What is the name of your solution?
TerraFirma
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
TerraFirma democratizes access to advanced environmental risk forecast models, from your home to your country, enabling widespread climate adaptation.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
San Juan, Puerto RicoIn what country is your solution team headquartered?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Current methods for mitigation of Climate Change-related events such as floods and landslides, depend on large budgets and teams of experts working collectively for decades. This method is slow, costly and not scalable for generating widespread solutions to large-scale needs, that are capable of keeping up with the increased frequency and magnitude of natural disasters.
According to NOAA environmental disasters, during the last 5 years, cost $788B in the US. The Total Addressable Market (TAM) for Global Disaster Preparedness Systems is $168.43, yearly. Our algorithms are valid for all tropical regions globally, comprising 40% of the world’s population, and the 54 million sq. km. of tropical ecosystems which is equivalent to 36% of Earth’s landmass.
We currently encompass the entirety of Puerto Rico, including 3.2 million people, as well as, 9,104 sq. km. of land, and 1.5 million structures.
What is your solution?
TerraFirma, is a SaaS platform, which combines data and algorithms to forecast environmental risks through solar, wind, and rain models, available on your browser.
These insights are implemented by the construction industry, landowners and governments, to protect our cities and natural resources.
Our technology joins federal datasets for soil and weather, with proprietary algorithms for studying solar exposure, hydrology, and wind patterns for every square meter of Puerto Rico since 1941, and conveys those risks and solutions to the general public, as well as professionals. We have developed a series of 15 pre-processed products that inform our population of 3.2M citizens in Puerto Rico, regarding environmental risks such as: flooding, sea-level-rise, erosion, landslides, and wind-related risks, among others. This data forms the basis for a platform that integrates real-time weather feeds to forecast risks to real-estate, infrastructure and natural resources.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We currently operate in Puerto Rico. We can serve the entire population of 3.2 million citizens with physics models and visualizations of environmental risks in their real-estate holdings, businesses, infrastructure and natural resources. We are a private company that serves construction and land management professionals, government agencies, and communities, with a one-stop solution to address the rising toll of climate change. Our clients have included Banco Popular of Puerto Rico Commercial and Residential Insurance, Construction Firms, and have proposals with the Government of Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Intelligence and Reconstruction Council.
Through our proprietary technology, e-commerce and platform we provide: A) preprocessed environmental studies for visualizing and measuring risks within our users territories, to accelerate policy and decision-making efforts. B) the preliminary data for underserved communities, tribal lands, and small governments agencies who may not have large resources at their disposal, to increase their capacity to apply for federal funding for mitigation-related projects. C) Support for country wide projects, such as: a) forecasting damage to telecommunications and electrical infrastructure; b) assessing solar energy exposure of each structure or site in Puerto Rico; and c) visualizing river levels during Hurricane Fiona.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Alejandro Mieses (CEO) Architect and Software Developer with over 12 years of experience in GIS, ML models, Remotely Sensed Data, Cloud Computing, and simulation of environmental processes in urban and natural environments, through digital research, geospatial algorithms, and software development. He has been Principal Investigator and Software Developer for the current software and previous research grants. Mieses has been a professor of Architecture in various universities in PR and the US. He has served as speaker, author, editor, and exhibited at a variety of venues and conferences internationally, including the 2018 Venice Biennale, World Design Summit, Websummit, the Paris Design Summit, and Oxford University, amongst others. He is advisory board member to The Economist’s Responsible Innovation Group.
Alejandro Excia Rodríguez (CRO): has over 15 years of experience leading teams of product design, fabrication, and entrepreneurial programs, in Puerto Rico and Chicago. He has been professor of Product Design in various universities in PR. His background in architecture and product design has allowed him to lead projects for companies like the Microsoft Stores, AT&T, Verizon, Apple, National Aquarium of New Zealand, Acuario de Mazatlán México, Kansas City Zoo Aquarium.
We are accompanied by a team of 7 software developers from Mexico, Ukraine and Israel.
Having been university professors with over 15 years of experience in climate adaptation, our backgrounds in environmental science, product design, and software development give us a strong foundation for scaling our solution. Our technology and partnerships, honed through our work in Puerto Rico, can be seamlessly adapted to other regions sharing climate risk similarities. We want to bringing actionable insights to communities, businesses, and governments to foster better preventive action to climate risks. We are making a difference by helping businesses and communities understand their environmental vulnerabilities in an intuitive way so they can take an active part in their environmental mitigation, conservation, and disaster relief efforts.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Adapt cities to more extreme weather, including through climate-smart buildings, incorporating climate risk in infrastructure planning, and restoring regional ecosystems.Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
PilotWhy are you applying to Solve?
