Walk outside on a summer afternoon in Miami and you can feel it almost immediately. One block feels almost comfortable in the shade. The next feels several degrees hotter, even though your weather app says they’re exactly the same.
That gap between the forecast and reality is exactly what FortyGuard has spent the past few years trying to close.
Since Refresh Miami last caught up with the company, the Miami-founded climate-tech startup has expanded well beyond South Florida. The company has grown into a team of 26 employees spread across nine countries. Miami, however, remains central to its story.
“We came to Miami. This was literally our first touch point,” founder and CEO Jay Sadiq [pictured above] told Refresh Miami. “From there, we took our solution to the US, but now even further than that, we’re taking it from Miami US to hopefully soon Europe.”
The company has continued developing what it calls Large Temperature Models (LTMs), AI models built specifically to understand urban heat. Instead of relying on broad weather forecasts, FortyGuard maps temperatures roughly two meters above the ground with street-level precision, helping reveal how heat actually varies across a city.
That approach has attracted attention from some of the biggest names in technology. NVIDIA has featured FortyGuard’s work, while the company is also collaborating with Microsoft, Google and AWS on various initiatives.
For Sadiq, those relationships represent something bigger than technical validation.
“If we can make cities cooler and save the carbon footprint and save energy and improve human thermal comfort, then AI now is for good,” he said.
Commercial growth has followed. Sadiq said FortyGuard’s U.S. user base recently grew by 50% month over month, driven largely by its free Temperature Dashboard.
The company has found users in unexpected places. Homebuyers compare neighborhoods before purchasing property. Engineers assess infrastructure projects. Asset managers evaluate climate risk. Parents look for cooler areas for children with health conditions.
“I don’t care about the temperature hundreds of meters above the ground,” Sadiq said. “I care about it here. This is where my health is. This is where my business is.”
That same thinking has opened opportunities across three main markets: cities, energy and enterprise.
Urban planners use the platform to better understand heat islands, while energy companies are exploring how localized temperature data can help determine where to build data centers and manage cooling demands more efficiently.
“If you build [a data center] in a hot place, eventually you’re going to need more energy,” Sadiq said. “Cooling demand is going to increase. Your carbon footprint is going to increase.”
The technology is also attracting interest from insurers, real estate firms and financial institutions looking to better understand neighborhood-level climate risk.
Next up, FortyGuard plans to expand its APIs so developers can build its temperature intelligence into their own products. The company is also preparing a global hackathon involving 5,000 developers and continuing to pursue partnerships across the technology ecosystem.
For Sadiq, the goal is straightforward: make temperature intelligence as accessible as weather forecasts are today, while making those forecasts far more useful for the people who rely on them every day.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- The world’s heating up. New-to-Miami startup FortyGuard tells us where… and what to do about it
- Miami Climate Week’s Innovation Showcase puts local startups in the spotlight
- Neural Earth raises $9M to turn climate risk into real-time decisions
- Blue Frontier is turning air conditioning into a climate solution
- From climate urgency to AI, Smart City Expo Miami marks six years of reimagining urban life
