India's meteoric rise in the field of Artificial Intelligence is augmented by several factors - a plethora of locally-rooted challenges spanning sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education and environment, a growing skilled workforce, and most importantly, the availability of datasets. Open datasets are now becoming easily and widely available to various groups including researchers, scientists, think tanks, NGOs, analysts etc. Fields like AI demand a constant churn of data to renew and rebuild models, run tests and plan research projects. 

The National Informatics Centre has set up the Open Government Data (OGD) platform to provide access to government-owned shareable data along with its usage information in open/machine readable format, through a wide area of network across the country. This portal provides a single window access to datasets and apps published by different ministries, departments and state-run organisations. Specifically to tackle the challenges posed by air pollution, the National Clean Energy Programme (NCAP) was launched to achieve upto 30% reduction in particulate matter concentrations by 2024. Among its multiple objectives, increasing the number of pollution monitoring stations is a key line item. 

But Abhilasha Purwar, while working on a government project, realised that environment data capturing and analysis methods in India were quite outdated, even as more cities and towns in India steadily climbed the ranks of being amongst the most polluted spaces on the planet. Environment data gathering and analysis needed a shot in the arm, and something that a combination of geospatial science and AI could achieve. Purwar, a graduate of IIT-BHU Varanasi & Yale School of Environment, decided to start Blue Sky Analytics along with her brother Kshitij, a self-taught programmer. Blue Sky Analytics is building what it calls a 'geospatial data refinery' that processes and analyses raw satellite data using ML and AI tools. Tejasvini Puri, Business Development Lead at Blue Sky Analytics decoded the DNA of Blue Sky Analytics and how they're building "the Bloomberg terminal for environment data"

"We work at the intersection of space technology, climate action and data. There have been significant developments in space technology and access to satellite images. With a rapidly accelerating climate crisis, these advancements in satellite images along with the transformational power of AI, Abhilasha and Kshitij started Blue Sky Analytics to develop a data garage for environment-centric data."

There are two parts to the Blue Sky Analytics tech offering - one part of the data visualisation platform for public engagement and consumption. The other element is the developer portal that has listed end points and enables the plugin of data into devices like smartphones, wearables etc. 

The startup initially began monitoring air quality, after noticing the glaring discrepancies in air quality data. Along with air quality data from India's 300 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCBs), inputs from satellites like NASA's MODIS Terra, Suomi NPP, European Space Agency's Sentinel 5P, and low-cost IoT devices, Blue Sky Analytics has developed BreeZo - an app that displays air quality data at a resolution of 1km2 pixel. The startup also leverages PostGIS for geospatial queries, TimeScaleDB for enhanced processing capabilities, and AWS EMR and Sagemaker where AI converts these data points into actionable insights. 

Tejasvini says, "The versatility of BreeZo is a huge metric of our team's success. We started it as a PoC based on ground data from CPCBs and Safar monitors. Today, it has visual tools, analytics, and historical patterns of air quality data from different time periods in an aggregated manner." More recently, the team developed its second dataset Zuri, which aggregates forest and farm fire data. BreeZo and Zuri are the result of 2TB of analysed data. A third product Zorro, to map industrial emissions, is in the offing. By 2021, the startup aims to analyse 21TB of data.

Puri explains that these datasets are being used by healthcare and technology companies building smart wearables, hospitals, insurance companies, NGOs and think tanks. Eventually, the goal is to assist financial services with this realtime environment data to hedge bets on climate-conscious investments and promote ESG investing with a data-driven approach. 

The startup has won $360,000 in prize money at MIT Solve, the AI Innovation Challenge hosted by Schmidt Futures - the foundation run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Blue Sky Analytics is also part of the CLIMATE Trace Coalition that uses satellite imagery and AI to track realtime emissions. This initiative is supported by climate conservationist and activist Al Gore. The company raised $1.2million in seed funding led by BEENEXT Emerging Asia Pte Ltd, in addition to Zerodha-backed Rainmatter Capital Private Ltd and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs.