Sunairio

Sunairio is a Baltimore-based software company that combines energy, weather and climate data into grid forecasting products for commercial decision-making. Its flagship product, Sunairio ONE, generates 1,000 ensemble forecast paths spanning horizons from the next hour to the next decade, and the company states it captures 97% of hourly extremes that traditional forecasts miss — up to 500 hours per year. The company positions the product against generic forecast solutions that it characterizes as having systematic biases, low temporal and spatial resolution, discontinuous time horizons and underdispersed ensembles, and states that Sunairio ONE outperforms publicly available forecasts, including major AI forecasts, on both expected-forecast accuracy and ensemble spread.

A second pillar is Sunairio High-resolution Earth Data (the SHED), a proprietary historical weather dataset built at 100x the resolution of alternatives such as ECMWF's ERA5, covering the Continental US from 1950 to the present and continuously updated. The company states the SHED is validated as more accurate than NREL's benchmark renewables datasets while covering roughly ten times as many years, and that it serves as the training set for Sunairio's forecasts and asset-level energy models. The platform forecasts medium- and long-term variability (15 days to 15 years) in renewable power production and energy demand, including tail risks from extreme weather not captured in historical datasets, using advanced statistics and generative AI to produce site-specific, asset-level climate simulations that integrate with existing energy modeling tools.

Sunairio was founded in 2020 by Rob Cirincione, previously Managing Director of Energy Trading at Boston Energy Trading & Marketing and formerly in trading roles at Constellation Energy. The team includes a CTO (Eric Hewitt, previously CTO at Understory), a Director of Data Science (Raiden Hasegawa, previously a senior energy and climate data scientist at Google), atmospheric scientists, data and software engineers, with staff backgrounds spanning NCAR, NREL, ArcVera Renewables, MIT, Citi and Toyota North America, and a substantial engineering contingent based around Belgrade, Serbia.

Founding story

The company was founded by Rob Cirincione, an engineer who studied the effects of uncertainty on technology strategy at MIT and spent more than 12 years developing approaches to managing weather-based risk in the energy sector, including senior trading roles at Constellation Energy and Boston Energy Trading & Marketing; investors have described the product as addressing problems he encountered firsthand as an energy trader.

Business model

Sunairio sells access to its forecasting and climate simulation software, offered under plan options with demos and enterprise contracts, to energy-sector customers; engagements described publicly include utility pilots and contracts with global renewables developers and commodity trading firms.

Traction

As of December 2024 the platform was used by energy-sector businesses including a grid planning pilot with Xcel Energy, use by Constellation to analyze its offsite renewables portfolio, and contracts with global renewables developers and commodity trading firms; coverage spanned four U.S. power market regions and select utility footprints.

Latest developments

In December 2024 Sunairio closed an oversubscribed $6.4 million round led by Buoyant Ventures with Constellation Technology Ventures and MassMutual Ventures' Climate Tech Fund, plus Rosecliff Ventures and existing investors, bringing total funding to $8.8 million. Earlier in 2024 it received an NSF SBIR grant for generative AI climate simulation, and in November 2024 it announced a grid planning pilot with Xcel Energy-Colorado.