Helios AI is a leading artificial intelligence company that predicts soft commodity prices and agricultural supply disruptions. The company sees daily and historical coverage for 85 countries and 50+ commodities. Its platform analyzes billions of signals in real-time to empower organizations to be one step ahead of the market. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Helios AI co-founder and CEO Francisco Martin-Rayo to learn more about the company.
Francisco Martin-Rayo’s Background
What is Francisco Martin-Rayo’s background? Martin-Rayo said:
“Before founding Helios AI with my co-founder Eden Canlilar, I was Chief Commercial Officer at Deep Labs (an AI fintech) and had been a Principal at BCG focused on digital transformations. A long time before then, right after graduating from Penn, I’d run an import/export business for Mexican avocados. Eden and I joke that I’m probably the only CEO of an AI company that can also tell you where the best avocados come from.”
Formation Of Helios AI
How did the idea for Helios AI come together? Martin-Rayo shared:
“Eden and I had these unique backgrounds in tech and food (she’d owned a restaurant before becoming an AI/ML engineer at Google), and we were really worried about the impacts of climate change, especially on agriculture. We knew we’d blown past attempts to limit global temperature increases and felt that we needed to help food growers and buyers better adapt to the crisis we’re in. At the same time, we’re living in the most exciting technology revolution of our lifetimes, thanks to the advances in AI and data science, and have better access to weather data than ever before. Taken together, we knew we could build an AI platform that could predict agricultural disruptions and price volatility — and finally help those food growers and buyers that were struggling.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Martin-Rayo’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Martin-Rayo reflected:
“Predicting the increase in cocoa prices weeks before the market! By that point we’d spent 18+ months building out our AI platform and it was so validating to see how good it was at predicting what we’d set out to do.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Martin-Rayo explained:
“Our newest dashboard, CommodiTrack, transforms how users interact with and interpret agricultural commodity data. It integrates critical elements such as climate risk factors, price forecasting, demand and supply signals and more — data that was previously scattered or inaccessible — all on one platform, providing not only comprehensive data but also actionable insights.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Martin-Rayo and the team faced in building the company? Martin-Rayo acknowledged:
“One of the best lessons we learned was during our launch of Cersi last year, the world’s first genAI agricultural commodity risk analyst. In short, we’d launched this cutting edge analyst that could answer questions that were specific to each of our customers (e.g., What are the biggest risks to my supply chain?). But what customers really wanted was not a virtual analyst they had to engage with, but rather these same custom insights delivered to their inbox so they didn’t have to take the extra step of coming to our dashboard to ask the same questions every week. The challenge here is making sure that you are super aligned with what your customers want, and need, and not trying to push the latest technology just because it’s super cool.”
Evolution Of Helios AI’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Martin-Rayo noted:
“It’s dramatically accelerated in terms of the amount of proprietary data we’ve collected and generated. When we first started we were doing basic weather statistical analysis and have now evolved to have 53 custom machine learning models (one per crop we cover), 1M+ lines of code supporting our genAI platform, and over 500B climate risk data points.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Martin-Rayo cited:
“Always our product launches. Launching Cersi in October 2023 was a historical milestone in the climate risk space — never before had users had access to on-demand custom analysis about their supply chains like this. Our Helios 3.0 launch was the first time in history customers could see 90% of all of the districts in the world that were growing key commodities for export. And our most recent, and proudest milestone, was the launch of CommodiTrack, which gives the most granular view of climate risk ever for 53 commodities across 85 countries AND predicts the price of commodities!”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Martin-Rayo about the company’s customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We helped a hedge fund customer make millions of dollars trading cocoa futures by predicting the increase in prices months before the market moved. On the CPG side, we saved one importer/exporter over $2M by predicting the big disruptions in Peruvian mangoes five months before market prices increased by 5X!”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Martin-Rayo assessed:
“$2.4 billion and growing at an 8% CAGR. We expect this to increase as more and more companies struggle to manage commodity price volatility and disruptions as climate change accelerates.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Martin-Rayo affirmed:
“We built the most comprehensive and most predictive climate risk model for agricultural commodities in history, powered by AI. This means we can predict agricultural disruptions more accurately than at any other point in human history — at a global scale. Our competitive advantage stems from three key innovations:
- Innovative World Mapping: We built the world’s best ensemble climate model ever and mapped billions of daily data points, for the past 20 years, to 14M hyper-granular hexagons. We then overlaid an unprecedented mapping of 90% of all of the districts in the world growing 53 crops for export.
- Crop Specific ML Models: We created individual machine learning models for each of the 53 crops that we cover, ensuring each model predicts risk based on unique temperature and precipitation ranges.
- Proprietary Climate Archetypes: We developed a proprietary climate classification system of 81 archetypes, and classified all 14M hexagons. This allows our models to compare similar hexagons globally, and for the first time ever understand the impacts of climate change at a district-level.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Martin-Rayo concluded:
“On the product side, we’re working on adding Political Risk to our platform, by leveraging the 250,000 global news sources we scrape every 15 mins. On the commercial side, we’re super excited to start work with governments and NGOs around food security – helping them better predict where agricultural disruptions are going to happen and how they can better support the people impacted.”