MIT Solve has a global reach and can help us expand our impact beyond its current focus on Puerto Rico.
We believe MIT Solve has the capacity to expose us to a wide range of impact investors, and potential employees that share our values related to social responsibility and environmental stewardship. We also believe this program allows us a great opportunity to connect to increase our C-Level team, to include expertise in marketing, and business development.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Alejandro Mieses
What makes your solution innovative?
By democratizing access to high tech environmental models for every home, roadway, and natural resource directly in the browser, it empowers users to understand the vulnerabilities, and potentials of the landscapes they inhabit. Our mission through our technology, is to provide the foundational environmental data for users, communities, organizations and governments to be able to carry out decentralized environmental stewardship efforts within their respective scales of impact.
This technology can bring a large set of social benefits by: a) Providing the construction industry with initial data to generate environmentally sensible proposals, mitigate risk in existing urban areas, and scout areas of low-environmental-risk for real estate development; b) Providing soil scientists, hydrologists, and conservationists with the capacity to visualize conditions, and iterate mitigation measures at watershed scales; c) Equipping communities with the capacity to visualize risks within their local environments; d) Providing local and state governments with the capacity to generate public policy and coordinate environmental resource planning efforts across local farmlands and parcel owners; e) Facilitating the capacity for education and research throughout K-16, to understand natural dynamics occurring at various scales; f) Facilitating detection of risk to infrastructure during extreme events such as hurricanes and floods; g) Scouting areas for renewable energy potential, such as solar micro-grids; and h) Enabling tribal lands and disadvantaged populations to accurately gather land management data for environmental risk detection, as well as protecting their natural resources.
Describe in simple terms how and why you expect your solution to have an impact on the problem.
Problem:
Current methods for mitigation of Climate Change-related events such as floods and landslides, depend on large budgets and teams of experts working collectively for decades. This method is slow, costly and not scalable for generating widespread solutions to large-scale needs, that are capable of keeping up with the increased frequency and magnitude of natural disasters.
Audience:
Construction and Planning Professionals, Government Agencies, landowners and Stakeholder Communities.
Entry Point to Reach that audience:
Direct involvement in existing and future mitigation projects.
Supply of data for environmental assessments for existing projects in the construction, conservation and government sectors. Promotion through press, scientific outlets, and networks of decision makers.
Steps needed to bring about change:
1) Increasing understanding of environmental risks in the user’s immediate environment from a science-based perspective.
2) Increasing the digital tools capable of forecasting and testing possible mitigation strategies, for decision-making purposes
3) Conveying these solutions and risks to the general population, to generate widespread local action.
4) Gaining community support and scientific evidence for implementation of solutions.
Expected Social Benefits
By supplying physics-based environmental models to the general population, directly in the browser, and georeferenced to their land, we provide the base data for any human to initiate, act, and coordinate mitigation and preparedness measures in a decentralized locally-responsive way. This allows us to surpass overrealiance on centralized modes of response such as governments and NGOs, which historically have had difficulties in scaling to meet the needs of widespread populations.
Hypothesis
If we support stakeholders, as well as, construction and land management professionals by providing a comprehensive repository of data, algorithms and visualization tools for decision-making purposes, then we can help to accelerate the process of mitigating environmental risks, and ultimately protect lives and our natural resources.
What are your impact goals for your solution and how are you measuring your progress towards them?
Our guiding principles center around three crucial metrics: safeguarded lives, preserved acres of land, and secured properties.
- Environmental risks identified and mitigation strategies in natural resources are quantified by the preservation of acres of natural habitats.
- Environmental risks identified and mitigation strategies in urban areas are gauged by the safeguarding of residential and commercial properties.
- The number of stakeholders empowered to make decisions regarding their environment is assessed by the education of citizens and the protection of lives from environmental hazards.
We currently can serve the entire extent of Puerto Rico, including a population of 3.2 million, 9,104 sq. km. of land, 580km of coastline, 7,544 sq. km. of forests, and 1.5 million structures.
Our strategy for scaling impact in the next decade initially consists of expanding to Florida and Texas within the next 2 years, this will allow TerraFirma to have impacted a population of 51.31 million, 865,974 sq. km. of land, and 323,748 sq. km. of forests. By 2026, TerraFirma will be expanding to the remaining gulf-coast States (Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi), and the Dominican Republic, with a total population of 23.7 million, 445,325 sq. km. of total land, and 253,405 sq. km. of forest area. As territories that share climate-risks, soil types, and environmental conditions that are similar to Puerto Rico, we are able to adapt our underlying technology, physics simulations and employ our network of collaborators to serve these regions.
