Interview: Got a text warning about hail? Thank this Aussie company

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Sean Aylmer: Welcome to the Fear and Greed Business Interview. I’m Sean

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Sean Aylmer: Aylmer. We’re officially in an El Nino weather pattern, which

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Sean Aylmer: means a hot, dry summer and increased likelihood of drought,

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Sean Aylmer: heat waves, and unfortunately, bush fires. Extreme weather events have

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Sean Aylmer: an enormous impact on a huge range of businesses from

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Sean Aylmer: insurance companies to agricultural producers. Today’s guest has built a

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Sean Aylmer: company that aims to warn these businesses of impending hazards,

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Sean Aylmer: and it uses some of the best climate modeling tech

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Sean Aylmer: in the country to do so, Kerry Plowright is the

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Sean Aylmer: founder and CEO of Aeeris. Kerry, welcome to Fear and Greed.

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Kerry Plowright: Yeah, thank you Sean. Appreciate it.

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Sean Aylmer: So take me through what Aeeris does. I have read

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Sean Aylmer: it, but I’d like to hear from you. I think

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Sean Aylmer: I understand, but I’m not sure.

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Kerry Plowright: Yeah, sure. So Aeeris is the listed entity and the wholly owned subsidiary,

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Kerry Plowright: which is the operational part, is the early warning network.

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Kerry Plowright: And that was kicked off some 17 years ago. And

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Kerry Plowright: really the crux of that operation is to be able

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Kerry Plowright: to warn people that need warning for a particular metric

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Kerry Plowright: that might concern them, and on a spatial basis. And

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Kerry Plowright: that’s probably the criticality. Our system and what we’ve developed,

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Kerry Plowright: which is called a geographic notification information system, you can

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Kerry Plowright: essentially draw a polygon on it of where something’s about to

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Kerry Plowright: impact. And we have something like seven, eight people, 24/

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Kerry Plowright: 7, around the clock monitoring, plus a whole lot of

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Kerry Plowright: data being pulled into our system to effectively notify people or assets

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Kerry Plowright: that fall within a warning area. And again, depending on the

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Kerry Plowright: particular metric of what it’s that they want to be warned for.

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Kerry Plowright: And the other part I should click into that, is

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Kerry Plowright: that we pull in a lot of monitoring, remote gauges and that

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Kerry Plowright: type of thing. And again, depending on the businesses or

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Kerry Plowright: people on the end of it, depends on the thresholds

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Kerry Plowright: that we put on those. It might be rainfall, it might

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Kerry Plowright: be stream gauges, heat gauges, you name it. And we also use a

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Kerry Plowright: bunch of other things now, radar derived rainfall we call

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Kerry Plowright: it, where we look at accumulation, where gauges aren’t, so

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Kerry Plowright: that we can do just as effective warning and replacing gauges, that type of thing.

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Sean Aylmer: Okay. So just break that down for me. What sort

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Sean Aylmer: of geographic area are you talking about in terms of

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Sean Aylmer: providing warnings? Are we talking about heavy rain, lightning, extreme

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Sean Aylmer: heat? Are they the sorts of things that you’re talking

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Sean Aylmer: about? I presume everyone from all agriculture, but electricity suppliers

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Sean Aylmer: and all sorts of people like that are interested in

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Sean Aylmer: this. So I’m just kind of interested in how closely

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Sean Aylmer: you can geolocate stuff

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Kerry Plowright: To within a meter, three feet. So that’s the accuracy

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Kerry Plowright: of the polygons that we draw. And it’s an interesting

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Kerry Plowright: thing because the footprint that we draw for some recipients

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Kerry Plowright: is different than others. And I’ll give you an example.

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Kerry Plowright: So insurance companies run something we call embargo services. So

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Kerry Plowright: if you’re talking about hail or something like that, we

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Kerry Plowright: will map out a polygon, or a fire, of the

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Kerry Plowright: footprint of where the fire’s going to go. And for insurance companies and things

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Kerry Plowright: like that, they need very high resolution and very accurate,

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Kerry Plowright: so that they, for instance, may not take cover notes.

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Kerry Plowright: Or if it’s a rail company, they’ll know where to

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Kerry Plowright: stop the trains. So they have a completely different need

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Kerry Plowright: than say the public.
So if we have a council or

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Kerry Plowright: a water authority on the end of it, we’ll have

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Kerry Plowright: a broader footprint for the same event, because that prevents

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Kerry Plowright: people from taking inappropriate action. So that they see an

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Kerry Plowright: event, of smoke or something on the horizon, they may

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Kerry Plowright: get scared and jump in their car and actually inadvertently

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Kerry Plowright: drive into it. So what we are doing is making sure

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Kerry Plowright: that people have the appropriate information to act accordingly.

