Earthmover PBC just closed a $7.2M seed round, and it’s not just another funding headline, it’s the story of two scientists who refused to accept that working with climate and weather data had to feel like chiseling stone tablets. Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman built their careers around understanding the physical world, only to realize the tools for handling petabyte-scale data were stuck in the academic basement. So they built their own. What started as community-driven tools for the Pangeo ecosystem has now become a full-fledged data infrastructure company sitting at the center of climate tech and AI.
Lowercarbon Capital led the round, with Costanoa Ventures back for another spin after the $1.7M pre-seed they led in 2022, joined this time by Preston-Werner Ventures. That brings Earthmover’s total to $8.9M, and it’s the kind of check written with conviction. These aren’t investors chasing buzzwords; they’re betting on founders who’ve already proven they can take theory and translate it into platforms trusted by NASA, RWE, Sylvera, and Kettle.
At the core is a three-part stack that hits harder than it looks on paper. Icechunk is the storage engine optimized for tensors. Arraylake is the management layer with version control built for scientific scale. Flux is the delivery gateway that makes the data actually usable. Put it together and you’ve got infrastructure that turns unmanageable climate datasets into clean pipelines for AI and machine learning. NASA saw a 100x performance jump in Earth observation retrieval thanks to Icechunk. RWE runs renewable forecasts on it. Kettle uses it to assess wildfire risk. Sylvera leans on it to keep carbon credit markets honest. This isn’t potential, it’s already being monetized.
The bigger play is timing. Climate change is no longer an abstract future problem; it’s a real-time business risk. Renewable energy producers, insurers, and governments all need high-fidelity data that doesn’t collapse under the weight of petabytes. Most infrastructure wasn’t built for tensors, it was built for spreadsheets. Earthmover is filling that gap, giving AI the fuel it needs to model the physical world with precision instead of guesswork.
Abernathey and Hamman are more than founders, they’re architects of the open-source foundations (Xarray, Zarr, Pangeo) that thousands of scientists already rely on. That’s credibility investors can’t buy and competitors can’t fake. Customers know Earthmover isn’t locking them in. They’re providing portability, cloud-agnostic infrastructure, and security designed for organizations that take sovereignty seriously.
This $7.2M round is fuel for acceleration: expanding engineering and customer success teams, enhancing Icechunk and Arraylake, and scaling Flux to reach even more complex use cases. The signal is clear, if AI is going to predict the physical world instead of just mimicking it, the data engine has to be as advanced as the models themselves. Earthmover isn’t just moving data; they’re moving the way the world makes sense of earth itself.
