (Voice of the Acre®) was built and demonstrated to various angel investors throughout 2021. Validation came in May 2022, when a wildfire in Orange County, California matched the probabilistic projection for the likely wildfire perimeter. The analysis shown here, was shared with prospective investors in December 2021. This link will take you to the analysis and pictures from the fire.
John Rafferty joined in the firm in 2022 as Chief Actuary. Products for the property insurance industry began to be built.
3Q22 The Mahoney Group became the first client.
Athena Insurance Risk Inc. was incorporated in Delaware, in December 2022, to pursue business among property insurers with a more accurate and granular probabilistic projections of wildfire risk than currently existed in the marketplace.
November 2022, Joseph Chaghouri joined Athena as a Geospatial, Machine Language Engineer, in the role of Lead Data Scientist.
February 2023, Athena Intelligence joined the ESRI startup program.
March 2023 The Mahoney Group became the first outside investor.
May 2023 Voice of the Acre® was introduced, as a minimum viable product (MVP) and accessible online, by registration.
November 2023 Athena was invited to participate in Geography 2050: The Changing Map of Risk, Hazard & Finance, the Fall symposium of the American Geographical Society. David Sypnieski gave a Lightning Talk on The Power of Predictive Modeling in Wildfire Prevention