Over the years, CAI has followed the trajectory of the Falmouth-based weather prediction startup Salient Predictions.
CAI's Gilda Geist checked in recently with the company's president and co-founder Ray Schmitt, scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Gilda Geist In 2023, you and some colleagues were here talking about challenges with getting funding and, at one point, one of your colleagues had said that one day, Salient will become profitable. Now it's 2026 and your company was named the second fastest growing business in New England in 2026. So how did that happen? How did you guys become profitable?
Ray Schmitt We were pretty surprised to come out number two, to tell you the truth. To be honest, we're not yet profitable. The weather business is pretty challenging. It's hard to compete with free forecasts that you get from NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration] or the European Union, but we do have something special. At Woods Hole, of course, I always had the privilege of working with very bright young people, and it was the same thing with the company. We developed a core group of talented machine learning guys. We also hired some really talented people to do the business end of things, because as an academic, I don't feel very well qualified to negotiate contracts or any of that business or go out on the road doing sales. But one of the first really good things I did was hire a fellow to be the CEO. This fellow named Matt Stein, and he and I got along great. We ended up pitching to venture capitalists all over the place. We ended getting funding mostly from the West Coast. We did get support from the state of Massachusetts. But then various things happen along the way. Sometimes you spend six months trying to convince a customer to take on your product, and sometimes it goes through and sometimes doesn't. So, there's ups and downs in the business.
GG I want to talk about another big change that happened since you were last here talking about Salient, which is that Donald Trump became president again. He and his people that he's put in various government positions have definitely come down hard against funding for science. Did that change your work? And if so, how did it change it?
RS We're worried about the threats to NOAA. There were a lot of people fired when [Elon] Musk was doing that DOGE stuff. We actually had people from NOAA calling us up—'Hey, do you have any jobs?' But the big worry was whether the data that NOAA is very good at collecting would be damaged, and so far that hasn't happened. And I think Congress knows that it's crazy to cut off all the weather information, so they've restored a lot of that. The thing about the weather is that you can't forecast it in any one country without data from all over the world. And so, there's an outfit called the World Meteorological Organization, and they've coordinated data sharing from all countries. We also have satellites, and the European Union owns a lot of them. The Indians have satellites, [and so do] the Chinese, and all that weather data is shared. So, the damage you could do by cutting back on NOAA is limited. We'll still have weather data. There were threats to making some of the historical data inaccessible. That's a very important thing for studying climate change because you have to know what the temperature was 20, 30 years ago and what it is now.
GG Off the top of your head, can you predict something like how summer is going to be on Cape Cod?
RS My fear is we're heading into a drought. The thing about climate change, the big feedback is all on what happens to the water cycle. I mean, we can turn up the air conditioning to deal with a hot day, but if we run out of water, we're in big trouble. As you raise the temperature of the planet, you get more evaporation from the ocean. The atmosphere can hold more water, but it also means it's very dry on land. The daily sunshine heats up the surface of the land and if there's a lot of soil moisture, the heat will go into evaporating the water and it won't get too hot. But if it is dry, it just gets hotter and hotter. The west had a very dry winter so it's going to be a tough wildfire season out west. Here in the east, I think we tend to get about as much rain as we ever did, but the problem is it evaporates more quickly because of the higher temperatures and the atmosphere holding more moisture. It just gets sucked into the atmosphere. So even if you get the same amount of rain, you may experience a drought just because of high temperatures.
