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Insurance companies used to spend months pricing disasters. Earthian AI wants to do it in real time.
The Amsterdam-based startup, founded by former Harvard researcher Shayan Shokri, is building what it calls a “financial inference layer,” an AI system designed to tell banks, insurers, and asset managers not just what’s happening in the world, but also what those events are actually worth in dollars and their risk exposure.
And investors are paying attention.
On April 30, Earthian announced a pre-seed raise at a $112 million valuation — structured as equity plus debt — with backing from Rabobank and NVIDIA’s Inception program. The angel round also drew former executives from Goldman Sachs, Moody’s, and Accenture.
“Five Fortune 500 firms are using our risk models today, and we expect that to be 30 by 2027,” Shokri said in a statement. “That kind of traction doesn’t come from a good pitch deck. It comes from solving a problem these institutions have been trying to solve internally for years.”
The problem isn’t hypothetical. Natural catastrophes caused $107 billion in insured losses globally in 2025 , the sixth straight year that figure has exceeded $100 billion. The Los Angeles wildfires alone accounted for $40 billion. Add in geopolitical fragmentation, climate volatility, and AI-driven cyber threats, and the math is moving faster than the analysts trying to do it.
Credit: Earthian AI
That’s where Earthian’s positioning starts to land. While large language models dominate most public AI conversations, Earthian is focused on SLMs, or small language models, trained specifically for financial reasoning.
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