Washington, D.C.-based Rhizome Data, which develops climate risk assessment tools to help utilities enhance infrastructure resilience, has raised $6.5 million led by Base10 Partners. New investors that joined the round included Boston-based MCJ and CLAI, alongside existing investors Convective Capital, El Cap, Stepchange and New York’s Streetlife Ventures and Everywhere.

“As extreme weather events continue to increase in frequency and severity, the need for intelligent resilience planning has never been more urgent,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani said. “By combining AI with climate risk data and digital representations of the physical grid, we can help utilities make smarter investments that protect infrastructure and ensure reliability when communities need power most.”

Thadani, who earned a civil engineering degree from Rice University, said he and his co-founder Rahul Dubey, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer, “wanted to bring in new partners who not only have conviction in climate technologies, but more specifically grid technologies implemented directly with grid operators.”

Thadani previously served as vice president of Strategy and Policy at Urbint, which helps utilities better manage risk and allocate resources through predictive AI. Dubey, who has an MS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Oregon Health & Science University, has previously held senior technical positions at Deluxe Corp., AllVoices and Jupiter Intelligence.

Rhizome reckons the power grid faces unprecedented climate threats. In 2024 alone, the United States experienced climate and weather disasters that caused over $182 billion in damages, and left individual utilities with an average of $1.4 billion in damages, it adds.

The company’s SaaS platform quantifies the economic and social impacts of infrastructure investments to enhance climate resilience. Integrating AI and machine learning models with exposure analysis — featuring extreme weather impact assessments, regulatory compliance tracking, social vulnerability screening, and wildfire risk modeling — the platform helps utilities enhance grid reliability, optimize resilience investments, mitigate environmental risks and support long-term infrastructure sustainability.

Rhizome says its models helped a Texas utility capture 72% more potential asset failures, significantly improving its ability to prevent outages and mitigate wildfire risk before problems occur. The company has deployed these models and tools with other utilities in regions representing a variety of geographies, including the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and Canada. Utilities such as Avangrid, Seattle City Light, VELCO and VEC work with Rhizome, which additionally has collaborations with organizations such as EPRI’s Climate READi initiative, KPMG and researchers at the University of Connecticut.

The post Streetlife, Everywhere Join $6.5M Round for Climate Risk Startup Rhizome Data appeared first on citybiz.

This contant was orignally distributed by citybiz. Blockchain Registration, Verification & Enhancement provided by NewsRamp™. The source URL for this press release is Streetlife, Everywhere Join $6.5M Round for Climate Risk Startup Rhizome Data.