Founded in 2017, Ambee emerged from a personal crisis to become a pioneering force in environmental data.
Co-founder Maddy’s move to a new neighborhood led to his child experiencing severe respiratory issues despite reported safe air quality levels. This discrepancy prompted Maddy to create a device that revealed the true hazardous nature of the local air, ultimately saving his child’s life. This pivotal moment inspired the creation of Ambee, driven by a mission to provide accurate, hyperlocal environmental data to improve health, support sustainable decisions, and enhance the well-being of communities worldwide.
In an exclusive interview with
Website Planet, Jaideep Singh Bachher shares the inspiring story and mission behind Ambee.
What motivated the founding of Ambee, and what is its primary mission?
Ambee was founded in 2017 with a mission to save an infant’s life. When my co-founder, Maddy, moved to a new neighborhood, his child started experiencing serious respiratory problems, including frequent breathlessness. The reported air quality, which showed safe levels, only added to the confusion. To understand the situation, Maddy built a simple device to measure the air quality of his immediate surroundings. The results were startling: the air he and his family were breathing was far more hazardous than the reported city levels.
This discovery was crucial—it helped save the child’s life and made us realize the huge impact that timely, hyperlocal, and accurate environmental data can have. Since then, Ambee has been committed to building a robust data foundation to tackle not just air quality but other climate hazards that help businesses, governments, and communities leverage climate solutions for growth and innovation.
So, to sum up, our mission at Ambee is quite simple. We empower businesses and individuals with climate data to support sustainable decisions worldwide. Our data, which covers air quality, pollen, natural disasters, emissions, and more, serves our goal of transforming industries, supporting data-driven decisions, improving health, and enhancing the planet’s well-being.
How does Ambee leverage data to provide real-time environmental insights?
At the heart of Ambee are our cutting-edge data science systems and algorithms. We gather data from a global network of sensors, ground stations, and satellites, processing it through our AI and ML models. This lets us achieve incredible granularity, even down to 1 kilometer. Our APIs handle around 3TB of data daily, boasting an impressive uptime of 99.96% and a lightning-fast response time of 500 milliseconds. Plus, we offer data across multiple timeframes, from historical climate data spanning over 30 years to 30-day forecasts.
We deliver this data through more than 7 APIs, covering air quality, pollen, natural disasters, emissions, and more. Additionally, we offer custom enterprise solutions for unique business needs, like using pollen data to improve demand forecasts for allergy drugs or creating safe navigation tools. What we’ve come to realize over time is that the data can be used in myriad ways and that companies are looking for a more solutions-based approach, which we also now provide to our customers.
What are the key features that differentiate Ambee from other environmental data platforms?
Firstly, what sets Ambee apart from other environmental data platforms is our proprietary data with hyperlocal granularity. Our custom models provide real-time, accurate values that truly reflect the environment.
Our data is scientifically vetted and aggregated from a range of sources, including our own sensors, ground stations, and satellites, making it exceptionally reliable. Additionally, our data is rich in insights. For example, our Pollen API covers over 35+ species of pollen with detailed risk levels, making it easy for anyone to integrate into their platforms.
Lastly, our data is trusted by industry leaders across the Fortune 500, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, where credibility and precision are paramount. The success of our data-based solutions across business functions and industries globally bears further testament to not just the need for reliable climate data but the effectiveness of it.
Can you share a success story where Ambee’s data significantly impacted decision-making?
In 2023, in partnership with Sanofi, we launched Allegra Airways, the world’s first navigation tool for allergy sufferers. Powered by Ambee’s Pollen and Air Quality APIs, Allegra Airways guides users along the safest routes from point A to B, minimizing pollen and pollutant exposure in real-time. We’re proud to say that just last month, Allegra Airways won the prestigious Cannes Silver Lion Award for its creativity and innovation.
On a business level, our collaboration helped team Allegra, the popular anti-allergy drug look at air quality as a part of their consumer’s allergy management practices and helped them position the product more effectively than ever before.
How does Ambee ensure the accuracy and reliability of its environmental data?
Our data is first gathered and standardized from various sources, then regionally integrated with specific models for each area. Missing values and outliers are handled using methods like moving averages.
Advanced processing involves aligning satellite data with calibration models and interpolating it to finer details. This results in a unified, precise dataset which is constantly checked against station data and ground reports to ensure the highest possible accuracy.
What upcoming innovations or features is Ambee working on?
Great question!
We’re working on several new solutions as we speak. One of them is ClimaChain – a tool that improves demand forecasting to predict surges in demand with remarkable accuracy. It’s direct impact will be on improved inventory management, reduced stockouts, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, we’re also taking our Emissions API, which helps automate reporting for virtually all business activities, to the next level. For more information on these, please follow our website and socials for updates.
At the same time, we are constantly improving and updating our pipelines from every aspect. So stay with us, and we’ll make the world a better place with each data point.
There are a lot more things that we’re working on, but I can’t disclose them at this point. Watch this space for more 😉
Find out more at:
www.getambee.com