After 2026, and in partnership with satellite data providers such as Maxar and Planet.com, we expect TerraFirma to progressively expand to serve all countries in the Caribbean Basin (2026), tropical and subtropical regions in South America (2027), Africa (2028), and Asia (2029). This encompasses 40% of the world’s population, 40% of Earth’s surface area, and 18.4 million sq. km. of forests, including critical global resources such as the Amazon.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Our current architecture is based in AWS. All territorial data is continuously integrated from federal sources using an auto-scaling EC2 cluster. We use 30 different instance images, dependent on the task at-hand, to process the entirety of Puerto Rico in parallel EC2 GPU instances. Typically 5 instances will process the entirety of Puerto Rico in 48 hours, at most, but the entirety of the data is modular, in 300m x 300m, which can be redistributed as necessary among any number of instances, to accelerate computation time.
This allows for an ever-interacting set of territorial-tiles, that can detect risks by proximity to neighboring tiles, as well as the assets within those tiles, i.e. buildings, natural resources, infrastructure, electrical and telecommunications towers, among others.
All data derived from those tiles is within an S3 Bucket controlled through IAM Access. Lambdas serve and process the data as necessary according to each product request.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
www.terrafirmasw.com
In which countries do you currently operate?
Which, if any, additional countries will you be operating in within the next year?
How many people work on your solution team?
Full-time: 2 founders
Alejandro Mieses, CEO
He has over 12 years of experience in software development and modeling of environmental processes in urban and natural environments. He’s acquired our Funding, spearheaded Hiring, Software Development, and Partnerships Development.
Alejandro Excia, CRO
He is a multidisciplinary designer with over 12 years of experience. He has successfully lead projects for: Microsoft Stores, AT&T, Verizon, and Apple. He is in charge of Revenue and Marketing, and UX Design.
Part-time: 2
Human Resources, Marketing, and Public Relations
Contractors: 7
Software developers, (including backend, frontend, cloud architects, quality assurance experts, and project managers), under Commit.US.
How long have you been working on your solution?
Our founders have been dedicated to this company for three years full-time, including software development, and business development.
Tell us about how you ensure that your team is diverse, minimizes barriers to opportunity for staff, and provides a welcoming and inclusive environment for all team members.
At TerraFirma diversity and inclusiveness while building our team is of the utmost priority. Our hiring history is 75% female. Our mentors are part of the LGBTQ community, and our current staff is multi-racial hispanic. Our future hiring plans include an additional in-house female software developer, and environmental engineer, which we have previously interviewed. Our hiring efforts are conducted through university outreach and direct involvement with disadvantaged community programs, which also allows us to hire personnel from lower-income backgrounds, thus fostering a culture of inclusivity throughout our company.
What is your business model?
We have divided our product offering in three tiers, starting with B2B Construction firms: a) Directors of Construction and Environmental Conservation Firms (B2B) - ($150/mo) Engineers, architects, real-estate professionals, and planners. They typically work on single projects which rarely exceed 1-2 sq. Km. They are buying the savings in time and costs of having to constantly put environmental information together for each project. They are buying at least $2,000 in savings and 2 weeks of time, in three clicks.
b) Land or property owners (B2C) - ($15/mo) typically individuals seeking to buy land or understand risks within their purchased land. They rarely exceed 10,000 sq. m. They are buying the peace of mind of knowing that their investment is not in an environmentally vulnerable area, or otherwise, the capacity to understand the environmental vulnerability and coordinate with other community members to mitigate future damage. They are buying the knowledge that their +$200,000 mortgage will be secure after payment.
c) Government Agencies, Multinationals, and Insurance (B2G, B2B) - ($10,000/mo) State, Federal, Municipalities, or large portfolio of residential/commercial assets. This can range up to country- wide scales, and are rarely below 5 sq. km. They are buying a data source that can aid and sometimes substitute the teams of GIS professionals which they may not have (due to workforce training, or funding availability). They are buying 3 years of work and the insights to protect current infrastructure from millions in damage.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable, and what evidence can you provide that this plan has been successful so far?
Currently, there are $8B in Federal funding to mitigate future hurricane damage distributed throughout Puerto Rico. Within this SAM, we’re targeting a 6% Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), equivalent to $480 million, due to our competitive advantage of streamlining the process for data gathering, environmental assessment processes, and conveying risks to non-scientific stakeholders. By combining our software with value-added consultancy services, we expect to expand this SOM to $600 million, by targeting government-funded projects dedicated to mitigating large-scale environmental hazards.
Our income model consists of three interrelated products: a) an e-commerce composed of pre-processed environmental risk data and reports readily available for each user's property or land; b) a platform with tiered subscriptions, for organizations that require access to our physics and forecast models, and APIs to serve their portfolio of clients; and c) consultancy services for large projects that require more complex solutions.
Solution Team
to Top
Our Organization
Tellurica