#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Carlos Gaitan, Co-Founder & CEO, Benchmark Labs
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Enabling Farmers with Forecasting Solutions
Consumer weather models are too coarse for farms and conservancies that are large enough to occupy their own microclimates. Dr. Carlos Gaitan started Benchmark Labs to solve this problem, leveraging artificial intelligence to create custom weather models for farmers and conservators—helping them increase their crop yield and better manage their land. Carlos recently sat down with us to discuss Benchmark Labs, his experience as an immigrant founder, the value of government funding for startups, and how policymakers should approach AI policy.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Benchmark Labs?
My background is in all things related to water—I’m a civil engineer by trade, and I did my Master's in hydroinformatics, where I linked machine learning applications to ecohydrology and the UNESCO paradigms of sustainability to engineering. I did that in Bogotá, Colombia, where I'm originally from. I also attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where I got my PhD in atmospheric sciences. After graduation, I came to the United States to work at Princeton at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, where they created the first global climate model, and worked jointly with the National Weather Service on how machine learning could be useful in their applications. After that, I joined the private sector and worked with startups in different capacities. In 2019, we founded Benchmark Labs to provide farmers with actionable weather data relevant to their location to help them save water, energy, pesticides, and fertilizers.
What is the work you all are doing at Benchmark Labs?
My passion for the problems I’m solving now likely comes from my background in Colombia—my mom spent 28 years in the National Federation of Coffee Growers. We saw the effects of weather on the economy, from pests and insects that have growing cycles related to climate conditions like droughts and floods—everything is driven by the weather.
Traditionally, the National Weather Service and legacy weather providers divide the world into geographical “boxes”. These tend to be too broad since everybody inside of a box receives the same forecast. While they might work for certain applications, like understanding the movement of a tropical hurricane in the Atlantic, if you are a farm owner, you first care about what is important for your specific location. After that comes what is happening at your county and then state level.
Benchmark Labs refines the data from the National Weather Service and other grid providers that divide the world in boxes and uses the information at farmers’ locations of interest using our proprietary machine-learning techniques. We use cloud-computing services to train machine learning models that refine those core models in real-time. In the end, we provide more actionable weather forecasts, recommendations, and alerts that are tailored to a specific location.
What’s been your experience raising capital for Benchmark Labs, and what should policymakers know to better support founders?
There are very clear statistics that show a lack of VC funding for minorities and women. In venture capital, less than 3 percent of the money goes to Black and Latin founders, and less than 2 percent goes to women. It's not representative of who we are as a society. So, while creating a company, we are already facing huge odds against us that are not even relevant to the product.
I am very thankful for any government support, including opportunities from the National Science Foundation, like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, and grants from NASA, because, to a certain degree, they evaluate by technical and commercial merits without paying attention to where you are from or where you graduated. I would encourage the government to continue funding those programs. It would be nice if underrepresented founders did not have to rely so heavily on government grants, especially since the SBIR is highly competitive, with probably 1 in 10 applicants receiving the money. But, compared to venture capital, where you have to talk with 100-200 investors to maybe get a “yes”, the success rate is higher. That’s my perspective, and there's room for improvement, but I have to thank the government for being there because if not, our funding situation would have been a lot worse.
Being from Colombia, can you talk about your journey building a U.S. based company while navigating the U.S. immigration system?
It was great working with the National Weather Service and Department of Commerce when I came to the U.S. after my experience in Canada, but it became very clear that the immigration system is not built to allow scientists like me to transition effectively into the private sector, or even create businesses. Regulations restricted the types of jobs I could get as an immigrant before I got my permanent resident card. Immigration is also a very expensive process in trying to figure out how to fill out forms effectively. You might even face deportation if you file a form incorrectly after a big event such as changing jobs or renewing an expired visa. They give you a very short window to get a new visa or leave the country. The implications of that with my family being here—my kids were born in New Jersey—it’s very nerve-wracking. The U.S. should do a much better job of creating certainty and enabling immigrants to start businesses here.
What are your thoughts on rapidly evolving AI policy?
AI is based on statistics, and to have robust statistics, you need data. It’s a numbers game, and for startups to be able to compete, they need to not be restricted from accessing this data. A few very famous entrepreneurs have said that there should be a hold on certain areas of AI research, but that ultimately benefits the large entities who already have access to the data needed to train certain AI models. There are a lot of opportunities for smaller companies to come in and fill service gaps and innovate in areas that may not be of importance to larger companies, and policymakers should understand that. Take Benchmark Labs, for example. If we were unable to collect data from the National Weather Service or retrieve information from our users about other weather stations and their locations, then our machine learning models could not be trained to do what we do. We fulfill a need that a bigger entity like the National Weather Service cannot, because providing such localized information is not within their scope or purpose.
Are there any other federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
After COVID, we saw changes in the dynamic of the workforce, specifically with people working remotely. If you are not a large company with lots of resources, it can be difficult to stay compliant with employees who work remotely. For each employee that moves to a new state, there are a lot of requirements, registration, worker's compensation, etc. Some states are vastly different from each other, and the experience has been similar to trying to operate and register in different countries. The cost of compliance could probably be quantified into months of productivity for our startup. Distributed workforces like this, especially for startups, are not going away, and policymakers should work to streamline the costs and headaches it currently creates.
What are your goals for Benchmark Labs moving forward?
Our goal as a company is to provide the best available forecast for specific locations on a global scale. I have experienced the problem we’re currently solving in Colombia, and we have users in the U.S.A, South America, Spain, and Asia who all have the same issue. We want to expand to be able to include them, as well. Ultimately, we want to be the company that farmers associate with savings on water, yield improvements, and other benefits.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
