- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're joined with Juliette Murphy,
the CEO and co-founder from Floodmapp.
Juliette, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Floodmapp?
- Thank you so much, Aley, for having me here.
It's an absolute pleasure.
So at Floodmapp, we're building a safer future.
During the recent flood events,
there is always so many people
that don't have enough warning or understanding
of how the flood is gonna impact them,
the people, the property, the critical infrastructure,
especially emergency managers.
So we have a very bold vision
where in the future,
a world in which there's no lives and no damage
due to flooding.
So we use a mix of traditional flood modeling
and cutting edge technology,
like machine learning and big data techniques
to build a super fast, super smart
pinpoint accurate flood model
that can be used to predict flooding
before the event and in real-time.
So unlike traditional models,
ours works really fast, updates in real-time
so that when an emergency hits
we support those emergency managers
with intelligence before, during, and after the event.
So it means that they have data
to know the exact properties
to coordinate targeted evacuations
or protect sites and assets,
and know where recovery funding is needed
after a flood event.
- Wow, I mean, with recent events
that have occurred in Australia,
your business is truly doing a world of good,
including saving the lives of so many
with your cutting edge technology.
And Juliette, I did see in the news recently
that you just announced a partnership
with Waze and the city of Norfolk, Virginia.
That's so cool.
Can you share with us
how this opportunity firstly came about
and also the impact the work is actually having
on the citizens of Virginia?
- Absolutely, so, yeah, we were so excited
to roll out Floodmapp's NowCast model
in the city of Norfolk in Virginia.
So Norfolk, it's a small coastal city
that floods regularly like every month.
Even small amounts of rain
can cause inundation
just due to sinking kind of city,
sea level rise, inundated storm water infrastructure.
So the city is really not able to cope
with big rainfall events.
Sometimes they get tidal flooding even on sunny days.
And so the city is really needing to now adapt
to a changing climate and these rising sea levels.
In light of that, there's an agency,
a not for profit, Rise Resilience Innovations
who are working with innovative technologies,
seeking out businesses who are working on coastal resilience
and adaptation technology
to help commercialize those ideas
working in partnerships with the cities
like city of Norfolk.
And so they put out a global call
for technology that was able to help community members
navigate around flooded roads.
And so Floodmapp responded to that call
and we were fortunate to be awarded
and receive funding through this program
selected to implement our technology
as a solution to their flooding.
And so we worked with the city collaboratively.
And we also worked with Waze, the traffic routing solution
to integrate our technology with Waze,
to help the public then get essentially alerts
so that they can know how to navigate
around the flooding in real-time as it's happened.
And the impact to the community has been incredible.
So we've seen 100s of 1000s of flood alerts
go out through Floodmapp NowCast
which predicts flooded roads.
And we've seen 1000s and 1000s
of interactions with the public
who's giving thumbs up to confirm
if that flood alert is accurate
which helps us continually improve that model.
And given that, in the recent Australian floods,
we saw the majority of lives were lost on flooded roads
and the same in US,
up to 200 lives per year are lost on flooded roads.
So there's been big safety implications
for this kind of technology
and really just helping improve
the day to day quality of life to improve time.
If people need to know
when to pick up the kids from school
or when to get to work,
this technology's gonna help them do that.
- So cool, the partnership with Waze
is so impressive and so impactful.
And Juliette, moving on from this a little bit.
Why did you choose to invest
in the cloud and in particular, I guess AWS?
- Yeah, so from day one
we knew we had to build a cloud based company.
I think part of the challenge we're solving
with these real time models
is that traditional flood modeling technologies
have always been very computationally intensive,
just due to the amount data pouring into them
and the complex physical equations
that are going into this.
So, we knew cloud was a must
and AWS really supported us from day number one.
In the early days we went into a engineering,
sorry, a startup accelerator.
And we were able to get access
to some programs there with some credits.
So, our kind of engineering team was really proud
to sort of partner with a company
that has a lot of experience
in keeping data safe,
maintaining service reliability and availability.
That were willing to kind of work with us collaboratively,
no matter where our staff are in the world.
So, we work with emergency management.
So we needed a service that had that reliability,
the trusted brand,
the available kind of redundancy
to serve those emergency management with confidence
during the flood of it.
So AWS was really a perfect fit
and it's been incredible
kind of going on the journey with them
from when we sort of were just working out
how to do a simple kind of computation
to now sort of running 1000s of services
across kind of 1000s of machines in real-time.
And that's kind of growing every month.
So that scalability is quite incredible.
- Of course, I mean, most companies seek a partner
that's reliable and secure,
but in your field, it's so imperative
that your partners can deal with emergency flood events.
So, I'm really glad that we haven't let you down
in those difficult times.
And Juliette, I know your team has worked really closely
with our AWS startup team
that you've just mentioned along your journey.
So, you mentioned credits and things like that,
but how has the experience been
working with our startup teams, specifically?
- So, yeah, really amazing.
I guess one of the amazing things about AWS
is that it was born from a startup.
So I think inherently AWS gets startups
and in more ways,
than maybe other companies understands that.
So Amazon, they're a global giant now,
but I guess the thirst to create something new
is still there.
And so it's been incredible kind of working with the team
in some hackathons and prototyping
sort of programs to explore all the different ways
that we can use AWS
and that AWS can develop sort of
and improve future services.
So we use the AWS kind of forecasting service
to experiment how that can help us
better run machine learning experiments
for new types of models.
And yeah, they've been really supportive
in just helping us explore what's possible, I guess.
- Well, I love that you guys remember this about AWS
'cause, yes, of course, you're right.
And to say that thirst to create and innovate
will never leave us, is so true.
Everyone wants to be in that startup team at AWS
and help companies build and innovate.
So yeah, absolutely right.
Juliette, to round up this interview,
I did wanna ask you,
what are some future technologies
that you're excited about
that will actually help the work that Floodmapp's doing?
- Great question, yeah, I don't know.
We're so excited for the future in general.
We've recently just announced.
We raised a seed round of AU $8.5 million
led by New York based Union Square Ventures.
And this money is just vital for us as we grow.
So we are investing in product.
We're investing in scale.
We're investing in our go to market
to really build and strengthen our technology
in two geographical markets, Australia and the US.
So, we have a product, we know it works.
It works as a direct feed into GIS systems
for emergency managers
and as an interface to traffic apps.
But the more that we improve our models
and the more that we are able
to sort of scale that technology,
the more we can work
with new sort of industry verticals and sectors.
So we work a lot with governments right now
but we're hoping to work
with more critical infrastructure agencies,
transport agencies within more countries.
So, the future, we really want to do a lot more
with machine learning and how we introduce that
to solving the problem of hydrology forecasting.
And we wanna put this technology into more hands
of more emergency managers and communities
to build a safer future.
- Thanks so much, Juliette.
I mean, in light of all the recent floods in Australia
your business value has definitely been felt
very close to home.
Before, a couple of months ago,
I wasn't aware of how many floods were happening
all the time, right in my backyard.
So it's really crazy.
It's such an impressive business.
Your impact's remarkable,
and you should be so proud, again, on the seed round.
So congrats, we cannot wait to continue working with you.
And if anyone has any questions
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much.