Ambee at the forefront of climate tech worldwide: Madhusudhan Anand

Ambee, a fast-growing climate tech start-up based in India, is making waves in the world of environmental data with its mission to create a sustainable future. With over 1 million daily active users, Ambee provides proprietary climate and environmental data-as-a-service to empower governments, healthcare organizations, and private companies to make informed decisions about their policies and business strategies. 

MongoDB Atlas has been at the core of Ambee's database architecture, supporting their AI and ML models.

Madhusudhan Anand, CTO and co-founder of Ambee, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview: 

DQ: What are the offerings of Ambee, and how does it contribute to helping companies make informed decisions by analyzing the climatic data?

Madhusudhan Anand: Ambee is at the forefront of climate tech worldwide. Defined by our data, including hyperlocal APIs, climate heatmaps, and historical climate datasets, we create custom enterprise solutions tailored to unique use cases globally.

Our APIs, covering air quality, pollen, weather, emissions, natural disasters, and wildfires, empower companies to optimize various functions such as marketing, research and development, sustainability, finance, and inventory management.

Climate change is changing almost every industry, and our intelligence helps businesses leverage that change. For instance, Boots, a UK-based health and beauty retail pharmacy chain, used our pollen data to target promotions for allergy drugs based on local forecasts, resulting in a highly personalized and effective campaign.

DQ: How do Fortune 500 companies leverage Ambee’s data for personalized marketing and resource allocation?

Madhusudhan Anand: When certain environmental conditions change, they significantly affect a business's bottom line. Let’s take the example of pollen allergies. Our research has shown a 73% correlation between peak pollen and sales of antihistamine drugs, which means that when stocked on time, allergy drug sellers can potentially make up for lost sales and run targeted promotional offerings.

For Fortune 500 companies, this is a big opportunity to refine their demand forecasts and timely optimize their resources. A good example of this is hyper-relevant ad campaigns that Bayer created for Claritine in Egypt, where it showed local air pollution levels on billboards and digital ads, leading to more than 2x revenue.

DQ: How does MongoDB enhance Ambee's ability to provide accurate geographical insights from various data sources?

Madhusudhan Anand: Using our proprietary models and data science techniques, Ambee data provides users with precise environmental insights within a <1Km² radius. To achieve this high level of accuracy and granularity, we required a platform capable of supporting extensive geospatial needs.

MongoDB Atlas perfectly fits our requirements due to its rapid geospatial querying capabilities. For instance, with MongoDB, we can query the nearest location to a given coordinate within 20 milliseconds, even with millions of geospatial data points.

Additionally, MongoDB Atlas facilitates complex geospatial analyses such as polygon-based searches and geo-intersection queries, which are challenging to execute with other databases.

From the outset, MongoDB Atlas has been at the core of our database architecture, supporting our AI and ML models. Their flexible document model allows us to store data from satellites, paid providers, IoT devices, and more, in a centralized location and operationalize it for various use cases.

DQ: What are the practical applications of Ambee’s data in digital healthcare and other industries?

Madhusudhan Anand: It’s no secret that the changing climate is having a serious effect on consumer health. It not only exacerbates existing chronic conditions but also puts the greater population at increased health risk. 

Our hyperlocal data helps digital healthcare offerings, especially apps, personalize healthcare for all their users by showing real-time alerts, mapping symptoms, and forecasts for lifestyle considerations. Juli, for example, uses our pollen and air quality APIs to manage mental health and more for its users.

But, Ambee’s ability goes beyond simple integration. With our solutions, we are making a real difference in people’s lives. Our street-level environmental historical, real-time, and forecast insights make for many such interesting applications. In collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, we built the world’s first navigation tool for allergy sufferers, which shows users the cleanest routes from point A to B in real-time. 

Now, any user can go to work, take a stroll, or drop their kids off at school without worrying about pollen and pollutant exposure. With our data, we’re helping create a future that is proactive rather than reactive to its changing natural environment.