First Wave Intelligence

💎 Idea

The problem. 335 people died in European floods in 2024. The data to predict those events existed — Sentinel-1 SAR scenes, GloFAS discharge forecasts, ECMWF rainfall — but it lived in 5+ disconnected dashboards, behind hours of manual cross-referencing by Water Management operators and Civil Protection officers. By the time a coherent risk picture was assembled, the first wave had already arrived.

Our solution: FirstWave. A single situation room that fuses six EU space data sources into a typewriter-style action plan in under 5 minutes per location:

1. Operator types a basin (or clicks on a globe).
2. FirstWave pulls SAR, optical, weather, river-discharge, soil and citizen ground-truth simultaneously — server-side on Copernicus via openEO.
3. A risk score and a ranked, citation-backed action plan are synthesized and ready for operator approval.
4. On approve, Galileo EWSS broadcasts the alert into the affected AOI.

One tool. One operator. Five minutes.

🛰️ EU space technologies

We use real, live EU space data — not as a label, as the actual computation backbone:

• Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD (SAR sigma0-ellipsoid backscatter on COPERNICUS_30 DEM) — flood detection through cloud, rain and at night.
• Copernicus Sentinel-2 L2A — NDWI (B03/B08), NDVI (B04/B08), MSI (B11/B08) for water extent, vegetation health and moisture stress.
• Copernicus AGERA5 (federated openEO endpoint) — historical precipitation and 30-day cumulative-rainfall soil-saturation proxy.
• Copernicus EMS · GloFAS — river-discharge forecasts via OGC WMS overlay and the Open-Meteo Flood proxy.
• ECMWF IFS — 16-day weather forecast (rain, soil moisture, wind, humidity, cloud) via Open-Meteo Weather.
• Galileo — EU GNSS for geotagging citizen field reports (since 2018 every new EU smartphone is Galileo-capable), and EWSS as the emergency broadcast layer that closes the alert loop.
• openEO — the EU API standard our backend speaks. We've also registered the 18 algorithms from the openEO Algorithm Plaza (BIOPAR, MSI, NDII, NBR, CropSAR 2D, Whittaker, Peak/Valley, Phenology, pyeogpr, …) so the engine can call EU pre-validated processing code without reinventing it.

Synergy in one sentence: Copernicus tells us what's happening on the ground, ECMWF/GloFAS tells us what's coming, Galileo positions and broadcasts the response.

🌊 EU Space for Water challenge

We address Challenge #3 — Disaster Risk Monitoring, specifically the flood-cycle of water resource protection.

How we contribute:

• Faster decisions, fewer deaths. Compresses a multi-hour multi-tool investigation into a single 5-minute operator workflow.
• Operator-friendly entry point. Natural language and clickable basins instead of GIS expertise.
• Closes the loop. From space-derived risk → SOP-cited action plan → Galileo EWSS broadcast back to citizens in the AOI.
• Citizen feedback loop. Geotagged photos validate the satellite mask, complementing top-down with bottom-up signal.

Primary customers: Water Management Authorities and Civil Protection / Emergency Response agencies across the 27 EU Member States bound by the EU Floods Directive 2007/60/EC.

🤼 Team

Combined experience in satellite operations, agentic AI, software engineering and startup fundraising.

• Alexandru — Project Lead & Space Engineer. Drives the satellite-pipeline architecture and the openEO/Plaza integration.
• Albert — Business Lead. Owns the B2G go-to-market motion to Water Management Authorities and EU Civil Protection.
• Mihai — Aerospace Engineer. Domain owner for the Copernicus Sentinel-1/2 + AGERA5 ingestion paths.
• Filip — Software Engineer. Built the FastAPI hazard service, panel grid, and the openEO server-side aggregation.
• Ruxandra — AI Engineer. Designed the agentic synthesis layer (Router / PlanAgent / Docs Agent over EU SOPs).
• Robert — UX / UI Designer. Designed the Situation Room dashboard, the Front-End pages and contributed to connecting the Backend and Frontend together.