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Sean Aylmer: Now, Kerry, I’m hesitate to ask this. How do you

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Sean Aylmer: do it? And dumb it right down for me please.

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Kerry Plowright: Okay, yeah, we have a whole bunch of people sitting

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Kerry Plowright: there watching weather events and all hazards all the time.

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Kerry Plowright: And they’re sitting there with a whole bunch of feeds

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Kerry Plowright: coming into them and they’re looking at all of them. And we

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Kerry Plowright: have a lot of automated systems that will kick into

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Kerry Plowright: gear and let them know what particular events which they

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Kerry Plowright: need to draw their attention to. And again, the system

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Kerry Plowright: identifies when they then see an event, they will then draw

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Kerry Plowright: the polygon of where that event is going. And if you’re talking

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Kerry Plowright: about thunderstorm or hail, you’ll be mapping and tracking that

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Kerry Plowright: event. And we actually have a particular hail product that

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Kerry Plowright: automates some of that stuff. So they’ll track that ahead.

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Kerry Plowright: So people are getting a warning two hours ahead. And

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Kerry Plowright: it depends on the type of threat as to the

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Kerry Plowright: amount of forecast warning that you give people.

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Sean Aylmer: So just Kerry, just to jump in, so when I

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Sean Aylmer: get a text, for example, from my insurer saying this

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Sean Aylmer: afternoon or shortly, expect hail in your suburbs, they mentioned

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Sean Aylmer: my suburbs specifically. That’s the sort of thing you’re talking about.

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Kerry Plowright: Yeah, yeah. It actually goes out in different ways to

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Kerry Plowright: different insurers, because most of them feed off our API.

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Kerry Plowright: And depending on their internal system and how they pull locations, it may

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Kerry Plowright: be because that polygon runs through a postcode. And subsequently,

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Kerry Plowright: if you’re in that postcode, you get the notification, albeit

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Kerry Plowright: if you’ve got a car, that’s probably pretty useful information anyway.

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Sean Aylmer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I ask, in all honesty, how

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Sean Aylmer: accurate are you?

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Kerry Plowright: We are really good. We’ve been doing this for a

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Kerry Plowright: long time. We’re the only ones that do it like

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Kerry Plowright: this, period. I think we were the first in the world to

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Kerry Plowright: do it. So I actually got the guys building this

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Kerry Plowright: back in 2006, and we ran the product out in

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Kerry Plowright: 2007, the first. And it would’ve easily been the first spatial system

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Kerry Plowright: for providing locational warnings for severe weather events. It’s just

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Kerry Plowright: that it was a garage in Terranora out the back of Coolangatta.

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Kerry Plowright: Whereas if we’d been in Silicon Valley, might’ve been a completely

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Kerry Plowright: different story by now.
But we were doing it, and

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Kerry Plowright: in those days it wasn’t easy. We had to hard tail. You’re talking MSSQL

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Kerry Plowright: and asp. net, and there were no services that delivered any sort

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Kerry Plowright: of locational stuff, and we were trying to, if you look

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Kerry Plowright: at how you figure out somebody’s in a particular polygon,

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Kerry Plowright: the system isn’t actually figuring that out. It’s figuring out

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Kerry Plowright: who’s not in it. So you draw a polygon, and if you’ve got

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Kerry Plowright: a half a million people in there, it’s got to suddenly figure out who isn’t in

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Kerry Plowright: it really quick, to know that who is in it. And

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Kerry Plowright: then it could just be two people. And then off

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Kerry Plowright: it goes. Because we could draw a polygon around a

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Kerry Plowright: house and just those people would get it if they were in it.

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Sean Aylmer: Stay with me, Kerry. We’ll be back in a minute.

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Sean Aylmer: My guest today is Kerry Plowright, founder and CEO of Aeeris. How far

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Sean Aylmer: into the future can you forecast? So is this an

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Sean Aylmer: hour thing? Is it days? I remember talking to a

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Sean Aylmer: weather forecaster once and he said, ” Look, anything over a

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Sean Aylmer: few days, it’s really difficult. It’s a real challenge to

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Sean Aylmer: get accurate after a few days.” I don’t know, that

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Sean Aylmer: was years ago. So I don’t know whether that’s still

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Sean Aylmer: the case, but how far into the future can you-

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Kerry Plowright: Pretty much still the case. Pretty much still the case.

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Kerry Plowright: So the way we look at it, three days, four days max,

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Kerry Plowright: depending on the stability of the conditions at the time.

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Kerry Plowright: Seven days is a real stretch. Just kind of gives

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Kerry Plowright: you some idea of what might happen. So we often

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Kerry Plowright: provide seven- day forecasts, but because we deliver them daily,

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Kerry Plowright: it sort of hones in on what the actual event

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Kerry Plowright: is going to be. But the systems that are used

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Kerry Plowright: to try to deliver that, the supercomputers, are just amazing.

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Kerry Plowright: I mean, the numbers they’ve got to run on this

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Kerry Plowright: are just absolutely insane.
And I think it’s pretty amazing that we’re doing that. But it brings

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Kerry Plowright: up the good point about longer term forecasting, because I

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Kerry Plowright: get to the type of data that we produce, which

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Kerry Plowright: I call, you can operationalize it, you can make decisions

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Kerry Plowright: on it. It’s what we do. And when you’re talking about

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Kerry Plowright: climatics, so we have a product called Climatics. And we’re really

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Kerry Plowright: lucky because we have proprietary data that we’ve made over the years using

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Kerry Plowright: our system, that is able to provide predictive analysis on

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Kerry Plowright: sort of a probability basis, of where events are going to occur and the metrics

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Kerry Plowright: that are going to occur. And I call it real world data. It’s

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Kerry Plowright: actual.
And unfortunately with people and especially businesses, because very

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Kerry Plowright: shortly you’re going to have 23,000 businesses requiring to report

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Kerry Plowright: on their climate risk because of new regulatory requirements, and

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Kerry Plowright: they basically, most of them don’t know how and don’t know where to start. And

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Kerry Plowright: the last thing they want to be doing is using

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Kerry Plowright: climate models to be able to try to figure that

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Kerry Plowright: out, because they’re not really designed for that. Whereas we’ve

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Kerry Plowright: got (inaudible) benchmark data, which would be defensible in

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Kerry Plowright: 10 years time. The analogy I use is this, if

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Kerry Plowright: you jumped on an airplane and you had a choice

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Kerry Plowright: of two pilots, the first pilot had only ever flown

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Kerry Plowright: simulators and crashed them every time, and the other pilot

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Kerry Plowright: had about 5, 000 hours and it never crashed, which one

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Kerry Plowright: would you pick?

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Sean Aylmer: So who uses you, Kerry, who are your clients? Insurers, obviously.

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Kerry Plowright: Yep. Insurance is a very big part of our business,

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Kerry Plowright: probably the largest part. It’s growing and I’ll get into

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Kerry Plowright: the rest in a minute, but the insurance is growing

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Kerry Plowright: because of the hail product and RDR, rainfall derived rainfall. So that

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Kerry Plowright: particular, we can look into a hailstorm using geo pol

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Kerry Plowright: radar and identify the size of the hail in the hailstorm. So that’s

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Kerry Plowright: how we know how destructive it may or may not be, and also where

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Kerry Plowright: that hail is going to fall.
The other thing that’s

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Kerry Plowright: really interesting about insurance companies is that with our climatics

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Kerry Plowright: risk, they have to redo their portfolios every year, every

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Kerry Plowright: year insurance policies are renewed. So that’s where this actual

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Kerry Plowright: data becomes really important. And we’ve built this product so they

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Kerry Plowright: can shove on their entire asset base and pull in

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Kerry Plowright: through our API, deliver a risk score for every hazard

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Kerry Plowright: that they’re concerned with those particular assets. And the monetization

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Kerry Plowright: on this is fantastic because we ping for every ping,

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Kerry Plowright: whether it’s every particular hazard, every particular asset. So it’s

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Kerry Plowright: multiple pings per asset. And of course they have to

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Kerry Plowright: redo this every year. So if an insurer has a

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Kerry Plowright: couple of hundred thousand assets or more, that’s a fairly

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Kerry Plowright: substantial monetary return for us. So we’ve only just started this and

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Kerry Plowright: we’ve pulled in a couple of smaller ones, but we’ve

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Kerry Plowright: got sitting on the books there, just about ready to

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Kerry Plowright: go, some much larger ones.
Now, they’re not there yet

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Kerry Plowright: from a guidance point of view, take that with a grain of salt,

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Kerry Plowright: but it’ll be a fairly significant change for us if

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Kerry Plowright: we’re able to deliver one of those in the near term.

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Sean Aylmer: So outside insurance, who else is this relevant? Government, agriculture,

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Sean Aylmer: those groups?

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Kerry Plowright: Yeah, Heavy Haul. Heavy Haul is a big one. Rail. So that’s

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Kerry Plowright: where that RDR comes in because a lot of tracks not

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Kerry Plowright: covered by gauges or anything like that. And we’re able

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Kerry Plowright: to, so we’ve got all of their gauges in our system

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Kerry Plowright: as well, so that we’re looking at all of these

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Kerry Plowright: things all the time. And we have a whole bunch of procedures and

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Kerry Plowright: protocols that we run with those guys, which determine how

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Kerry Plowright: fast the trains run, whether they stop and when they

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Kerry Plowright: start again. It’s one of the few where we provide

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Kerry Plowright: a follow- up to say you’re all clear, because they need to …

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Kerry Plowright: It’s a big deal if you stop trains. It can

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Kerry Plowright: really stuff up pretty bad. So that’s one.
You’ve got

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Kerry Plowright: telecommunications, another people like NBN. So again, nearly all of

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Kerry Plowright: our large blue chip customers and they’re all blue chip, pull

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Kerry Plowright: through an API. So it goes into their system. And

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Kerry Plowright: what they do, two parts is one, is they have a coding

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Kerry Plowright: system to allocate where people can go, their contractors and

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Kerry Plowright: staff, so that they can prevent them from going into areas

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Kerry Plowright: that are likely to be impacted by a severe event.

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Kerry Plowright: And others are worried about cables and where (inaudible)

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Kerry Plowright: might go so that they can anticipate outages and react accordingly.

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Kerry Plowright: So that’s telecommunications.
We’ve got councils, water authorities. Water authorities

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Kerry Plowright: actually use our GNIS. So in addition to us just

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Kerry Plowright: going to them with our warnings ourselves, they actually use

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Kerry Plowright: our main platform to deliver their own notifications to people

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Kerry Plowright: downstream of the dams. SEQ Water, New South Wales State

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Kerry Plowright: Water, Melbourne Water, people like that. So that’s another one.

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Kerry Plowright: Councils, and Parramatta City Council, Newcastle City Council. This is

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Kerry Plowright: where people become important. I know tech is great, but people are still

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Kerry Plowright: really important. So these sensors I’ve talked about, 20% of the time they

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Kerry Plowright: go off incorrectly or they break, don’t go off at all.

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Kerry Plowright: And we have people sitting there that can A, if

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Kerry Plowright: something looks a bit dodgy, in other words, (inaudible)

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Kerry Plowright: lid off a sensor, we will refer it to the

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Kerry Plowright: other telemetry that we have to see whether we think

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Kerry Plowright: that’s a real one or not. And the CBD or

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Kerry Plowright: Parramatta or Newcastle would’ve been (inaudible) out several times

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Kerry Plowright: if it wasn’t for us saying, ” Nah, that’s not right.

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Sean Aylmer: Okay. Yeah.

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Kerry Plowright: Or on the other hand, “Hey, we think something’s going on, but

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Kerry Plowright: we’re not getting anything. What are you seeing at your

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Kerry Plowright: end?” And subsequently they send out a notification. So those would be

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Kerry Plowright: probably some of the bigger entities we’re picking up. Solar

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Kerry Plowright: Farms now is another one. Hail is a big problem.

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Kerry Plowright: So not just from a monitoring and alerting basis, but

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Kerry Plowright: also from a planning basis. We definitely know where the hail tracks

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Kerry Plowright: are and we can very much tell businesses where you’re

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Kerry Plowright: going to be at most risk from a hail event.

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Sean Aylmer: Kerry, I have learned a lot today. Thank you for

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Sean Aylmer: talking to Fear and Greed.

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Kerry Plowright: Thanks John, appreciate it.

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Sean Aylmer: That’s Kerry Plowright, founder and CEO of Aeeris. This is

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Sean Aylmer: the Fear and Greed Business Interview. Join us every morning

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Sean Aylmer: for the full episode of Fear and Greed. Australia’s best

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Sean Aylmer: business podcast. I’m Sean Aylmer. Enjoy your day.